Play Kismet Online

What Is Kismet?

Kismet is the dice game that added color to the Yahtzee formula. Its five dice look ordinary until you notice the pips: the 1 and 6 are black, the 2 and 5 are red, and the 3 and 4 are green. Those colors create three hands that no other scorecard game has, a Flush (five dice of one color), Two Pair Same Color and Full House Same Color, and they sit beside the familiar straight, full house, four of a kind, and the five-of-a-kind Kismet, worth the dice plus 50.

The game plays over 15 turns with three rolls each. Its Basic Section works like Yahtzee’s upper section but pays a three-tier bonus of 35, 55 or 75 points, so a strong run of 5s and 6s is rewarded far more generously. Its Kismet Section scores most hands as the dice total plus a fixed premium, which keeps every box meaningful: a Full House of 6s and 5s is worth 43 while a Full House of 1s and 2s is worth 22. Totals routinely pass 300, and a game with a Kismet and the 75 bonus can reach 450.

If you enjoy colored dice you should also try Qwixx, where the colors are the whole game, and Crown and Anchor. For the game Kismet was built on, play Yacht.

A Short History

Kismet was published in 1964 by Lakeside Industries (later Lakeside Games) of Minneapolis, eight years after Edwin Lowe launched Yahtzee. Lakeside was a small company best known for Barrel of Monkeys and Kerplunk, and Kismet was its answer to the dice-game boom: a Yacht-family game with enough new rules to be its own thing. The trademark is held by E. William DeLaittre, a Minneapolis name, and the game has never gone out of print; it has been produced by Endless Games since the late 1990s in a box that still promises “the modern game of Yacht”.

The name is the Turkish and Arabic word for fate, which suited a game whose signature hand can only be rolled, never planned. The scoring uses the vocabulary of the card table: Aces, Deuces and Treys instead of Ones, Twos and Threes, a Flush borrowed from poker, and a Yarborough borrowed from whist, where it means a hand with nothing above a nine. Physically the game has hardly changed: five white dice with the colored pips, a cup, and a pad of scorecards with the Basic Section on top and the Kismet Section below.

The original Lakeside rules include a multiplayer twist. A player who rolls a second Kismet forces every opponent to write a zero in their first empty box and lose a turn. That penalty makes no sense in a solo card, so the game above omits it, as the Common Mistakes and Variants sections explain.

Kismet Rules

Equipment

• Five six-sided dice with colored pips: 1 and 6 black, 2 and 5 red, 3 and 4 green
• A scorecard with 15 boxes in two sections
• A dice cup (optional)

Object of the Game

Score the most points over 15 turns by filling every box on the card once. Each box may be used only once, and every box must eventually contain either a score or a zero.

How a Turn Works

1. Roll all five dice.
2. Hold any dice you want to keep and re-roll the others. Tap or click a die in the game above to hold it. Watch the colors as well as the numbers.
3. Roll a third time if you want, again holding whatever you like.
4. Score. Write the result into one empty box. If nothing fits, use Yarborough if it is open, or write a zero.

You may score after any roll. Nothing in Kismet rewards a first-roll combination.

Scoring

The Basic Section and Its Bonus

Add the six number boxes. 63 to 70 earns 35, 71 to 77 earns 55, and 78 or more earns 75. Sixty-three is three of each face (3 + 6 + 9 + 12 + 15 + 18). Seventy-eight is four each of the 4s, 5s and 6s with three each of the 1s, 2s and 3s (24 + 20 + 16 + 9 + 6 + 3). The jump from 35 to 75 for fifteen extra basic points is the biggest lever on the card and shapes most of the strategy below.

The Color Hands

Because opposite faces of a die add to seven, each color’s two faces sit on opposite sides of the same die, and every die can show any color. A Flush is any five dice in one color: 1-1-6-6-1, 2-5-5-2-5, or 3-4-4-3-3, for example. Two Pair Same Color requires both pairs to be the same color as each other: 1s with 6s, 2s with 5s, or 3s with 4s. Four of a kind and five of a kind also qualify, since the official rules say “or any four of a kind”. Full House Same Color is a full house whose two numbers share a color: 6-6-6-1-1, 5-5-5-2-2, 4-4-4-3-3 or the reverse. A full house of 6s and 5s is not the same color and belongs in the ordinary Full House box.

Ending the Game

After 15 turns, add the Basic Section, its bonus and the Kismet Section. Highest total wins; solo, you are chasing your own best, which the game above stores on your device.

Worked Examples

• 6-6-6-1-1. Full House Same Color (both black) for 20 + 20 = 40. It is also a Flush (35), a Full House (35), Two Pair Same Color (20) and Three of a Kind (20). Take the 40 unless Full House Same Color is used.
• 2-2-5-5-3. Two Pair Same Color (both red) for 17. Not a flush because of the green 3. With a roll left, hold the four red dice: any 2 or 5 makes a Flush for 35 and any 2 or 5 also completes a Full House Same Color for 36 or 39.
• 4-4-4-4-6. Four of a Kind for 22 + 25 = 47, or Fours for 16. With one roll left, roll the 6: a 4 makes a Kismet for 70, a 3 makes a Full House Same Color for 39, anything else leaves the 47 intact.
• 1-2-3-4-5. Straight for 30. Note that it is never a flush: a straight always spans all three colors.
• 3-3-3-3-3. Kismet for 15 + 50 = 65. If Kismet is already scored, the same dice make Four of a Kind for 40, Flush for 35, Two Pair Same Color for 15 or Treys for 15.
• 1-2-2-4-6 after three rolls. Nothing fits. Yarborough takes it for 15; if Yarborough is gone, a zero in Aces costs the least.

The Odds

Five dice give 6⁵ = 7,776 outcomes. The color hands are rarer than they look, because each color covers only two faces.

How the color odds are built: a single die shows a given color with probability 1/3, so five dice all one color is (1/3)⁵ for each of three colors, 3 × 32 = 96 outcomes. Two Pair Same Color counts 360 outcomes of the shape pair-pair-odd, plus 60 same-color full houses, 150 four-of-a-kinds and 6 five-of-a-kinds. Holding three dice of one color and rolling two, the chance of a Flush on a single roll is 1/9, or about 31% over two rolls when you keep any new die of the right color; holding four of a color and rolling one gives 1/3 per roll, or 56% over two rolls. The three-roll figures in the table come from a 400,000-game Monte Carlo simulation in which the player always holds the majority color, so the color hands are what a flush-first policy delivers as by-products.

Other numbers worth knowing:

• The Basic bonus tiers are steep. Perfect Yahtzee-style play reaches 63 about two games in three, but 78 requires four of a kind in three different high faces and happens in well under one game in ten.
• The theoretical maximum card, by our calculation, is 553: 105 in the Basic Section, the 75 bonus, and 373 in the Kismet Section (30 + 30 + 30 + 35 + 43 + 40 + 55 + 30 + 80).
• A five-die sum averages 17.5, so Yarborough and Three of a Kind are worth about 17 and 20 on average, while Full House averages about 33 and Four of a Kind about 45 when hit.

Strategy

1. Play the Basic Section for 71, not 63

The 55-point middle tier needs only 8 points more than the 35 tier, and one extra 5 or 6 above three-of-each gets most of the way. Take four 6s (24) or four 5s (20) in the Basic Section rather than in Three of a Kind whenever you are at or above pace. Reaching 71 is worth 20 more than Yahtzee’s entire bonus.

2. Colors decide what to hold with a pair

Yahtzee players hold the higher pair. In Kismet, hold the pair whose color is shared by another die. With 5-5-2-3-6, keep 5-5-2 (all red): you are one red die from a Flush and two from a Full House Same Color, while still on course for Three of a Kind. Three same-color dice reach a Flush about 31% of the time over two rolls, which beats the 18% chance of a four of a kind from a pair.

3. Do not waste Four of a Kind on low dice

Four 1s and a 2 score 31 in Four of a Kind; four 6s and a 5 score 54. The box’s +25 premium is fixed, but the sum is not. Early in the game, four low dice are better spent on the Basic Section (four 2s is 8 in Deuces, ahead of pace) or on a Kismet attempt.

4. Full House Same Color before Full House

Only 60 of 7,776 rolls are same-color full houses, so when one arrives, score it there and keep the ordinary Full House box for the other 240 combinations. The 5-point difference is small; the scarcity is not.

5. Use Two Pair Same Color as a second Chance

The box qualifies on any four of a kind and on 7.4% of raw rolls, and it scores the plain sum. Treat it as a high-sum dump for hands like 6-6-1-1-5 (19) that fit nothing better, and keep Yarborough for the genuine disasters.

6. Save Straight decisions for the right moment

There is no small straight, so 1-2-3-4 needs exactly a 5, and 2-3-4-5 has two outs. Go for the straight only from an open-ended four in the first ten turns; late in the game, a failed straight attempt has nowhere cheap to go.

7. Score a five of a kind in the right box

A Kismet is worth the sum plus 50, so 55 to 80. If the Kismet box is used, five of a kind is still a Four of a Kind (sum + 25) and, if that is used too, a Flush for 35. Never put five 6s in Sixes for 30 while any of those three boxes is open.

8. Scratch order

When you must take a zero, in rough order of least harm: Aces, Deuces, Kismet (after turn ten), Straight, Full House Same Color, Two Pair Same Color. Scratching Flush or Full House early is expensive because both arrive regularly from a good hold.

Common Mistakes

• Ignoring colors on the second roll. The most common error: re-rolling a black 1 that sits next to two 6s and throwing away a 56% shot at a Flush.
• Scoring a straight in Yarborough. 1-2-3-4-5 is 15 in Yarborough and 30 in Straight.
• Filling Three of a Kind with 2-2-2-1-3 (10 points). The box averages over 20 for a good player; Deuces takes the same dice for 6 and stays on pace.
• Chasing 78 from behind. If you scored 6 in Sixes early, the top tier is gone; play for 63 and stop sacrificing Kismet-section boxes to the Basic Section.
• Treating Flush as a color full house. A Flush is any five of one color and pays a flat 35, whether the dice read 1-1-1-6-6 or 1-6-1-6-1.

Variants and House Rules

• Official multiplayer Kismet penalty. In the Lakeside rules, a player’s second Kismet makes every opponent write a zero in their topmost empty box and skip a turn, and the roller keeps the dice. Our solo card has no opponents to penalize, so extra Kismets simply score in another eligible box.
• Joker rule. Some modern rule sheets treat a second Kismet as a joker that may fill any open Kismet-section box at its printed value. Not part of the original rules and not implemented here.
• Small straight. House rules borrowed from Yahtzee sometimes add a four-in-a-row box for 20. The original card has no such box.
• Flat bonus. Family games often simplify the bonus to 35 at 63. Keep the three tiers; they are what make the Basic Section interesting.
• Two-Pair with mixed colors. Some casual players allow any two pairs. That inflates the box from 7.4% to about 23% per roll and removes the color skill. Our game requires matching colors.
• Score ordering. A “down the card” variant, as in Yamb, forces boxes to be filled top to bottom.

If you enjoy the color logic, Dice Poker offers flushes of a different kind, and Yatzy shows what the same card looks like with fixed-value straights and a 50-point bonus.

Glossary

• Basic Section: The six number boxes, Aces through Sixes.
• Kismet Section: The nine combination boxes.
• Aces, Deuces, Treys: Card-table names for 1s, 2s and 3s.
• Flush: Five dice of one pip color.
• Two Pair Same Color: Two pairs whose faces share a color, or any four of a kind.
• Yarborough: The anything-goes box, scored as the dice sum.
• Kismet: Five of a kind, scored as the sum plus 50; also the Turkish word for fate.
• Pace: Three of each face in the Basic Section, the rate that reaches 63.
• Tier: One of the three bonus bands, 63, 71 and 78.

Play Kismet Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page plays the Lakeside rules for a solo card: 15 turns, three rolls with click-to-hold dice, pips colored black, red and green exactly as on the real dice, the three-tier Basic bonus, matching-color rules for Two Pair Same Color and Full House Same Color, a Flush that any five same-color dice qualify for, and a Kismet worth the dice plus 50. Every open box shows a live preview of what the current roll would score, the multiplayer second-Kismet penalty is left out because there is no opponent, and your best score is saved on your device only. Roll the dice.