Play Yatzy Online

What Is Yatzy?

Yatzy is the Nordic member of the five-dice scorecard family. You roll five dice up to three times per turn, holding whichever dice you like between rolls, and then write the result into one of fifteen boxes. Every box can be used only once, so a game lasts exactly fifteen turns and ends with every box holding either a score or a zero.

If you have played Yahtzee the shape of the game is familiar, but the card is not. Yatzy adds One Pair and Two Pairs, scores the “of a kind” boxes with only the matching dice, turns Full House into a sum rather than a flat 25, and pins the straights to two exact sequences worth 15 and 20. The upper bonus is a chunky 50 points, and there is no bonus at all for a second Yatzy. The result is a game with more small decisions per turn and a lower ceiling: the maximum possible score is a modest 374, against 1,575 in Yahtzee.

Yatzy is a staple of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish households in the way Monopoly is elsewhere. It sits in a family that includes the 1938 Yacht it descends from, the Latin American Generala, the Balkan Yamb with its four columns, and its own six-dice big brother Maxi Yatzy.

A Short History

Yatzy is a public-domain game, and like most public-domain games it has no birth certificate. What can be said with confidence is that it belongs to the line of “poker with dice” games that spread through the 1930s and 1940s: English Poker Dice, the Latin American Generala, and above all Yacht, which appeared in print in Clement Wood and Gloria Goddard’s The Complete Book of Games (New York, 1938). Yacht already had five dice, three rolls, six number boxes and a 50-point five-of-a-kind; Yatzy keeps all of that.

Edwin S. Lowe’s trademarked Yahtzee arrived in the United States in 1956 and went on to sell tens of millions of copies. The Nordic countries developed their own card instead. Because nobody owned the name, publishers in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland were free to print Yatzy score pads and box sets, and each market settled on the same broad rule set: pairs and two pairs added, straights fixed, Full House summed, 50-point bonus at 63. The word “Yatzy” itself is the local spelling that stuck; a Danish player will write the same card as a Swedish one.

Yatzy has been studied academically as well. In 2012 two students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Marcus Larsson and Andreas Sjöberg, computed the complete optimal strategy for solitaire Yatzy and found an expected score of 248.63 points, the Scandinavian counterpart to the 254.59 figure long known for Yahtzee.

Yatzy Rules

Equipment

• Five six-sided dice
• A score sheet with fifteen boxes: six in the upper section, nine in the lower section, plus a bonus line and totals
• A cup to roll from (optional)

Object

Score the most points over fifteen turns. Each turn you must write something into one empty box, even if that something is a zero. When every box is filled the game ends and the totals are added: upper section, upper bonus (if earned) and lower section.

How a Turn Works

1. Roll all five dice.
2. Hold any dice you want to keep. In the game above you tap or click a die to hold it, and tap again to release it.
3. Roll again with the dice you did not hold. You may change which dice are held before the next roll, including releasing dice you kept earlier.
4. Roll a third time if you want to. This is your last roll of the turn.
5. Score. Choose one empty box and enter the score for your dice. If nothing fits, you must put a zero in some empty box.

You may score after the first or second roll. Unused rolls are lost; they do not carry over.

Scoring

The card below is the standard Scandinavian sheet, and it is exactly what the game on this page uses.

Three details trip up players coming from Yahtzee:

• Only the matching dice count in One Pair, Two Pairs, Three of a Kind and Four of a Kind. 6-6-6-1-2 scores 18 in Three of a Kind, not 21.
• Two Pairs and Full House need two different numbers. 5-5-5-5-1 is not Two Pairs and 5-5-5-5-5 is not a Full House.
• Straights are exact. 1-2-3-4-5 is the only Small Straight and 2-3-4-5-6 the only Large Straight. A 1-2-3-4-6 scores zero in both.

The 50-Point Bonus

Score 63 or more across Ones to Sixes and you receive 50 bonus points. Sixty-three is three of every number, so “on pace” means three of each face you have scored so far. Because 50 points is worth as much as a Yatzy and far easier to reach, the bonus is the spine of every good Yatzy game.

Worked Examples

• 2-2-5-5-5. The classic teaching hand. It is worth 19 in Full House or Chance, 15 in Three of a Kind, 14 in Two Pairs, 10 in One Pair, 15 in Fives or 4 in Twos. Full House (19) is the right box early in the game: it is the hardest of those boxes to fill well later.
• 6-6-6-1-2 on the first roll. Hold the three 6s and roll twice. If you end with 6-6-6-6-x, Four of a Kind pays 24 and Sixes 24; if you end with 6-6-6-x-x, Sixes (18) keeps you on bonus pace and is usually better than 18 in Three of a Kind, which can hold the same 18 later.
• 2-3-4-5-6. Large Straight for 20. Score it. It is also 20 in Chance, but the straight box is far harder to fill.
• 1-2-3-4-6 after three rolls. Nothing fits. Chance scores 16. If Ones is open and the bonus is still realistic, a 1 in Ones costs you two points against pace but keeps Chance in reserve.
• 4-4-4-4-4. Yatzy for 50. If the Yatzy box is already used, Four of a Kind (16) or Fours (20) are the fallbacks; Full House and Two Pairs are both zero.
• 6-6-5-5-1 with Two Pairs open. 22 points, the maximum for the box. Take it. Do not chase a Full House with one roll and a 1 in 6 chance.

The Odds

There are 6⁵ = 7,776 equally likely outcomes when five dice are rolled. These are the exact single-roll probabilities of each lower-section combination, computed by enumerating all 7,776 outcomes against the scoring rules above.

Over a full three-roll turn, holding the most common face each time:

• Three of a kind of some number: 70.8% of turns.
• Four of a kind: 28.3%.
• Yatzy: 4.53%, about 1 in 22 turns. Over a 15-turn game you will see a Yatzy roughly half the time if you chased it every turn, which you should not.
• An exact straight (holding every needed face and rerolling the rest): 19.7% by the third roll. Yatzy’s straights are far harder than Yahtzee’s flexible ones, which is why they pay 15 and 20 rather than 30 and 40.
• The average sum of five dice is 17.5, so Chance averages about 17.5 if you just dump into it, and around 23 if you play the whole turn for it, holding 4s, 5s and 6s.

Two headline figures put the game in context. The optimal-strategy expected score is 248.63. A simulated bot that holds the most common face, always rolls three times and always takes the largest immediate score averages only about 134 and earns the bonus less than 1% of the time. The 115-point gap is almost entirely the bonus and box discipline described below.

Strategy

1. Play for 63 from turn one

The 50-point bonus is worth more than any single box. Track your pace: three of each number scored so far. Four 5s or 6s early let you absorb a weak Ones or Twos later; two 3s early mean you need to catch up with the higher faces. When you have a genuine choice between an upper box and a lower box of similar value in the first half of the game, the upper box is usually right.

2. Keep the high pair, not the first pair

With 6-6-2-2-3 hold the 6s. Three 6s are 18 in Sixes, 18 in Three of a Kind and the seed of a 24-point Four of a Kind; three 2s are 6 anywhere. The exception is when Sixes is filled and Twos is the box you need for pace.

3. Use One Pair and Two Pairs as pressure valves

These two boxes exist to catch mediocre turns. One Pair with 6-6 is 12, the maximum, and 5-5 is 10; do not fill it with 2-2 in round three. Two Pairs pays 14 on average when it hits and up to 22; a 6-6-5-5 is worth banking immediately.

4. Take a Full House when you see one

A Full House arrives in only 3.9% of single rolls and 28 is the ceiling. Unlike Yahtzee, where it is a flat 25 and low dice are fine, the sum matters here: 6-6-6-5-5 is 28, 1-1-1-2-2 is 7. If you roll a low Full House early with three rolls left, consider holding the triple and rolling for something better; late in the game, take what you get.

5. Do not chase the straights with one roll

An exact straight needs a specific missing face, a 1 in 6 shot per die. With 2-3-4-5 and two rolls left you have about a 31% chance of finishing 2-6 or 1-5; with one roll it is 17%. Hold four-to-a-straight after the first roll, and be prepared to bail into Chance or a pair if the second roll misses.

6. Let the Yatzy come to you

Chasing five of a kind from a pair costs you the turn about 95% of the time. Hold triples and quads because they are worth points in Three of a Kind, Four of a Kind and the upper section; the 50 arrives as a by-product. The same holding pattern gives you the best shot at the bonus.

7. Scratch cheap boxes, never expensive ones

Ones averages about 2 points over a game and Small Straight is missed in 80% of turns spent chasing it. A zero in Ones or Small Straight near the end costs very little; a zero in Chance, Sixes or Four of a Kind costs 15 to 25 expected points. When forced to scratch, look at what the box would realistically have earned, not its maximum.

8. Count outs in the endgame

With three boxes left, the best play is whichever combination is most likely on the rolls you have, weighted by its value. Large Straight (20) at 19.7% is worth about 4 points per turn; Four of a Kind at 28% with an average of 14 is worth about 4 as well; Chance is worth 17 guaranteed. Take the guaranteed points unless the gamble is genuinely better.

Common Mistakes

• Scoring Three of a Kind with all five dice. Only the three matching dice count. The game above shows the correct preview, but paper players make this error constantly.
• Filling Chance in round two. Chance is your insurance against a scratch late in the game; a 14 in Chance on turn two throws away its true value.
• Breaking a Two Pairs to chase Full House with one roll. You are giving up a certain 20-ish for a 1 in 3 shot at 22-ish.
• Forgetting that the straights are exact. 1-2-3-4-6 is not “almost” anything; it scores zero in both straight boxes.
• Ignoring pace after a bad Sixes. If you score 12 in Sixes you are six points behind; you now need four of something else, and every later decision should reflect that.

Variants and House Rules

• Forced Yatzy (Tvungen Yatzy). Boxes must be filled in order from Ones down to Yatzy. Because you cannot choose your box, the bonus threshold drops to 42. It is a popular quick-fire variant and a brutal test of nerve.
• Maxi Yatzy. Six dice, twenty boxes including Three Pairs, Villa and Tower, a 100-point bonus at 84, and unused rolls saved for later turns. It is the strategic deep end of the family and you can play it here.
• Full Straight variants. Some Danish and Finnish sheets pay 15 for any five-die straight; others keep the Swedish 15 and 20.
• Yahtzee-style scoring. Families sometimes import Yahtzee’s flat 25 Full House or all-five-dice Three of a Kind. It changes the value of the boxes considerably, so agree before you start.
• Multiplayer. Yatzy is normally played by two to six people taking turns with one set of dice; the highest total wins. The game above is a solitaire scorecard so you can chase your own best.

For close cousins with different personalities, try Generala for its first-roll bonuses, Yamb for its four columns, Balut for its threshold points, or head-to-head Dice Poker.

Glossary

• Pace: Three of each number scored so far in the upper section, the track toward 63.
• Scratch: Deliberately entering a zero in a box.
• Hold: Keeping a die out of the next roll.
• Exact straight: A five-die sequence that must be precisely 1-5 or 2-6.
• Sum of the matching dice: The Yatzy scoring convention for pairs and of-a-kinds; the other dice are ignored.
• Tvungen: Swedish for “forced,” the ordered-box variant.

Play Yatzy Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page plays the standard Scandinavian card: five dice, three rolls per turn, fifteen boxes in the usual order from Ones down to Yatzy, a 50-point bonus at 63 and no bonus for extra Yatzys. Click a die to hold it; the score card previews what every open box would score for your current dice, and you click a highlighted row to score it. Full House and Two Pairs require different numbers, Three and Four of a Kind score only the matching dice, and the straights must be exactly 1-2-3-4-5 or 2-3-4-5-6. The status bar tracks your roll, round, running total and best score, which is saved on your device. Rolls use your browser’s cryptographic random number generator. Fifteen turns, one card: roll the dice.