Should one roll a Yahtzee, say five sixes, early in the game can it be scored above the bonus line or must it be scored as a Yahtzee?
Score it anywhere you choose, as far as I’ve always played. Don’t have a set of rules in front of me though. The Yatzhee app certainly let’s me play it as a Yatzhee, 4s, 3s or the individual numbers.
The official rules don’t expressly prohibit it and, since, according to the rules, you can treat a large straight as a small straight, I presume you could similarly downgrade a Yahtzee. However, you’d be giving up significant points, especially if you plan to attain the Yahtzee later. A Yahtzee is worth 50 and subsequent Yahtzees are worth 100 points. The most you could score from a downgraded Yahtzee is 30 (5 6s in the 6 category).
As far as I understand, the basic rules of Yahtzee are that you never have to score your dice in a particular way.
Unless you need the extra points to make up for a deficit in a lower category (4s or 5s) in order to get the upper bonus. To get the bonus you need 3 of each number (3 1s, 3 2s, 3 3s etc). If you only get 1 1s, you can make i up with an extra 2 etc. The bonus is worth quite a bit!
Oops. I left out the sentence that actually added something. I believe you can even intentionally score a zero on something else, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you can just not score at all for a particular role.
The bonus is only 35 points, right?
So you’re getting 36 points (if we’re talking about a sixes yahtzee) plus (likely) 35 points in exchange for 50 guaranteed points plus the potential 50 point bonus if you hit another one…
I think it’s always better to take the Yahtzee, right? I guess maybe your opponents scores might factor into it.
And yes, BigT, you can definitely just put a zero somewhere if you don’t like your roll (say you needed a large straight and missed it but had, say, 4-of-a-kind open - you could put a zero there and go for the straight again later).
Every roll must be scored somewhere, if only as a zero. If you could blow off bad rolls, the game would be much, much easier!
You are seldom if ever better off scoring a Yahtzee in the upper half while your Yahtzee box is blank. Yes, you can get an instant 65 by scoring a six-Yahtzee as sixes and making the bonus. But, you can take that as 50 in Yahtzee and then roll for sixes on your next turn, and by chance you’ll probably get two or three sixes anyway, bringing your Expected Value into the same range.
Yeah, I didn’t think that through, did I? :smack:
:minor hijack:
Is there a Yahtzee app for the Iphone that allows you to play against other humans on the same Iphone? Pass-and-play, I mean.
If so, which is the best one?
I have this strange desire to post in this thread via a narrated animated video, speaking quickly and acerbically.
You can do this, and there’s a very rare case where you should.
Considering the worst case, which is a Yahtzee of sixes that you could score as 30 + the 35 point bonus vs a Yahtzee for 50 points, you’re netting an extra 16 points by scoring the roll as sixes.
If you take the Yahtzee score of 50, then just try to roll 6s on your next roll, you should expect to score 12 points (I just wrote a little Monte-Carlo simulation to test this).
The full probabilities are more complicated, but if you’re in a game where 12 points on sixes won’t get you the bonus, and you only have sixes and yahtzee left as boxes, and you roll five sixes, it’s probably better to take the score as sixes.
According to Wikipedia, the optimal strategy has been determined for Yahtzee and is published in http://www.amazon.com/Advantage-Yahtzee-Olaf/dp/0929712048/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326142125&sr=8-1]Advantage Yahtzee
EA is the official provider of Hasbro games on the app store and their version of Yahtzee allows for both Pass-n-play as well as networked play.
Thanks, I just saw this. I guess it was obvious, but I somehow had the idea in my head that it did not have pass-and-play, which would be rather odd.
This is the sort of situation I was in last week and inspired the query. Thanks.
To say nothing about the odds of getting one Yachtzee in any game in the first place, 1:3 games, IIRC, yes?
I don’t know what the odds are if you play using a more general strategy, but if you just roll for yahtzees, you have a 42.7% chance of getting at least one in a game of 13 rounds, and the average number of Yahtzees per player per game (using this strategy) is about 0.54.
That’s from 1M games simulated.