In which I roll the dice

“Yahtzee!” I exclaimed, to no one in particular

Note how they have attempted to skirt trademark problems by having a rolling die cover the third letter. What could it be? “Yantzee”?

I am a sucker for board games, but don’t have a lot of opportunity to play them. A few years ago, I was part of the Kickstarter for a really fun-looking game called Abducktion, played with little bitty rubber ducks, and I am now the proud owner of it, but haven’t gotten to play it yet. I did bring it to a board game night at church once, but we never got around to playing it; people tended to gravitate towards games with which they were already familiar.

Anyway, this week a friend of mine posted to social media asking if anyone had a copy of the dice game Yahtzee. She wanted to try playing it with her little boy, thinking it might help him learn numbers and patterns, but she wasn’t quite sure if he’d enjoy it or was old enough for it, so she wanted to try it out without having to spend money on a game that might sit idle. (I could learn from this.)

I think everyone in the U.S. has played Yahtzee at some time or another, but if for some reason you haven’t, it’s a game in which you roll five dice. You have two opportunities to reroll some or all of the dice, but then you’re stuck with whatever combination of numbers you have at the end of the process. You are trying to fill up a score sheet with different combinations — some of which are familiar to poker players, such as a…