Replace Yahtzee with these five great dice-rolling games
Inject some strategy, lose the downtime: These five games can help you move past the classic dice-rolling game.
There’s nothing quite like gathering as a family around the table around the holiday season, chucking dice and having a great time with a game. For many families over the last 70 years, the game of choice has remained Yahtzee.
Who doesn’t have a Yahtzee box hiding somewhere in a closet? And, of course, if you don’t have a box labelled Yahtzee, you may well have a handful of six-sided dice.
I remember playing Yahtzee and loving it as a kid. There’s something innately fun about rolling a bunch of dice. (There’s probably some deep research on that somewhere, come to think of it.) Unfortunately, that’s where most of the fun lives — the act of rolling dice. These five games present something deeper than Yahtzee, something more engaging, and altogether, something more fun. And yes, you do still get to roll a bunch of dice.
Spots
Spots is a game about dogs with spots, and as the rulebook kindly reminds us, dice, too, have spots. That pretty much the premise of the game in a nutshell: You’re rolling dice, putting them on cards depicting the cutest dogs you can imagine, and pushing your luck as you try to fill the cards in front of you. With each roll, you’ll put matching dice on empty spots on your dog cards, and you’ll “bury” dice in your hard that don’t match an empty spot. But if the sum of the dice ever exceeds 7 in the yard, you’ll bust, and you’ll lose all the dice on your dogs.
The connection to Yahtzee is rooted in the dice-rolling, but it’s more than that: Yahtzee is fun because you’re constantly pushing your luck just a little bit further. This fits the bill, but it’s a bit simpler in the scoring department. Is it Yahtzee with dogs? Not entirely. But I think it’s a fair bit more fun, and I think you should play it.
Designed by Alex Hague, Jon Perry and Justin Vickers. Published by CYMK.
That’s Pretty Clever
Do you remember the roll-and-write boom that kicked off in, what, 2018? That’s Pretty Clever (or, in the original German, Ganz Schön Clever) was right at the heart of the movement. It’s a smart-playing roll-and-write game in which you’re rolling dice, selecting three of them, and filling squares on your sheet accordingly. Some of those squares will allow you to fill other squares. Sometimes you can get a nice little chain going.
That’s the heart of the game. It’s basically an optimization puzzle, and I love an optimization puzzle. Unlike Yahtzee, there’s plenty of strategy to be had here, and you always have the opportunity to make a selection on other players’ turns.
Designed by Wolfgang Warsch, published in the U.S. by Stronghold Games.
Qwixx
n best in my home as “the game we play with Ginny’s mom,” Qwixx is a stupendous little dice rolling game. With dice in four colors plus two white dice, every turn has you rolling dice, then adding two of them together to fill in one to two numbers in one or more colored rows on your player board.
The red and yellow rows numbered 2 to 12, and the blue and green numbered 12 to 2. Once you’ve filled in a number, you can’t fill in anything to the left of it, though — so if you fill in a red 5, but you haven’t filled in the 3 or 4, you can’t fill them in. You’ll earn points for the filled-in numbers on each row, with the points ramping up pretty considerably when you’ve filled in more.
Like Yahtzee, this is quick, fun, and easy to teach. Unlike Yahtzee, you’ll want to pay attention each turn, because you do have the opportunity to fill a number on each other turn — but importantly, you’re only obligated to on your own turn.
Designed by Steffen Benndorf, published in the U.S. by Gamewright.
On Tour
This newsletter is full of roll-and-write games, and On Tour fits the bill quite nicely. Each turn has you rolling dice then placing them on a map in specific regions. You’ll earn points based on your longest connected series of locations with ascending numbers. It’s a simple game to play, and I’ve found it’s pretty compelling to play solo, too. (And there’s a great app. Check it out.)
Designed by Chad DeShon. Published by AllPlay.
Pandemic: The Cure
I know, I know. This isn’t a roll-and-write game. This is sort of Pandemic: the Dice Game. But if you love rolling dice, and that’s what Yahtzee brings to your life, then I can’t recommend this one highly enough. (I mean, if you like cooperative strategy games. If you don’t, this won’t change your mind.) There’s even a fun push-your-luck component (for the Yahtzee comparisons!) where you can re-roll your action dice, but doing so brings you closer to an epidemic.
Designed by Matt Leacock. Published by Z-Man Games.
Thank you, as always, for joining me here at Don’t Eat the Meeples. Publishing weekly has really been a delight for me, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it, too. We’re just a few weeks away from the end of the year, and I’m just feeling particularly energized and excited about 2024. I hope you’ll join me, and I hope I can help you find some games that really delight you and your gaming groups.
Next week: Last-minute board game gift ideas.