How to Play Yahtzee: Rules, Scoring and the Joker Rule

Yahtzee is played with five dice and a scorecard of 13 boxes. On each turn you roll up to three times, keeping any dice you like between rolls, then write a score in one empty box, even if that score is zero. After 13 turns the card is full, and you add it up, with a 35-point bonus if Ones through Sixes add up to 63 or more and 100 points for every extra Yahtzee once you've scored 50 in the Yahtzee box.

Below are the full rules exactly as Poozee's Yacht Dice plays them, every box with what it scores, and worked examples checked with the game's own scoring code. Yahtzee is a Hasbro trademark, so our game is called Yacht Dice, and Poozee isn't affiliated with Hasbro. Where printed rule sheets say something different, we point it out. For what to keep and where to score, see the Yahtzee strategy guide.

Yahtzee at a glance

How a turn works

1. Roll all five dice.
2. Keep what you like and roll again. Set aside any dice you want to keep and reroll the rest.
3. Roll a third time if you want. You can reroll any dice you like, even dice you held on an earlier roll.
4. Score one box. You can stop after any roll, and after the third you must stop. Pick one empty box and enter what your dice score there. If they don't fit any box you still have, you must enter a zero in one. A filled box can't be changed or used again.

On Poozee, tap a die (or press 1 to 5) to hold it: it lifts, turns yellow and says "Held". The Roll button (or Space or R) fills in a dot for each roll you have left. Every empty box on the scorecard shows what your dice would score there, so you tap the one you want. If you hold all five dice and press Roll, the game reminds you to release one or pick a box. Hint (or H) shows what the optimal strategy would hold or score.

The Yahtzee scorecard: all 13 boxes

The card has an upper section (Ones through Sixes) and a lower section of seven boxes for poker-style combinations. The last column shows what each box averages in a game of perfect play, from the exact solver behind our strategy guide. It's a quick way to see what a box is worth.

Perfect play averages 254.59 points a game in all (the column adds up to that before rounding). A few details that trip up new players:

• Upper boxes count only the matching dice. Two 6s in Sixes is 12, whatever the other three dice show.
• Straights: a small straight is 1‑2‑3‑4, 2‑3‑4‑5 or 3‑4‑5‑6 with any fifth die, and a large straight is 1‑2‑3‑4‑5 or 2‑3‑4‑5‑6. A large straight also counts as a small straight.
• Bigger sets count as smaller ones. Four of a kind also scores in 3 of a kind, and a full house also scores in 3 of a kind.
• Five of a kind scores in 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind and Chance as well as the Yahtzee box. It isn't a full house, though, until the joker rule below applies.
• Names: printed scorecards call Ones "Aces", and Poozee's card calls the Yahtzee box "Yacht".

What one roll scores

Here's every box that scores more than zero for six rolls on an empty scorecard. Every other box would take a 0.

Notice that Full house is missing from the 6‑6‑6‑6‑6 row: with the Yahtzee box still empty, five of a kind scores 0 there. The last roll fits nothing in the lower section but Chance, which is why Chance is often called a safety net.

The upper bonus

At the end of the game, add up Ones through Sixes. If the total is 63 or more, you get 35 more points. 63 is exactly three of each number (3 + 6 + 9 + 12 + 15 + 18), so every upper box where you score four of a number puts you ahead of that pace, and every box with two puts you behind.

The last card is a single 1 short and loses all 35 points. The bonus is worth chasing: perfect play earns the upper bonus in 68.1% of games. On Poozee, the Upper total row shows your total out of 63, and the Bonus row fills in 35 as soon as you reach it, or 0 once all six boxes are filled without it.

Pro tip: Count your pace, not your total. Four 6s in Sixes is 6 points ahead of pace, which covers two 1s and two 2s later.

The Yahtzee bonus and the joker rule

Your first Yahtzee usually goes in the Yahtzee box for 50. After that box is filled, two rules apply to every extra Yahtzee:

• The Yahtzee bonus. If the Yahtzee box holds 50, every extra Yahtzee earns a 100-point bonus. If you scratched the box with a 0, there's no bonus.
• The joker rule. Either way, the extra Yahtzee still has to fill a box, in this order:
  1. The matching upper box, if it's empty (five 4s go in Fours for 20). You can't choose anything else.
  2. Otherwise, any empty lower box. Full house, Small straight and Large straight score their full 25, 30 or 40, even though five of a kind isn't any of those; 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind and Chance score the total of the dice.
  3. Otherwise, a zero in any empty upper box. If your Yahtzee box holds 50, you still get the 100-point bonus.

Here's where five of a kind can go on five different scorecards:

On Poozee, only the boxes the joker rule allows can be picked, the message under the dice announces the bonus, and the Yacht bonus row adds 100 for each one. Don't plan around it, though: under perfect play, the joker rule comes up 0.127 times per game on average, about once every 8 games, and the bonus is paid 0.096 times per game.

Adding up your score

At the end, add four numbers: the upper total, the upper bonus, the lower total and any Yahtzee bonuses. Here's a complete scorecard from one game, in scorecard order:

The upper section reached 65, with 2 points to spare, thanks to four 5s making up for the low Ones and Twos. A bad roll went into 4 of a kind as a zero. The total is 65 + 35 + 194 = 294. Poozee adds everything up for you as you go.

The highest possible score

The highest possible score is 1,575 points, from 13 Yahtzees in a row. The first goes in the Yahtzee box for 50, the joker rule sends the next six to Ones through Sixes (105 points, plus the 35-point bonus), and the last six fill the lower section as jokers, each with its own 100-point bonus. Without any Yahtzee bonus, the most you can score is 375, the same figure the Winning Moves Yahtzee rule sheet gives.

Yahtzee odds worth knowing

• A single roll shows five of a kind in 6 of the 7,776 ways five dice can land (1 in 1,296).
• If you hold your most common number and reroll the rest twice, you make five of a kind 4.60% of the time, about 1 turn in 22.
• With the best holds, you make a large straight within three rolls 26.11% of the time.
• Perfect play scores 50 in the Yahtzee box in 33.7% of games and scratches it in the rest.

The strategy guide has the odds of every pattern, and which dice to keep for each.

How Poozee compares with printed rule sheets

Printed rule sheets don't all agree on the details. We checked two current ones: the Yahtzee Classic instructions on Hasbro's site (dated 2016) and the rule sheet from Winning Moves (2023), which makes a licensed edition.

The only real difference is the joker order on Hasbro's sheet, and it barely matters. Played that way (with a zero in an upper box once every lower box is full, the case Hasbro's sheet leaves open), our solver says perfect play averages 254.21 instead of 254.59, a difference of 0.37 points a game. If you play at home, agree on the joker order before the first roll.

Keep playing

• Play Yacht Dice solo or against the computer, with hints from an optimal solver
• Yahtzee strategy: what to keep, where to put bad rolls and the odds of every pattern
• How to play Spades, the rules and scoring of a classic partnership card game
• Play Four in a Row against the computer