How Many Dice Are in Yahtzee?
Yahtzee uses five six-sided dice. You roll all five, hold the ones you like, and reroll the rest up to three times a turn, chasing combinations across 13 categories. Play a full game free right here, grab a printable score sheet, and see the rules, the odds and the many near-identical games Yahtzee grew out of.
Roll, hold, reroll — then tap a category to score it. Thirteen rounds.
Press roll to start your turn. A second Yahtzee in a game earns a +100 bonus.
The scorecard is live: after each roll, every category you could still fill lights up with the points it would score, so you can see your best option before you commit. Fill all thirteen to finish the game.
The short answer
Yahtzee is played with five standard six-sided dice and a scorecard of 13 categories. On each turn you may roll the dice up to three times, setting aside any you want to keep between rolls, then you commit the result to one category. The headline combination — five of a kind — is the Yahtzee itself, worth 50 points, the highest single score on the card. Thirteen turns fill the card and the game ends.
How to play & scoring
- Roll all five dice. Then choose any to keep and reroll the rest — up to two more times, three rolls in all.
- Pick a category to score your dice into. Each of the 13 can be used only once per game.
- Score it — by the rules below — even if that means writing a zero when nothing fits.
- Repeat for 13 turns, then total everything up. Highest score wins.
The card splits in two. The upper section is Ones through Sixes — score the total of whichever number you choose — and reaching 63 there earns a 35-point bonus. The lower section rewards poker-style hands: three- and four-of-a-kind (the sum of all five dice), Full House (25), Small Straight (30), Large Straight (40), the Yahtzee (50), and Chance (any five dice, scored as their sum). A second Yahtzee earns a 100-point bonus each time, and a perfect game maxes out at 1,575.
The odds in five dice
Five dice have 7,776 possible outcomes (6⁵). Of those, only six are five-of-a-kind, so the chance of rolling a Yahtzee in a single throw is 6 in 7,776 — exactly 1 in 1,296, about 0.08%. But you get three rolls and can hold matching dice between them, so with optimal play across a full turn the probability of finishing with a Yahtzee climbs to roughly 4.6% — better than one turn in twenty.
That gap between the one-roll odds and the three-roll odds is the whole game in miniature: Yahtzee is about managing chance with the hold-and-reroll mechanic, not just hoping. Choose which dice to keep well, and luck does far more of your work.
Free printable score sheet
Playing with real dice? Here's a clean Yahtzee score sheet you can print for the table — every category, the point values, and columns for up to six players or games. Tap the button for a print-ready page, or just read the categories off the table below.
| Category | How to score | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Upper section (reach 63 for a +35 bonus) | ||
| Ones | Total of 1s | — |
| Twos | Total of 2s | — |
| Threes | Total of 3s | — |
| Fours | Total of 4s | — |
| Fives | Total of 5s | — |
| Sixes | Total of 6s | — |
| Lower section | ||
| Three of a Kind | Sum of all dice | — |
| Four of a Kind | Sum of all dice | — |
| Full House | 25 points | 25 |
| Small Straight | 30 points | 30 |
| Large Straight | 40 points | 40 |
| Yahtzee | 50 points | 50 |
| Chance | Sum of all dice | — |
The family of similar games
Yahtzee feels singular, but it sits in a crowded family of nearly-identical dice games — and there's a clean legal reason, which also answers a common question: can you copy Yahtzee? Game rules and mechanics can't be copyrighted — only a game's name, logo and artwork are protected. So while "Yahtzee" is a trademark, the five-dice, three-roll, fill-the-categories game is free for anyone to make under a different name. That's why these all exist:
| Game | Dice | Origin | How it differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yacht | 5 | England, by 1938 | The direct ancestor. Public domain. Straights are full five-runs; no upper bonus or three-of-a-kind. |
| Generala | 5 | South America | Older cousin. Bonus points for combinations made on the first roll; a "Generala" is five of a kind. |
| Yatzy | 5 | Scandinavia | The public-domain version. 50-point upper bonus, plus One Pair and Two Pair boxes. |
| Maxi Yatzy | 6 | Scandinavia | Six dice and extra categories, so bigger combinations are possible. |
| Poker Dice | 5 | England | Score the poker hand you roll — pair, straight, five of a kind and so on. |
| Kismet | 5 | USA, 1964 | Coloured dice; both the numbers and the colours count toward scoring. |
| Balut | 5 | Denmark / Asia | Yahtzee-like card with fixed targets; popular among expatriate communities. |
| Crag | 3 | USA, c.1940 | A faster three-dice relative with its own 13-box scorecard. |
| Farkle | 6 | Traditional | Push-your-luck cousin — keep rolling for more or bank before you "farkle" and lose it all. |
The most important of these is Yacht, an English game documented by 1938 that Yahtzee is directly descended from — Yahtzee simply added the upper bonus, three-of-a-kind, the four-die small straight and the Yahtzee bonus. Yatzy, hugely popular in Scandinavia, is openly described as a public-domain version. So the dozens of free "Yahtzee-style" apps and the boxed Yatzy on a Stockholm shelf aren't knock-offs in any illegal sense — they're the same folk game wearing different names.
History & the trademark
The modern game began with a Canadian couple who, around 1954, played a dice game on their yacht and called it "The Yacht Game." Toy entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe — who'd earlier popularised Bingo in America — bought the rights and filed "Yahtzee" as a trademark on 19 April 1956. Sales were slow at first because the fun was hard to convey in an advert, so Lowe sold it through live "Yahtzee parties," and word of mouth did the rest.
Milton Bradley bought the E.S. Lowe company in 1973, and the game has been a Hasbro property since. Hasbro says around 50 million sets sell every year. The name is firmly protected; the underlying game, inherited from Yacht and Generala, never was — which is the whole reason this little five-dice idea spread so far under so many names.
A trademark on a folk game
Yahtzee is a tidy lesson in how intellectual property treats games. What Hasbro owns is the name and the look — the word "Yahtzee," the logo, the box. What nobody owns is the actual play: five dice, three rolls, a grid of poker-style categories. That idea is centuries-old folk material, crystallised from Yacht and Generala into one well-marketed product. The line between the free idea and the protected expression is exactly why a game can feel proprietary and be endlessly cloneable at the same time.
So "how many dice in Yahtzee" has a one-word answer — five — but the richer story is that those five dice belong to everyone. If you like the poker-hand logic underneath it, the same combinatorics run through how many possible poker hands there are.
Common questions
Quiz: Yahtzee facts
Five quick rounds on the dice, the scoring and the history.
How many times can you roll per turn?
Facts & sources
- Game — 5 six-sided dice, up to 3 rolls per turn, 13 categories; Yahtzee = 50, Full House 25, Small/Large Straight 30/40, upper bonus 35 at 63+, bonus Yahtzee 100, max 1,575 (Wikipedia; Hasbro rules).
- Odds — 6⁵ = 7,776 outcomes; Yahtzee on one roll = 1/1,296; ≈ 4.6% over a full three-roll turn with optimal play.
- History — derived from "The Yacht Game"; Edwin S. Lowe filed the Yahtzee trademark 19 Apr 1956; Milton Bradley acquired it 1973; now Hasbro; ~50 million sold yearly.
- Family — Yacht (≥1938), Generala, Yatzy (public-domain), Maxi Yatzy, Poker Dice, Kismet, Balut, Crag and Farkle are related dice games.
- The game and score sheet here are original implementations. Yahtzee is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. This page is independent and educational, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro.
More games & numbers
Five dice, three rolls, and a folk game so good someone put a trademark on it.