Game Review: Yahtzee Free for All

By W. Eric Martin and Ted Cheatham
September 7, 2008

Publisher: Hasbro
Designer: Richard Borg
Players: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 20 minutes
Rules Language: English
Link:

For an overview of this new take on the Yahtzee line – an ever-replenishing resource for Hasbro on par with Prometheus’ liver – here’s Ted Cheatham with a video intro:

I’ll second Ted’s call-out of the packaging of Yahtzee Free for All as cool, but it’s so cool that it verges on unusable. First, you have the supplementary packaging that allows the box to stand upright on the shelf – you know, what other boxes do normally. The fold-out flaps that form each player’s home area don’t lie flat without struggle and repeated back-bending each time you unwrap the gameboard. The dice and cards are cocooned in a molded plastic shell that doesn’t release its treasure without major prodding. And the rulebook that unfolds into a throwing star is visually enticing, yet unwieldy.

(You Gotta) Fight for Your Dice (to Parlay Them into Points)

Once you finish the origami project, though, the game itself works well and is a nice updating of Yahtzee. Yahtzee Free for All will be familiar to anyone who’s played this decades-old dice game – players roll five dice up to three times, possibly freezing dice along the way to keep their results, and to achieve certain dice combinations – yet it adds some punch to the game play because players can now steal points from other players.

While Yahtzee has some interaction, in that another player’s scores will make you gamble more or less on which dice combinations to shoot for, players largely operate on parallel but separate tracks; in Yahtzee Free for All, I can claim a scoring card for rolling 1s, a small straight, a full house, and so on, but if another player beats my result before my next turn, that player steals the card – although it’s still at risk of being stolen again until that player takes her next turn. In five-player games, some cards – particularly “Chance” which counts only the total number of pips – have changed hands multiple times, with some players stealing to hit a leader and others stealing because it’s fun to steal.

The constant stealing of goal cards could be frustrating, but the scoring chips cleverly add an incentive not to steal as well as a second timer for the game. (The game ends when either the deck of goal cards or the chip bank is empty.) Whether a player is stealing a goal card, claiming a Yahtzee card (which is worth 10 points, is in a stand-alone deck and is also at risk of being stolen), or crapping out due to bad rolls, if he doesn’t take one of the three goal cards from the center display, then one chip is added below each card. These chips are worth 1 vp each and can’t be stolen, so as the chips pile up, stealing can become a less attractive option, although players still tend to split into grasshoppers (shooting wildly for cards), ants (storing chips in small bundles), and mutant combinations of the two, depending on their personality.

One aspect of Yahtzee Free for All that doesn’t work are the rules for two- and three-players that say players control multiple Home spaces and cannot bank more than one goal card a turn. If I have multiple Homes, then I can’t bank a card anyway until I’m playing for that Home once again, and if I have a single Home, then I’ll never have more than one card on it anyway. That said, the game works well even with only two players, and stealing becomes more important since each theft is essentially worth twice a card’s printed value (with your opponent losing points and you gaining them). Again, the chips serve as an incentive to stop stealing and go legit, especially since you’ll have multiple chances to steal a card before the opponent gets another turn for that Home space.

All in all, Yahtzee Free for All is an impressive director’s cut of a mainstream classic, with enough extras to make the feature worth another look. A smaller box footprint containing only the goal cards, chips and dice would have made the total package more attractive – but I’m sure that Yahtzee Free for All: Travel Edition is already on Hasbro’s calendar for 2012.

Note: If you want to avoid YouTube, you can watch the video straight from the BGN server.

Update, Sept. 10, 2008: Richard Borg has clarified that in a two-player game, players effectively take the role of three separate players with the caveat that they can’t steal from their other selves. He also notes that players get to bank the cards on their home spaces when the game ends, something not mentioned in the rules. I had assumed that players lost those cards, which gave those in a two-player game a reason to shoot for the center cards rather than steal since they would have otherwise run the game out of chips and missed out.

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