The Yacht dice game
The 1930s original of every five-dice scorecard game since: roll, hold, roll again, and fill every box on the card. Play it right here, in our Roll Five table of the tradition.
One link, live dice, up to six players.
Yacht, Roll Five, and the game you grew up with
Yacht is the folk original, named for the ocean-going idleness it was reputedly invented to fill, and passed around card tables since the 1930s. Its most famous descendant is the heavily trademarked boxed game whose name you already know, which added an upper bonus and a three-of-a-kind box to the old card. Our own table of the tradition is Roll Five, the game above: the same five dice and three rolls Yacht has always used, with a scorecard tuned so the bonus race and the scratch decisions stay sharp.
How to play Yacht
- Roll five dice. Hold any you like, and roll the rest up to twice more.
- Score the hand into one open box on your card. Every box is used exactly once, so the game is one turn per box.
- If the hand fits nothing, a box must still be filled with a zero. Choosing the sacrifice is the skill.
- Highest total when the card is full wins. The classic card has twelve boxes; ours has thirteen.
The classic card and ours, side by side
Folk games drift, and a century of kitchen tables has produced a dozen Yacht cards. This is the card as the tradition usually records it, against the table the game above actually plays:
| Box | Classic Yacht | Roll Five, played above |
|---|---|---|
| Ones through Sixes | sum of matching dice | the same, plus a 35 point bonus at 63 |
| Three of a kind | not on the card | sum of all five dice |
| Four of a kind | sum of the four matching dice | sum of all five dice |
| Full house | sum of all five dice | 25 |
| Little straight, 1 to 5 | 30, exact | small straight: any four in a row, 30 |
| Big straight, 2 to 6 | 30, exact | large straight: all five in a row, 40 |
| Yacht, five of a kind | 50 | Roll Five: 50, and 100 for each extra |
| Choice | sum of all five dice | Chance: the same |
The biggest differences in feel: classic Yacht has no upper bonus, so the top of the card is just arithmetic; and its straights must be exact runs, which makes them crueler draws.
Free printable score card
A clean PDF score card for the kitchen table: the full thirteen-box card with the upper bonus and extra Roll Fives, six games to a sheet. It works for Roll Five, classic Yacht, and every five-dice scorecard game in the family.
Download the score card (PDF)Letter size, prints in plain black and white.
The odds of a yacht
The namesake hand, five of a kind in one throw, lands 0.08% of the time: about 1 roll in 1,296. Three rolls and shrewd holding raise it to roughly one turn in twenty, which is why a shouted yacht still turns heads a century on. The full one-roll odds for every combination are on the Roll Five page, enumerated exactly over all 7,776 rolls, in keeping with how every number on this site is produced.