14 DAY TRIAL // There are three ways to win in this addictive game from Electronic Arts. You can either roll dice on your own, compete for the top score against the CPU, or go head to head with a friend. Download difficulty levels for added challenges. iTunes now hosts Milton Bradley's popular dice-poker game Yahtzee, iPod version, for $4.99.
Yahtzee is the trademarked name of a popular dice game made by Milton Bradley and it is now owned by Hasbro, one of the largest toy makers in the world, second only to the toy giant Mattel. The main purpose of the game is to score the most points by rolling five dice to obtain certain combinations. Players can roll the dice up to three times in a turn to try to make one of the thirteen possible scoring combinations. One game consists of thirteen rounds, during which the player must choose which scoring combination is to be used in that round. Players can only choose a certain combination once.
Just like with the card-poker game, you can choose to save certain pieces of the combination - in this particular case, certain dice. You can re-roll the dice two more times after your first cast. After the third roll, the player must find a place to put the score. However, players can choose to end the turn and score after one or two rolls, if desired.
Unused boxes are ticked with a "zero": the resulting combination of dice will not fit in any unused scoring category. Each player's total score is calculated by summing all thirteen score boxes.
The iPod Yahtzee game is all about team spirit, as you need to collaborate with other players to advance your team goal and earn bonuses for scoring Yahtzee together. Each of the scoring combinations has a different point value. Some of them are fixed values and others have the cumulative value of the dice, while a Yahtzee is a five-of-a-kind and holds the game's highest point value of 50.
Yahtzee is now available for download via the iTunes service. The game is only compatible with iPod nano (3rd generation), iPod classic and 5G iPod.