Boat

Boat is a small three dice game in the Yacht family, similar to Yahtzee, Yatzy, and Kniffel.

People remarked that my previous business card game, No Pair, had a Yahtzee-like feeling to it, and so here we are!

As with No Pair and Stack-a-Cash, Boat is designed to be small enough to fit on a business card.

The card itself is designed in such a way that the score card can be extended out onto a piece of paper.

Rules in Detail

The rules are similar to that of Yahtzee, so if you’ve played that you pretty much know how to play this.

On your turn, roll all three dice. You may re-roll any of the dice up to twice, but you must keep the final roll.

Then, select the row that is most appropriate for your roll and fill it in.

If what you rolled doesn’t fit any of the rows, choose a row and write a 0 in it.

Rows can only be used once.

The Top Section

The six top section rows (ones, twos, threes, etc) only count the dice of the corresponding types.

So, if you roll two 1s and a 5, you can either write 2 in the Ones row or 5 in the Fives row.

To score the bonus, the sum of all the rows above must total 42 points or more. This is equivalent to rolling at least a pair (two of a kind) in each of them. The reward for scoring the bonus is a flat 20 points.

Then, once every row is filled for the top section, you can fill in the subtotal row by adding up all the rows above.

The maximum amount of points you can score for the top section is 83. 63 for the rows + 20 for the bonus.

The Bottom Section

The bottom section has five different spaces, each of which score slightly differently. The ∑ symbol just means “add all the dice together”.

  • Straight – Three dice in numeric sequence, going from 1-2-3 for 6 points in the low end to 4-5-6 for 15 points in the high end.
  • 7 or Less – Three dice that, when added together, add to 7 or less. When scoring this row, add 20 to the result.
    From 1-1-1 for 23 points in the low end, to 2-2-3 or 3-3-1 for 27 points in the high end.
  • 14 or More – Three dice that, when added together, add to 14 or more. When scoring this row add 10 to the result.
    It goes from 5-5-4 or 6-6-3 for 24 points in the low end to 6-6-6 for 28 points in the high end.
  • Boat/Triplet – Three identical dice. Add 20 to the result.
    Goes from 1-1-1 for 23 points in the low end to 6-6-6 for 38 points in the high end.
  • Chance – The throwaway roll. Simply scores the sum of the dice for at most 18 points.

Once all these rows are filled add them together alongisde the subtotal from the top section to get the final score.

The highest possible attainable score is 209. 83 for the top section and 126 for the bottom section.

How to Play Video by Mark Ball

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Credits

The boat icon behind the text is licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0 and is made by https://delapouite.com/