Open Yahtzee for Windows

Did you ever play Yahtzee? With over 50 million copies of the classic dice game sold every year (according to its maker) chances are pretty good that you've heard the familiar sound of dice rattling in the cup, not to mention the game's simple play: Roll five dice up to three times in certain combinations to achieve the highest possible total score. Let's see...random numbers, calculating combinations, and keeping score: sounds like a natural for software, doesn't it? But not just any gameware: Open Yahtzee is open-source freeware that brings the simple, endless, and mentally stimulating fun of Yahtzee to your PC. It runs on just about any platform available, including Windows, by the use of vxWidgets that give it a native look on each platform. It's supported by an open-source project.

Clicking the extracted Open Yahtzee executable called up the game's simple but attractive interface, which sports a row of nicely rendered dice along the bottom and the Upper Section and Lower Section from the Yahtzee scorecard presented side by side, though we could enable a more traditional layout as well as turn the dice animations off in the program's settings. The Help file included basic rules as well as FAQs at the project's wiki. But if one of the great things about Yahtzee is how easy it is to learn, another is how quickly it comes back when you start playing again after a long hiatus. We started by pressing the Roll button, which keeps track of your three rolls. We clicked check boxes to keep dice and rolled the rest again. We got two pairs on our first roll and a Full House by our second; not a bad start. The game calculates scores, so there's no use arguing the math.

As with the original, the problem with Open Yahtzee isn't starting to play, it's stopping. Not only that, but you can also start playing right away: No more hunting all over the house for enough pencils, or drawing up score sheets because the pad is empty. All that's missing is that famous clackety sound!