💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 3-27.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 17:42:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
We started playing Yahtzee as a way of playing games and passing the time with my in-laws over Zoom, back in the early days of the pandemic. It became a weekly thing: every Sunday, two games of Yahtzee, rolling the dice for around 45 minutes total, circling the wins on our scorecards.
Official rules by Hasbro (PDF)
It's a simple game. A lot of chance. We all know the rules by heart. It's perfect for us. My in-laws used to play it a lot, so obviously my partner did as well, and I used to play by the glow of an old CRT when I was a kid, popping in a shareware diskette.
My in-laws use official Yahtzee pads that they had from decades ago; then, after using those up after a couple of years of two games a week, we got them a fresh pack. My partner and I use unofficial scorecards we found online, making them small and foldable, double-sided, printing out a couple dozen at a time. We started off using dice I used as a teenager for RPGs, before getting two packs of white, pipped dice in our stockings at Christmas.
A gift from our in-laws. Easier to read than a weird assortment of colours and sizes of dice I got when I was fourteen.
My D&D dice are in an old Seagram's whisky bag I found when I was a kid; to streamline our Sundays even further, I found a new Crown Royal bag, put the new dice and our pens and sheets in those.
The thing about Yahtzee is it's easy. You can explain the rules immediately. You get a sense for how to re-roll after a few games. But there's still a little room for strategy: do you stroke the Yahtzee or the Long Straight? That 6/6/6/5 you just rolled - do you take it for 6s (smart) or 4 of a kind? (a riskier choice, but perhaps good if you think the game will be close)
Having played hundreds of games of Yahtzee the past three years I find a weird sense of calm playing it. I've even started playing it on a telnet BBS, logging in every few weeks to play a version so old the copyright date glitches due to a two-digit year.
All this to say: small things matter; the little rituals matter. And outside what they mean immediately, over time they'll grow and morph. Just as I can't listen to certain pieces of music ("You Oughtta Know"; "Hey Jude") for different reasons long in the past, Yahtzee will forever be my pandemic game, the game I've played nearly five hundred times and counting, the game that still delights me when I roll a long straight with a single toss of the dice.