8 Games for people who loved Yahtzee

0:01 brought to you by boardgameatlas.com the fastest growing board game community in the world kia ora kotuou and welcome to eight games heavily inspired by yahtzee that you might like if you like yahtzee now that's obviously not what the video is titled but that's what it's about see one of the funny things about board gaming is people get into hobby board games and they look at classic toy store games and people playing them and go oh you're playing monopoly or oh i remember playing clue when i was a child and there is this tendency to look down at games that are available in a toy store, now sure i'd much rather play terraforming mars than monopoly but i don't think people who play monopoly are just unwashed peasants so for this video i thought i'd look at one of those classic toy store games yahtzee which is a game i really really enjoyed as a kid i played yahtzee i a bunch and what is yahtzee at its core it's taking five dice rolling them and re-rolling them to get the results you want and then recording those results and those ideas have proliferated all across board gaming and as much as board games develop and evolve over time so many great games owe so much to yahtzee so if you know someone who likes yahtzee or if you like yahtzee here's eight games you might want to try out as well the first two comes a set and apologies to everyone in germany but they are ganz schon clever and doppel so clever also known as

1:32 that's pretty clever or twice as clever these pair of games are essentially advanced yahtzee they take the same idea of rolling different dice and assigning values onto a scoresheet in order to maximize your score before the end of the game but they use different dice that can be used in different situations for example on the original game purple dice can only be placed in the bottom column but you have to place a higher value die to the right each time you place one until you place a six in which case that resets the blue area you have to place the combined value of the blue and the white die and while there's a lot more math involved in figuring out how you maximize your score on the different score sheets this is fundamentally the same game as yahtzee but probably the biggest single difference is that all players are working off the same set of dice it's also available on phones i definitely recommend both of these games if you're looking for something that is very much a modern take on yahtzee next up we have a game that uses yahtzee's core mechanics of rolling dice and re-rolling them up to three times to get the results you want and that's gonna appear quite a bit in this list but this game is king of tokyo king of tokyo also has a companion game called king of new york which is a very similar game using slightly different rules but fundamentally both games are about giant monsters battling over a city in each turn you will roll the different dice and re-roll until you get as close to the results as you want and king of tokyo has unique dice which give you which you can spend to heal yourself get power ups or to attack other

3:04 people the core of the game though is it's a king of the mountain game where you're trying to hold on to the center of the board as long as possible in score points whilst not being eliminated and while king of tokyo is a very confrontational game you will be fighting each other all the way through the game it's so wonderfully silly and light that you can't take it too seriously definitely another good one for a family game night or for anyone who just doesn't want to play a long game next up we have dice throne which can be best described as combat yahtzee it's primarily a dueling game where two players go head to head although i understand there are multiplayer modes for the game as well but really it's designed as a head-to-head duel and each character in this game has their own unique board and their own unique set of five dice and like yahtzee you can roll and re-roll up to three times and based on the symbols you generate you allocate them to different parts of the board in order to get different bonuses in this case you're trying to do damage to your opponent or prevent them from doing damage to you and the first person do 50 damage wins and the different classes have different dice with different distributions and different special abilities they can do so each one of them has their own character and play style it's weirdly like a cross between a dice game of yahtzee and magic the gathering without the deck construction another one of those easy to teach easy to play games from dice throne we move on to dice forge which is a rather different beast this isn't about having five dice that you can re-roll up three times but it is a dice game about generating resources for yourself the twist in this

4:36 one is that you can change the sides on the dice which is an absolutely mind-blowing concept and when you start to unpack it you realize that this is a fascinating game when it comes to understanding probabilities and figuring out what you can do with them within the game so you start with these two basic dice which generate money victory points and two basic resources and throughout the game you will be trying to buy better sides for your dice and figuring out what cards to buy that complement your strategy based on the probabilities on the sides of the dice you've got and the reason i think this would appeal to people who've played a lot of yahtzee is yahtzee's all about calculating those probabilities of getting the sets you want diceforge does is allow you to alter those probabilities on the dice themselves and i find that personally really captivating and i've got a lot of love for dice forge as an idea it's also really tactile popping the sides off the dice and replacing them it feels like real progression when you pop off a side that says one coin on it and replace it with a side that says six coins next up is one of my favorite games and it's by one of the most popular board game designers in the world matt leacock and it is pandemic the cure and i know a lot of people love pandemic and pandemic legacy i'm a big fan of pandemic the cure and the reason for that is the dice rolling mechanism there are so many different classes in this game especially if you've got the expansion like i do and they each have their own unique pool of special dice that do different things for each character and instead of limiting you to just

6:08 two re-rolls so a total of three roles with each character you can re-roll as much as you want but one side on each character is a biohazard and you really don't want to roll that side because once you do that side's locked and it's always bad so it takes a core idea of yahtzee and then adds a push your luck element to it so like i really need to get like an extra cure this turn and i've got three dice left so you roll and you get a biohazard and two wrong symbols you're like i still need this cure and you pick up the two dice and roll and get nothing and then you try again and boom two biohazards and that's the end of your turn and everyone you're playing with screams at you for going why why'd you keep rolling so while panting with the cure is relatively easy to learn and a very accessible understandable game it's meanly hard at times and disturbingly unfair so i'm not sure i'd recommend it for family play but i would recommend it for people who love probability and love taking risk and love the push you luck element that's pushed into this it's also a cooperative game so you can play it with the family and either all win or more likely or lose i just kind of think the game needs an easy mode before our last two entries which are linked games in my mind i'm going to run through some honorable mentions from my people on patreon david allenby recommends bang the dice game as a game heavily inspired by yahtzee

7:40 ryan chambers says if you want a tremendous amount of game built around the coreyatsu mechanic check out assault from doomrock which is a cooperative adventure game with randomly generated heroes bret hart suggested based on my recommendation for gunshot clever that roll through the ages either iron or bronze age or catan the dice game could be good options as well as maybe alien frontiers finally rocco privitera says of ninja dice in ninja dice you re-roll skill dice trying to be challenged represented by house dice such as guards locked areas or civilians each time you rolled opponents could roll their own dice to possibly stop you but only if you chose to re-roll that means you make decisions should i keep a diet that lets me keep a point or re-roll hoping it gives me a bonus and finally on to the last two games which are both cooperative games built around the yahtzee mechanic and the first one of those is elder sign now you've probably heard me talk about elder sign a fair bit i do like the arkham games from fantasy flight games even though i wasn't sold on the last couple elder sign especially ported to the app is so derivative of yahtzee's core mechanics that anyone who's played yahtzee will be able to pick it up and understand how it works in elder sign there are different challenges you're trying to complete and they will have different dice totals you have to mix and match based on your rolls and they have these special dice with six different sides on them and you have to roll and re-roll and use bonuses and cards to adjust dice in order to get the precise

9:12 results you need to finish the challenges and i really recommend this one because it's on phones it's on tablets you can just pick it up and play it anywhere you want so if you are someone who likes ciati that doesn't necessarily want to buy a board game you can still pick it up on your phone and i've spent disturbing amounts of time on the train playing elder sign it is such a great filler game in that regard that brings me on to the reckoners the reckoners is a cooperative game it's a superhero themed game although in this one the superheroes are the bad guys and you're the good guys trying to take them down because they're not really super heroes they're super bastards and it revolves entirely around a yahtzee mechanic each character has six dice three special ones based on their power and three default ones and you roll them up to three times saving one dice each time you roll and then using those dice to take actions but what makes it really cool is that you can combine your efforts as a group so unlike elder sign where one player takes all the actions trying to solve trying to solve one of the challenges the whole team has a full pool of dice that they can mix and match and do whatever they want with so in a four or five or six player game you can have 30 dice worth of actions taking place in any order that the players choose and that means there's just a fascinating decision space here how do you time your actions how do you move around the board how do you maximize all of the resources available to your group and for me that's what makes the reckoners my

10:42 favorite game directly inspired by yahtzee and i think because i loved yahtzee so much as a kid that's why i like the reckoners so much now well that's my very quick and dirty list of games that i think you might like if you like yahtzee are there any games that i've completely missed of course there are let me know in the comments these long-form videos are made possible solely through the support of patreon i try to keep the ads and begging on this channel to an absolute minimum but if you do want to support the channel you do want to see us do more please hit us up on patreon you can participate in polls you can get involved in these lists and you can generally help me make more content and until next time stay safe everyone and if you enjoyed this video like it hit the notification button support us on patreon and check out our website