Viva Dice Throwing: Casino Yahtzee

REVIEW THREE: CASINO YAHTZEE

PURCHASED: SAVERS NORTHWEST ALBUQUERQUE

PRICE: $1.99 + TAX

PLAYERS: 2 - 4

AGES: 8 & UP

CREATED BY: MILTON BRADLEY

Confession time in advance: I'm not the world's biggest Yahtzee fan. Something about the game just equates sleaziness to me -- perhaps it's the imagery of hoodlum youths in a dingy alleyway throwing dice against a dumpster for new pairs of shoes that gets to me, or perhaps it's my Sunday School knowledge that the Roman legionaries that crucified Jesus played dice for his clothing and effects while he was dying. For some reason, that one verse really, and I mean REALLY, sticks in my head, and thus, a burning hatred for all things dice games was born!

However, this is no ordinary devil Yahtzee -- this is CASINO YAHTZEE. Somehow, that makes it worse -- it's like the box is already loudly proclaiming additional sin via gambling on the box itself! While there aren't any massively blinking lights or nude showgirls on the box (which in itself is a bit disappointing, as I figure if you're going to be advertising sin, you might as well go all out) the game does seem sort of colorful. A nice picture of the actual board is on the front, providing you with an idea of what the game will be like in all its resplendent 1970s freakish disco-colors. Ironically, discotheques have been making a comeback the last time I was in Las Vegas, so the Vegas assumption seems pretty appropros. The box is simplistic and "easy" to understand. Hey! There's a game in there! It involves dice and a strange plastic stadium to roll them in!

I can't decide if the dice here are pretending to be rockstars or if they're WWF wrestling superheroes. Either way, they're center-stage for an audience of inter-racial plastic chips (See? White chips and black chips in the same bin? We CAN all get along after all!) and the action is brewing already. Is this game going to be a Las Vegas showpiece, a glittering jewel of gambling and fun amidst a sea of otherwise mundane, boring day-to-day board games? Or is this game nothing but a literal Soddom & Gomorrah, simply begging you to play Yahweh and put it out of its misery with a hail of fire and brimstone?

The game, not surprisingly, looks exactly like the picture, so at least we're not dealing with something like a fast food commercial, in which you open the box to horrors and are left weeping in the corner, repeating "But the commercial.....". So that's at least something, yeah? The stadium setup is actually pretty cool once you get everything done, and it certainly is quite colorful. Once again, the Vegas irony is very present, as if this is a stadium, it's definitely a Tom Jones concert, which leaves me worried that this game is pretty much only for 40 year old suburban women wanting to "go crazy" on the weekend. Nonetheless, from a simple glance, a person can already get a good idea of what you're working with. Dice go in center, chips go on spaces on boards, points are scored, pretty much Yahtzee right there. Not boding well for someone like me, however, is there enough of a twist here in the gameplay to save the poor Tom Jones concert from the cloud of granny panties flying the singer's way?

The game didn't come with any score sheets, which doesn't factor into my review, since that's the previous owner's fault, not MB's fault, but it was easy enough to find replacements online. Continuing with a geriatric theme, the score sheet seems something more from Insurance Actuary: The Game rather than any sort of "fun" experience. Fill out the tables, boys and girls, and your whole family can find out whether you save 15% on your car insurance with Geico! This sheet looks incredibly complex and it seems very, very easy to miss something, thus not giving someone their points earned with blood, sweat, and rolled ivory; this situation is never something you want to occur in a board game. If the game is for ages 8 & up, the scorekeeper shouldn't have to be the CEO of a national financial institution in order to understand exactly what is going on.

But how does the game itself play? What is the purpose of this huge stadium and these disco boards? How different from actual Yahtzee is this strange 1986 concoction? Well, for basic gameplay, the answer is: Not much different. Your basic motor skills will get exercised by placing dice in a cup and then turning it out on center stage, and the contained area is a plus when one has had a bit of wine to drink and gets a little "overeager" in the rolling department. However, the basic turn still works just as Yahtzee does: Roll dice, look at numbers, figure out if your score points. This isn't necessarily a criticism, mind you: the simplicity of Yahtzee makes it a very easy game to learn, and keeping a simple game mechanic such as dice rolling ensures that the game has a certain 'pick up and play' that adds to its value on a family game night when uncle Joe has come over and doesn't know how to play.

If I had to pin down a serious reason why I don't like Yahtzee, it's because the game relies on a dice roll mechanic and not much else. There's simply no "game" there for me. Casino Yahtzee adds a little additional layer to the basic idea, but it's really like adding an additional layer of smoke to a slot machine room -- everyone's already smoking 3 packs a minute in there, so you're getting lung cancer if you come in contact with it anyway, so adding an additional layer isn't really going to offer much in the grand scheme of things. In Casino Yahtzee, you get 5 rolls, and from the start, you get to pick which dice and how many you roll. Thus, you can roll 1 die 5 times, as shown in the picture, in an attempt to get that ONE left over score, or you can simply throw caution to the wind and throw all of them once.

After each throw, you place black markers over what you've rolled, and score points when you complete 'rows' in the directions indicated by the arrows. Congratulations, Casino Yahtzee, you've just made every single 60+ member of the gambling population happy by somehow magically combining Bingo and Keno (Bengo? Kinengo-o?). However, you don't get a free novelty-large-sized marker when playing this, so I don't know if the senior population will be as interested in this game as standard Bingo. Nonetheless, the game proceeds through the five rolls of your choosing, blacking out the numbers you have achieved and showing you what your 'goals' are. As shown in the top corner, once you get a row, all players place a white chip upon the row, marking the score off as having been completed. The turn then ends, and the next person continues.

Once points are scored in a Bingo row, it's "Game Over" for any attempt anyone else was trying to make for said points, since the points are accumulated as a group, rather than individually over several turns, such as normal Yahtzee. So there's a little bit of strategy there, or rather the illusion of strategy. Choosing different colored dice (each color signifies a row on John Travolta's Saturday Night Fever floor) targets certain areas of the board, and therefore you can -- "but wait a second!", I can hear you saying. "If the chances of the dice are completely random, isn't it ultimately up to the laws of nature/God/deity of choice as to whether you win or not?" Well, aside from the obvious point that if God is concerned about a Casino Yahtzee game, I'm a bit bothered about the future of mankind, the answer is yes and no. If you're going to roll a blue 6, you're going to roll a blue 6, and your probability on each individual throw is going to be 1 out of 6. But if you choose all 5 rolls to roll only blue with the goal of getting a 6, your chances overall become..... 1 out of 6 five times in a row, instead of just once! Depending on your views on kismet and karma and all that, this may mean you get an increased overall chance, or it may mean you just get more frustrated when you hit that 3 five separate times. Up to you! Just like real gambling, Casino Yahtzee can drive you to drink!

So your "strategy" ultimately relies on manipulating the available chance tabulations and seeing what's available on the board for you to take, in order to maximize your points and w--WAIT A SECOND. That's math. We've got an insurance actuary table for a scorecard, and we're working with principles of chance and discrete mathematics here. Dear God, this has nothing to do with Vegas or gambling at all, though incidentally it does have something to do with old people. We've got a subversive insurance actuary training kit here. Milton Bradley was secretly inserting these games into people's homes in the hopes of getting them to work for AIG! Conspiracy theories abound! The game actually uses just as much math as you'd like to put into it, and it's not much more than any strategy game, for example. You want to see some real insurance actuary tables, look at a hit table for Squad Leader. This is a cakewalk compared to that, so at least that's something. Then again, this game isn't trying to be intelligent. I haven't really figured out what this game is trying to be.

Another element added to the strategy is the "Bonus Roll", and this just seems to be a tacked-on attempt to throw a little randomness into the game. After the first turn, you can choose to throw every single dice in a single turn, as if you are some sort of aloof, nonchalant ne'er-do-well who isn't really interested in winning. If every number ends up different on the dice, you WIN! You get to add up the dice and add the score in the 'Bonus' tabulation. If your amazing rainbow ends up being a straight (cue a joke about "rainbow" and "straight" here) you score DOUBLE the bonus points! You get to place the chips where available just like a normal turn, but there's the added chance of getting bonus points. Of course, you're sacrificing your ability to roll that single die 5 times to get that one....number....left to win a row, but seriously, it's all up to chance anyway, so why not play for keeps and get those bonus points? I don't think it really adds much to the game at all, as the point spread in a 2 player game ends up usually being so dominant and one-sided that you'd have to bonus roll every third roll and win to comeback.

So you continue, roll, score, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum until every single row is scored, at which point you tally up the points and find out who's the big winner in our non-monetary Vegas-esque casino (Bingkeno?) environment. With 2 players, this is a lot like ripping off a Band-Aid quickly -- the game may be somewhat painful but at least it's fast. We ended up playing 2 games and both were around 10-15 minutes total. With 4 players, one can assume it will take a little longer, but I think the result will still be equal, you're just a wimp in my allegory and the Band-Aid is getting pulled off more slowly.

Congratulations! You've filled up the entire board! Amazing! The game now appears to be an incredibly one-sided Checkers variant. You should be proud of yourself, you've managed to put out all the lights in the disco floor, and Three's Company is no longer allowed to have any fun. Time to put on your Mr. Roper badge!

 Then you're left with the tabulations and the adding. One particular negative quirk of the game is that it's near impossible to notice every single Bingo line when you complete it; in both games, we ended up having to pause 2/3 of the way through and meticulously go through each chip, ensuring that everything was scored properly and in the right place. I would have considered this a fluke on the first game due to learning curve, but it happened at roughly the same point in the game the second time. Kids will not be able to be scorekeeper in this game, despite the 8 & up rating, and adults will also find it somewhat of a challenge to just keep track of everything. A 2-player game was hard enough; I'd assume a 4-player game is a nightmare for scoring. The best ammo Freddy could have had in his nightmare fuel is a lifetime of tabulating Casino Yahtzee scorecards. Not flashy, but certainly effective, and the teenager in question would likely attempt suicide inside the dream within a few minutes, thus negating the need for effort on the horror villain's part! A master plan!

I have to give the game creators a bit of credit for this innovation -- to clean up after a game, you simply slide the overlay out, pushing the chips into the container for them. No picking them out individually, simply adding to the tedium! Arguably this is the most fun part of the game, which is very, very bad. Then you're ready to start over again and the power has been restored to the disco dance floor!

I'd say the names have been covered up to protect the innocent, but I realized in the above picture I didn't edit out the names. Oops. At any rate, after the game is done, you're left with a tabulation that will require a calculator, since not only could you not recognize all the scoring as it happened, but the table is incredibly confusing and you're not really sure what's going on anymore. Early-onset Alzheimer's. Great. We've been playing in a casino environment, but only playing Bingo, Keno, and whatever combination of Craps is somehow involved there, and we're tabulating insurance actuary mathematics at a disco dance floor that can only be from a Tom Jones concert. Yep, this game turns people old.

I should add that although I am a little biased against Yahtzee by my own admission, my wife is a huge Yahtzee fan, often attempting to wheedle me into playing it with her. She gave this game lower ratings than even I did, so I think that's saying something. Even with a positive bias, this game is going nowhere fast -- very similar to Nicholas Cage in, ironically enough, Leaving Las Vegas. This game is sort of like that, because once you start, you can't leave, but at least it's over quickly.

THE RATINGS:

PACKAGING/MARKETING: The box is certainly colorful, and the simplicity of it does help in a way. You get a good picture of the game itself, so you already know what you're getting into from the very beginning. It's clearly designed with an audience in mind; however, that audience seems to be Yahtzee fans and not much else. You don't get much of a draw from the non-Yahtzee crowd here, so it's barely eking out a Knight in my book.

BOARD QUALITY: I can't even really tell what's going on with the board setup. At first glance it seems sort of interesting, with the dice pit fight in the center and the crowd of chips watching on, but after playing, all of it seems completely unnecessary and ultimately if the game just stuck to the mechanics it was stealing from in the first place, the game would be much simpler. There's some flash, but if all I'm doing is marking off a card like Bingo, why not just use Bingo cards? Dumping out the chips is sort of entertaining, but the mechanic again is very unnecessary. Definitely a pawn.

COMPLEXITY: The only complexity this game has is in the score tabulation, and that complexity is definitely of the "punch-holes-in-table" kind, as you have to meticulously go through and figure out whether you've scored properly (HEH HEH) for each individual involved. The game mechanic is just as simple as Yahtzee plus Bingo cards, and that might be a plus if you're playing with kids or as a family, but as with above, why add complexity to something that already works? We're not insurance actuaries, and we certainly don't need to get headaches figuring out points. If you're a Yahtzee fan, you just want to roll some dice and score some points. Pawn!

ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: When your game is trying to add to Yahtzee, and even a Yahtzee fan says it's bad, you've got a total stinker on your hands. The game is tedious and doesn't have anything going for it that you couldn't already get through normal Yahtzee, and the only fortunate thing is that the game is over quickly enough that you can completely forget it even existed in the first place. Pawn!

VARIABILITY: You've got a dice mechanic and a general rule of chance as a dominating factor, so that's going to give some points to the variability. You'll probably never end up with the same points as a previous game, but then again, why would you want to find that out? If you do, you're probably already tabulating the chances of that happening in the first place. The mechanic, however, and the "strategy" has no variation whatsoever, and games will always play along exactly the same path, barely eking out a Knight rating.

POTPOURRI: Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along. Although the colors could have a weird 70s disco vibe to them, which would add quite a bit to the personality of the game, it's obvious they were intended to make the mechanic of the game simpler. There's some good jokes to be had at the game's expense, but it's not even worth it to do it in the first place. Pawn!

AND THE OVERALL RATING IS:

GARBAGE BAG! (PAWN)

This game tries to elicit some sort of 'casino' vibe from it by bringing in other casino-type games, but I'm left baffled as to why they took out the original Yahtzee mechanic, which was, surprise surprise, based upon POKER, a game traditionally equated with casinos. You've literally taken out poker and replaced it with Bingo and Keno? Hurrah, we're all 90 years old now. It doesn't even do that well, as the board is unnecessary and pointless to the actual gameplay and could be done much simpler in a more interesting way.

The colors on the game board are somewhat distracting, but artwork could really go a long way in making the marketing much more interesting. The gameplay itself takes all the fun out of Yahtzee and turns it into some abomination; unless you're the type of person who likes tabulating chances at every opportunity and runs through statistics courses in your head every three seconds, you're not going to find much here. If you are that type of person, scary. So, in conclusion......LESS VEGAS, MORE SODDOM & GOMORRAH. The game is over, the fire and brimstone have fallen, and God is pleased. He just wishes He could have His $1.99.

DISCLAIMER: I don't actually put board games in the trash. Someone can probably find this fun. The ones I decide aren't worth keeping will go back to the thrift stores they came from.

Next week's review: TRUST ME!