A one die Yahtzee can work

 After I wrote a less than glowing commentary about Boat, a three-dice Yahtzee variant, BGG user d x@UanarchyK

asked me to check on their game Raft, a ONE die Yahtzee variant.

The bad news for d x@UanarchyK is that I thought Raft was simply okay. The good news is that I consider it to be a _much_ better game than Boat. 

In Raft, you are filling out six different scoring categories. (1&6s, 2&5s, 3&4s, full house, straight and five of a kind) However, you are not filling it out one category at a time. Instead, you are filling out a five by six grid.

And here’s what made me laminate a copy of the game. Each roll must be placed in the same row or column as the last roll. 

That creates a lot more decisions than Boat gave me while the restrictions make those decisions cruel. I feel like I have enough control to make failure have meaning.

In the minis column: Raft is abstract and dry. Rolling one die thirty times could get tedious, although it wasn’t as bad as I feared. And rolling one die as opposed to even two increases the random factor. (Can’t Stop wouldn’t be a good game if was numbered one to six with you rolling two dice. Honest, that sentence does make sense)

In the positive column: It’s currently free and low ink so the opportunity cost is next to nothing. It could work as a simultaneous multiplayer Solitaire like Take It Easy with any number of players. It’s easy to teach with actually meaningful decisions.

One of the first Roll and Write game I played that only used one die was Not Another One, which soured me to the idea. It took games like Waypoints to make me reassess the idea. And Raft is another good example of one die working.

Boat was a copy of Yahtzee only less. Raft uses Yahtzee ideas but is its own thing.