Is there any reward to simplifying Yahtzee?

 It has become a definite part of my gaming hobby to hunt down odd little truffles. Short games that you can easily knock together yourself. The world of PnP micro games is a surprisingly engaging and diverse one.

But when I came across Boat, I honestly had to ask myself ‘Is this really necessary?’ At the same time, Boat was too convenient for me not to try.

It’s Yahtzee with three dice. 

Boat has two fewer categories and it has a couple different ones. You can’t have a full house with only three dice after all. But it’s still two rerolls and mark a scoring line every time.

Yahtzee is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. I like fidgeting on my phone by playing it solitaire. And I do think it can be a good core mechanic for better, more complicated games. However, it’s not a game I’d played with physical dice. If I’m getting out dice, I’m going to play a better game. And I think it’s a appalling multiplayer game. I honestly believe games that are literally multiplayer solitaires should have simultaneous play.

The selling point of Boats is that is simplifies Yahtzee by having two less dice and two less turns. I will argue that, when you scale down a game, you should either meaningfully reduce its footprint or playing time (or ideally both) and I don’t think Boat does either. Two fewer dice is not going to be the deciding factor on picking Boat over Yahtzee.

(Playing devil’s advocate, I do appreciate Euphrates & Tigris: Contest of Kings, which has a larger footprint on the table than Tigris & Euphrates. However, its storage footprint is minuscule which is how it survives purge after purge in my collection)

I also think that Boats is weaker than Yahtzee which isn’t the strongest game in the first place. Playing Yahtzee as a fidget exercise, my personal victory condition is to get the bonus. If I did the math right, it’s statistically harder to get the bonus in Boats. (Admittedly, I think the odds are less then 10% different but it’s still harder)

In fact, the odds of getting a pair in the first roll and trying to build something off of it is much higher in Yahtzee. The ability to plan and play with the odds, which is basically Yahtzee’s biggest virtue, isn’t there in Boat.

For me, a game that filled the role of ‘Yahtzee but simpler’ was Cinq-O. It’s not a Yahtzee as Boat but it is meaningfully simpler and more dynamic while still being fun. I’m sure there are a lot of little dice games that fit that same description.

I do appreciate the mechanical choices that were made to modify Yahtzee to three dice. I do find it an interesting as an intellectual experiment. However, that doesn’t make Boat a game I want to play.