Yahtzee is a dice game made by Milton Bradley (a company that has since been acquired and assimilated by Hasbro).

The objective of the game is to score points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations.

According to the current owner, Hasbro, as of 2007, 50 million Yahtzee games are sold each year.

[1] A classic edition is currently being marketed by Winning Moves Games USA.

The overall concept of Yahtzee traces its roots to a number of traditional dice games.

The most important predecessor of Yahtzee is the dice game Yacht, which is an English cousin of Generala and dates back to at least 1938.

[1] Later they asked Lowe if he would make up some sets to be given as gifts to their friends who enjoyed the game.

This story is expanded by Lowe in the 1973 book A Toy is Born by Marvin Kaye.

According to Lowe, the game did not initially do well commercially, since the rules and appeal were not easily conveyed in an advertisement.

Eventually, he had the idea of organizing Yahtzee parties at which people could play the game and thereby gain a first-hand appreciation of it.

The idea was successful, and enthusiasts quickly popularized the game through word of mouth.

During Lowe's ownership, a number of changes were made to the game's packaging, contents, and appearance.

During Lowe's ownership over 40 million Yahtzee games were sold in America and around the globe.

According to current owner Hasbro, as of 2007, 50 million Yahtzee games are sold each year.

The original version of the logo was used throughout the entire period that the game was produced solely by the Lowe company.

The Yahtzee scorecard contains 13 scoring boxes divided into upper and lower sections.

[4] In order to gauge how well a player is doing in the upper section, they often refer to being "up" or "down" compared to the average of three required for each box.

Scoring is the same as normal except that, if the Upper Section box corresponding to the Yahtzee has been used, the Full House, Small Straight and Large Straight categories can be used to score 25, 30 or 40 (respectively) even though the dice do not meet the normal requirement for those categories.

[4] In the official rules the player must act in the following way: In the simpler, alternative version of the Joker rule the player retains the free choice as to which category to use, but the Yahtzee can only be used as a Joker if the corresponding Upper Section box has been used.

The highest possible score without a Yahtzee bonus is 351, which is achieved with scoring a five-of-a-kind as a Yahtzee, 84 in the Upper Section (four-of-a-kind in each category), and 29 in each of Three of a Kind, Four of a Kind, and Chance.

In recent years, a number of collector issue Yahtzee games have been sold as well.

Some of these collector issues have dice that replace the pips with certain symbols connected to a theme, but still correspond to the numbers one to six.

Later, GameHouse also released an authorized special version of the game for Windows users.

It was sold in a three pack that included Life, Pay Day, and Yahtzee.

[19][20] The strategy for maximising score has been solved computationally by exhaustively evaluating all possible decisions.