No great shakes

What noble dice game defined the Cream era? Bloody Yahtzee, that’s what. Bloody Yahtzee, the devil’s own dice game. Bloody Yahtzee, invented by a cosy bloody middle-class Canadian family on their cosy bloody yacht (of all places!) to play at cosy bloody dinner parties with their mates from the cosy bloody boating coterie¹.

So goes the official story, anyway. History rewritten by the victors there, we suspect, to ease the game into the fondue and Frascati homes of ‘Fifties America (and from thence to the rest of the world in less time than it takes to roll a full house – ooh, you’ve not got one of those! Quick, write it down!). A bit of bourgeois pandering never did a good game any harm. Who’d’ve picked up the damn dice cup if they thought it’d once been shaken by a Spanish-speaking street urchin? Not us, that’s for sure.

Once Milton Bradley bought up the rights in the early ‘Seventies there was no stopping Yahtzee. It – ahem – rolled into Yuletide living rooms with a fake baize box-liner, pads and pencils, plus an endlessly complicated scoring system. Cut to the scene of a million dads digging out their reading glasses to pore over the rules before the Queen’s speech. They could be summed up thus: roll five dice, write down what you got, do it again. They say the devil makes work for idle hands. Yahtzee is the proof.

There were, of course, many variations, although all stuck close to the “poker dice” original. Casino Yahtzee, Challenge Yahtzee, Word Yahtzee, Jackpot Yahtzee; they were all intended to be played with a furrowed brow and a nice glass of sherry. Way to ruin a nice glass of sherry, eh?