Pure 100% BASIC implementation of the popular Milton Bradley game "Yahtzee". This one drops the "h" presumably to avoid either legal action or at least confusion with the several other speccy Yahtzee games out there.
Yahtzee is one of those games you either love or hate, being based on throwing five dice and then trying to maximise scores on your scoresheet by getting three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind, a "long run" and so on. The game isn't just down to chance as players can hold certain dice and re-throw and elect which pattern to go for on each round. It can be quite an absorbing game.
I was drawn to this one by the no-nonsense interface giving a nice clear row of large dice and a functional scoresheet in sensible colours. You can also play against the computer's AI and the game supports 1 to 3 human players. The input method is also pretty sensible. So, top marks for all that.
Only one thing lets the game down though and it's quite a major problem - the dice throwing is just too slow. It's about four times slower than it should be. This is not a limitation of BASIC however, rather it's because of the "changing dice" animations, which are unnecessary. This slows the game down rather too much. Luckily the code is very easily moddable to overcome this, but the fact that "out of the box" the software has this issue and there is no in-game option to fix it, makes this simply an average game rather than good. After all, the end user can't be expected to modify a game they bought just to improve it! In summary, "yatzee" is a game that gets almost everything right, but is marred by just one unfortunate issue.
