Review: Yacht (Blue Particle)
Score:
54%
"Can't read my, can't read my, no you can't read my, Poker Dice, Yahtzee's got to love somebody." Okay, that's enough of that. The question is not how good my singing is, but can Blue Particle's poker dice game, Yacht, make a better attempt at covering a classic than I can?
Version Reviewed: 1.00 (0)
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Running solely in portrait mode, Yacht presents your five dice at the bottom of the screen - touch 'shuffle' and the score pad lifts up off the screen, and an animated dice cup will roll the dice for you. It's wonderful the first time you see it, but it doesn't take long to get in the way of a fast game, and I'm not sure that players of Yacht need a touch of vertigo while rolling the dice.
You get three rolls, and a tap on a rolled dice you want to keep brings up a tiny padlock symbol - this dice is locked and won't be rolled again. It's a perfect metaphor/icon to know what is going on, and away you go again, trying to get the best scoring combination of five dice in those three rolls, mostly by getting dice of the same value on show.
Tap where you want the dice rolls to be scored, and you'll move on to the next round, shuffling the dice (why it's not 'rolling' I don't know) and there's your game. You can play solo, or have up to four players on the same phone, passing the handset round in the same way you'd pass the dice around at a table.
There's one thing I want to draw your attention to that dulls the appeal of Yacht, and that's in the "straights". Every version of Yacht I've come across has the big straight as five dice making a run (i.e. 1,2,3,4,5 or 2,3,4,5,6) and the small straight as four dice with sequential numbers. Not here. The big straight is only 2,3,4,5,6 and low straight is 1,2,3,4,5. Seriously, that just makes me feel like a Robert Heinlein character who's twisted into the wrong universe.
Neither is the scoring right. A Full House normally scores 25 points, not the 40 points that's on offer here, and the three and four of a kind should score the total of all the dice, not just the matching numbers.
While Yacht is functionally complete, handles well, and copes with the metaphor of dice throwing, it doesn't sit well in my head. Like a picture frame askew on the wall, it's annoying enough to be distracting, but not enough to look horribly out of place.
So your mileage is going to vary with Yacht. If you can live with a version of the game that's tweaked to be different enough from Yahtzee, then I can't see anything wrong with Blue Particle's variant. For me, I'm going to pass on this and stick with ZingMagic's version of Yacht.
-- Ewan Spence, July 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at