Yatzy

Yatzy is the dice game your family plays at the kitchen table, laid out on warm oak in the late afternoon. Tip the cup, look at what landed, keep the dice you like and roll the rest — up to three times a turn. Then pick a box on the paper scoresheet and write the score there. Every box takes one entry and one entry only, so the hard part is never the rolling. It is deciding which box to spend.

The sheet is the Scandinavian one: ones through sixes up top, with fifty points waiting if you reach sixty-three, then one pair, two pairs, three and four of a kind, the two straights, a full house, chance, and Yatzy at the bottom for five alike. Prefer the American sheet? One tap on the table screen swaps it for the Yahtzee version, where three and four of a kind pay the whole throw, a full house is a flat twenty-five and the straights pay thirty and forty. Every open row shows what it would pay right now, so you can weigh a safe twenty against a box you may wish you had kept.

Play it alone against your own best score, or sit one, two or three opponents down opposite you — Elsa, Hugo and Nils weigh every hold the way a careful player does, and you can set them to Easy, Normal or Sharp. Pass and play hands the device around a table of up to four, with everyone's name across the top of the sheet and their column filling in as the rounds go by. Tap a die to slide it into the held tray, tap a row to write the score, or drive the whole thing from the keyboard: space rolls, one to five keep a die, enter writes the highlighted row.