Yahtzee Holiday Bookshelf Edition

Yahtzee solves the awkward half hour, the stretch after the plates are cleared and before dessert, when nobody wants to start something that runs two hours. Five dice, three rolls a turn, and a scorecard a seven-year-old and a grandfather can both fill in without a rules argument. This is the Holiday Bookshelf Edition from WS Game Company, and the name tells you where it is meant to end up, out on the shelf with the seasonal books rather than buried in a closet behind the puzzles. That changes how often it gets played, because a game you can see is a game somebody picks up. Among family board games it is the low-commitment one, which is exactly why it survives a house full of relatives with different attention spans. An easy gift for the family that already owns the classics, and an easier tradition to start in your own house.

How do you play Yahtzee? Yahtzee is a dice game in which each player rolls five dice up to three times per turn and scores the result against a fixed set of categories, from three of a kind up to the Yahtzee itself. A full game runs thirteen rounds and usually takes about half an hour, and the rules are simple enough that mixed-age groups can play together.