🃏 Classic1956Edwin S. LoweEASYYahtzee rebuild deck
EASY
Five dice, thirteen boxes and a scorecard — there is nothing in here that can fight you, which makes it the rare game where the entire build is finished before the interesting part even starts.
You will get essentially the whole thing.
Build this when you want to finish something. The game itself is an evening and it will work on close to the first prompt. Then spend a second evening on the expected-value solver below, because Yahtzee is small enough to solve almost exactly and doing so will change how you play it — most people keep the wrong dice on turn one, and a solver will tell you so in a way no article can.
- Difficulty
- EASY · 1 of 5
- First playable
- An evening
- The original
- 1 team-years
- Released
- 1956 · Classic
- Genre
- Dice
Build Yahtzee as a single self-contained HTML file. DOM or Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. Requirements: - Five dice, three rolls per turn, click dice to hold between rolls. Thirteen scoring boxes: ones through sixes, three of a kind, four of a kind, full house, small straight, large straight, Yahtzee, chance. - The scoring rules people get wrong: the upper-section bonus of 35 at 63 or more, the Yahtzee joker rule, and successive Yahtzees scoring 100 each. Get these right and it is a real Yahtzee. - Ghost the potential score into every open box as soon as the dice settle, so you can see what the current roll is worth everywhere before committing. - Dice animation with a real tumble and a settle, plus sound on roll and hold. This is the whole feel of the game and it deserves more of your time than the scoring did. - Hot-seat for 2-4 players and a solo mode with a running high score in localStorage. Definition of done: a full thirteen-turn game plays end to end, the upper bonus fires at exactly 63, and the dice feel good enough that I roll them when it is not my turn.
- Nothing, really — this is one of the few games on the list you can finish completely in an evening
- The physical dice, which is a bigger loss than it sounds; you will need sound and a decent tumble animation to replace them
- Playing across a table with someone, unless you add hot-seat, which is twenty more lines
An optimal-play advisor that argues with you before you commit
Yahtzee's state space is small enough to evaluate exactly: for any held subset you can compute the expected final score across every remaining roll. Surface that as advice and the game changes character — it stops being luck and becomes a series of decisions where you can see precisely how much each hunch cost you. The pattern generalises to any small stochastic game, and it is the cheapest way to build real intuition for expected value.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build an expected-value advisor for a dice game as a single self-contained HTML file. No dependencies. - Five dice, three rolls, and a simplified scorecard of at least six categories. - For every possible held subset of the current dice, compute the exact expected final score over all remaining rolls by enumerating outcomes. Memoise on (held dice, rolls remaining, open categories). - Rank all 32 hold options and show the top five with their expected values, updating instantly as the player toggles dice. - When the player rolls with a suboptimal hold, log the expected points they gave up, and show a running total of that regret across the game. - A toggle to hide the advice while still tracking regret, so you can play blind and see the damage afterwards. Definition of done: the enumeration returns in under 50ms per turn, and after a full game the regret total tells me something about my play I did not already know.
Not a clone — Yahtzee re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.
Verdant Turn Order
Yahtzee, but turn-based instead of real-time, set in a solarpunk city. Rendered in VHS camcorder night.
Build a browser game called "Verdant Turn Order". The pitch in one line: a dice in the spirit of Yahtzee, but turn-based instead of real-time, set in a solarpunk city. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Yahtzee — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else Turn-based instead of real-time. Time only advances when the player acts. Removes every timing, netcode and animation-blending problem and turns reflexes into decisions. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME A solarpunk city. Abundance rather than scarcity, and conflict that comes from competing goods rather than from enemies. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK VHS camcorder night. Tracking lines, timestamp burn-in, autofocus hunt, and crushed blacks with over-bright headlights. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Yahtzee to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Yahtzee is EASY (1 of 5). You will get essentially the whole thing. Five dice, thirteen boxes and a scorecard — there is nothing in here that can fight you, which makes it the rare game where the entire build is finished before the interesting part even starts. Reckon on an evening to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Edwin S. Lowe spent.
What makes Yahtzee hard to rebuild?
Five dice, thirteen boxes and a scorecard — there is nothing in here that can fight you, which makes it the rare game where the entire build is finished before the interesting part even starts. That is why it sits at EASY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is an optimal-play advisor that argues with you before you commit — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Yahtzee clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Yahtzee — the original took Edwin S. Lowe on the order of 1 team-years, released in 1956 on Classic. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about an evening, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Yahtzee?
Nothing, really — this is one of the few games on the list you can finish completely in an evening. The physical dice, which is a bigger loss than it sounds; you will need sound and a decent tumble animation to replace them. Playing across a table with someone, unless you add hot-seat, which is twenty more lines. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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