If you haven’t played Yahtzee, I’m gonna take you through the rules right now. Eventually, Milton Bradley adapted the game and renamed it Yahtzee. So they concocted one and christened it The Yacht Game, presumably while asking their butler for more Sevruga caviar. Yahtzee as we know it was invented by a wealthy Canadian couple who wanted a game to play with their bestest, richest friends while aboard their luxury yacht. Here is another legend that you’re better off taking as fact. But at the time, I cut the tension by keeping my head down and focused on my dice, rolling my way back to comfortable ground. We get along famously now and I love that man to death. That moment counts as the only time my wife’s old man would ever be visibly pissed at me.

“Oh my God, so sorry,” I told my soon-to-be father-in-law. I don’t remember if I won or lost that night, but I do remember blurting out a casual F-bomb while the action was going on. I had never played Yahtzee before, and I had forgotten the rules of Balut. But I kept my mouth disciplined throughout the bulk of the trip, until we all played Yahtzee the final night. I had been warned by my wife that her father didn’t like it when people cursed, which was a pretty fucking hilarious bit of irony given my everyday vocabulary. We spent a weekend in coastal Delaware with her parents-my first time on vacation with them. Balut was a solid after-dinner treat.Ī couple of decades later, I was dating the woman whom I would later marry. My dad explained the rules to us-they were similar to poker, which we all already knew how to play-but I only cared about shaking the dice around in that cup, hearing them jangle as they banged into one another before I threw those bad boys down. We sat around a table in the family room and passed around a weighty cup with a thick, embossed leather hide wrapped around its outside. When I was young, my dad taught my brother and sister and me the game of Balut: an antecedent to Yahtzee that, according to a legend that’s more fun when accepted as straight history, was invented by bored American soldiers stationed in the Philippines during World War II. I never meant to become obsessed with Yahtzee, but all of the early signs were there. Hold a pair of dice-or five of them, for that matter-in your hand and you know you’re holding something which cannot be improved upon. You can run your fingertips over the thermoset plastic, which gives dice a sheen similar to tooth enamel, and feel the series of perfectly round depressions that mark each number.

There are few perfect things in this world.

Rules for original game of yahtzee