ToyQueen.Com

There are just some classic Hasbro games that have been bestsellers for decades, Yahtzee being one of them. I won’t lie, before we were married, my husband and I actually used to love to play Yahtzee, so much so we even took it with us on our honeymoon to Saint Lucia because it was a fun, easy game to pack where we didn’t need a lot of space to play.

Hasbro recently released a new version of Yahtzee, The World Series of Yahtzee. Instead of players taking individual turns and filling in a score card like in the original Yahtzee, 4 players can play simultaneously, rolling their own sets of dice.

What’s different about the World Series of Yahtzee is that there is a buzzer console in the middle of the board. Several different point valued cards are placed along the playing board  around the buzzer. At the same time, everyone starts rolling their set of dice. The first person to match one one of the cards on the board hits the buzzer directly in front of them. The remaining players will have 5 seconds to find a match and hit their own buzzer before the round is over. The winners take the matching card. On each card there is a corresponding point value, and the winner with the most points at the end of the game wins. So it’s like traditional Yahtzee where players try for various dice combinations with a much faster pace.

Initially, when trying to read the directions when playing this with the kids at school, we were slightly confused by the buzzer. It wasn’t until we finally got some batteries in the buzzer and started playing that we were able to begin making matches at a quicker pace. I played the game with several children of varying ages in the 3rd, 5th and 6th grade, who all really enjoyed the game. However, I didn’t play with multiple kids at the same time but I’m sure this could get extremely competitive and a little adult refereeing may be needed.

As an adult playing along with the children, I could set the pace and try for a harder card to give them time to find a match, or keep rolling my dice randomly to buy time while they were so busy working on their goal, they didn’t notice I wasn’t really putting forth my best effort. We didn’t try this, but you could even practice teaching the kids about the various cards by just flipping over one card and battling each other to see who gets 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind, a long straight, short straight, or Yahtzee (5 of a kind) first before upgrading to the full game. What’s also great about this game for the 8 and up age group, is that it works on double digit addition with fairly simple numbers (10, 15, 25, 30, 40, 50, etc.) so kids working on mental math will also benefit from totaling up their score at the end.

Looking for a fun way to also play the World Series of Yahtzee game, there is a free iPad/iPhone app in iTunes.

If you’d like to win your own World Series of Yahtzee, enter the Rafflecopter giveaway below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Hasbro provided this game free to facilitate this product review. Any opinions are my own.