36 GAMES WORLD^ OF PUZZLES october 2019
In the intervening decades there were changes in
ownership. Milton Bradley bought the E.S. Lowe Com-
pany in 1973 for $26 million, giving it the right to pro-
duce and sell Yahtzee. And in 1984, Milton Bradley
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thing is for sure: Despite all these changes, Yahtzee re-
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reaching over 50 million copies per year.Earlier Dice Games
Although we don’t know much about that mysterious
Canadian couple, several traditional dice games offer
clear antecedents to Yahtzee: Poker Dice, Cheerio, and
Generala.
Poker Dice was an English game popular in the lat-
ter half of the 19th century. The dice were specially
marked to represent the top 6 cards in a deck—ace,
King, Queen, Jack, 10, and 9—and the object was to roll
the best poker hand possible. In Poker Dice, each play-
er takes a single turn to roll 5 dice up to three times.
On any roll, a player may set aside one or more dice.
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ond roll. Scoring is determined by the highest to lowest
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a-kind; full house, two pair; etc.
Cheerio is another English dice game that preced-
ed Yahtzee. In Cheerio the winner is the player who
scores the most points in 6 different scoring catego-
ries, including numbers (1’s-6’s); full house; run of
four (a straight), and Cheerio (a run of 5). Depend-
ing on the category, points are assessed. (Cheerio
is 50 points.) Players can roll a total of three times,
then choose a category to score in. After three rolls,
you must score it. In Cheerio, all categories must be
played, and a player who can’t meet a category’s con-
ditions gets zero points.
Generala is another early antecedent of Yahtzee that
is popular in Spanish-speaking countries of Central
and South America. Like Yahtzee, Generala is played
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scoresheet, and the highest score wins. A player can1EVOIXMRK7XVEXIKMIW
If Lowe imagined Yahtzee being an overnight success
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year, Yahtzee didn’t sell well, despite advertising. Lowe ran
a large ad with the May Company in Los Angeles, for exam-
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he came to believe, was that the advertisements failed to
capture the fun of playing. Clearly, promoting Yahtzee was
going to require some clever thinking.
A glimmer of hope surfaced when some orders were placed
for the Yahtzee scorecards. Utilizing his marketing savvy, Lowe
concocted a promotional plan that relied on word-of-mouth.
So he organized Yahtzee parties where the public could experi-
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In his 1973 book A Toy is Born, author Marvin Kaye de-
scribed how Lowe worked with his sales team and regional
game buyers to set up Yahtzee parties in their own homes.
The E.S. Lowe Company supplied refreshments and a copy of
Yahtzee. A company representative would attend each party
to organize the event and get the game started. At the end of
gameplay, the highest-scoring winner at each table would get
the Yahtzee game as a prize. Lowe referred to this process as
“seeding.” If, for instance, 5 sets of games were being played
in New York City, the original participants would spread the
word about how much fun the game was. Family, friends, and
neighbors would discover the game’s entertainment value,
and area stores would get more calls for Yahtzee.
Lowe’s gamble paid off: Sales of Yahtzee skyrocketed.
Within a few short years, millions of copies were sold. Occa-
sionally, he tinkered with his advertising formula. Between
1956 and 1961, for example, he changed the game’s slogan
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to “The Fun Game That Makes Thinking Fun!” but it’s dif-
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is just how popular Yahtzee was. From 1956 to 1973, the
period when Lowe had ownership rights to the game, over
40 million copies were sold worldwide.
36 GAMES WORLD^ OF PUZZLES october 2019