Yahtzee Adventures International

Shame on you if you think Yahtzee is the runt of the litter when it comes to traditional family games.

Okay, so it's not top of the list during the holidays given the competing charms of Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and lobbing peanuts into drunk Uncle Fred's mouth while he snores in an armchair. But Yahtzee is still pretty fun in its own way.

It's even more fun in Yahtzee Adventures International because they've tarted it up with some different rules options. Along with the traditional game, you can play Battle Yahtzee, Rainbow Yahtzee, and Duplicate Yahtzee, each of which adds a twist to the basic rules.

Battle Yahtzee, for instance, introduces a slight role-playing bent: you start with 100 hit points and have to wear your opponents down by 'attacking' them with lower categories, while healing yourself with upper categories.

Rainbow Yahtzee brings an element of colour into play with the dice. You can score points for a round of all blue dice or a full house of two of one colour and three of another. Meanwhile, Duplicate Yahtzee involves both players getting the same 15 dice (in three rolls of five) and trying to outdo each other in score.

All of this is wrapped within an adventure theme, which is a slightly hokey plot involving you traveling around the world battling fellow students to impress your sensei – an old fella with a serious Yahtzee habit. It feels a bit silly, but at least adds direction to the game. The biographies of the characters you meet suggest they have different playing styles, but that doesn't really come across when you actually play them.

Along the way you can receive rewards for certain achievements like completing a chapter in Adventure mode, scoring 400 in a game of Rainbow Yahtzee, or winning ten battle games. There's also a Custom Play mode where you choose what rules and how many players to compete against, who can be computer-controlled or human opponents, with you passing the handset around in the latter case.

The presentation is good and the controls work well. There's an option to use the accelerometer, too – shaking your iPhone rolls the dice. It's set to a ridiculously sensitive level by default though, where the dice roll even if your hand quivers, so you need to turn it down in the options menu.

It's a good game, although it would be nice to have some connectivity in there, such as uploading your highest scores. However, something else missing is any explanation of how to play Yahtzee well. Yes, there are tutorials, but they just tell you the mechanics. It would be good to have more tips on Yahtzee strategy, for those of us who spent our childhoods baiting Uncle Fred rather than honing our dice skills.

Still, Yahtzee Adventures International is a good example of a casual iPhone game with broad appeal that's had some thought put into its structure and presentation.