Poker Yacht is a version of the well-known and popular poker dice game, the commercial version of which is called Yahtzee™ (a registered trademark of Hasbro). This implementation uses playing cards rather than dice, of course. It actually uses a short deck (sometimes called a cut deck) consisting of only 24 cards (9-10-J-Q-K-A of each suit). This game also offers a few innovations not possible in the dice game, such as support for suits.

This game was invented by Randy Rasa, and is available as part of the Poker Solitaire Pack collection.

Getting Started

The game is begun by taking a standard 52-card deck, removing all 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 cards, and shuffling the remaining 24 cards to form the stock. Five cards are then dealt to the five tableau positions to form the initial hand.

Object

The object is to fill up the score card, creating one of each type of hand. Each of the five tableau cards may be either held or discarded. Click the cards themselves, or the buttons below them, to toggle between "Hold" and "Discard". Click the "Deal" button (or the deck) to replace the "discard" cards with new cards from the deck. You may discard and deal new hands twice before you must score the hand.

Cashing In A Hand

When you've created a complete hand, click one of the possible hands in the score card to cash it in. If you leave your mouse pointer over a hand name for a second or two, the "hint" will show you how much the current hand would be worth if you cashed it in.

Scoring

Scoring in this game is a bit different than it is in most of the games in this collection. Rather than using the Wild, American, or English scoring systems (see Poker Solitaire Pack Scoring), Poker Yacht uses it's own unique system:

In addition to the point to be scored directly from the hands above, you can also score a 75-point bonus if the sum of your Nines, Tens, Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces hands totals at least 177. Note that you can see how close you are to a bonus by passing your mouse pointer over the "Bonus" label on the score card.

Strategy

In this game, strategy consists primarily of using your judgement to select the optimum home for a particular hand. Some hands are subset of other hands, so early in a hand you can often aim for one of the more difficult hands, such as a Full House, and if you don't get it, settle for a lesser hand such as Two Pair. As more of the score card is filled, your choices become much more restricted. The bonus granted on the top half of the score card is worth striving for, but not at the expense of even higher-scoring hands such as Four Of A Kind. Finally, the "suit" hands can often be used as a fallback position if the desired hand does not appear. Be careful of using up the suit hands too quickly.

The rules to this game are copyright Randy Rasa, and neither the rules nor the game they describe may be reproduced without written permission.