Play Painted Yahtzee / Rainbow Yahtzee online for free here at freethedice.com
What is Painted Yahtzee?
Painted is a variant of the very popular dice game Yahtzee. It is also commonly referred to as Rainbow Yahtzee, but the game is the same game.
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The rules are very similar to regular, you have five dice available to roll on each turn and after each roll you may choose to reroll any number of the dice you want. After three rolls you must accept the dice in front of you and must then place your score.
But painted yahtzee lives up to its name: the dice are coloured! In fact, each of the five dice has different colours on their faces. Dice 1 has a red number 1 and red number 6, and different colours on the other faces. Each of the five dice is a bit different in terms of colours and numbers combinations.
AND... the painted yahtzee scorecard is a bit different. Whilst the left-hand side with the 35 point bonus is the same, there are some changes in the right hand section: three of a kind has gone, low straight has gone, and been replaced with four of a colour, flush, painted house, rainbow, and an entirely new section has been added where points are awarded for each of the colours rolled.
This is possibly the most strategically demanding of all the Yahtzee variants and by far the most interesting because of the tight gameplay and the interesting permutations in play on every turn. Mathematically, this is a statisticians delight!
Advantages of playing Painted Yahtzee
Every time you roll the dice there are multiple options to consider, how to give yourself the best chance of ending up with a set of dice that can be scored, both with the numbers and the colours, and there are not many places that can be treated as a dump space. Almost all of the scorecard is important. Games will usually not be decided by who had the best dice rolls but by who made the best overall decisions and it's fairly rare that multiple yahtzees will win the game, simply because you cannot afford to try to roll a yahtzee on every turn, you will end up wasting too many turns.
Disadvantages of playing
Some people don't like the tight gameplay because it can be very punishing and it's quite easy for your scorecard to descend into a pile of zeros when things don't quite come as you expect. It's also possible to get into analysis-paralysis trying to calculate the probability of rolling what you want, or just freezing in thought from being confused by the options available.
But my summary is that this is by far the best version of yahtzee out there. You really should play this game, it's fantastic.
You may log in to freethedice.com to discover more about the rules of painted and even join in with our daily tournaments and the chat and all the fun!