Did he win it?

Recorded a new episode of the podcast, finally, last night.

After recording, we often go to the nearby Dave & Bastard's for cheap beer and a little game play. I'm highly pissed about the lowered payout for the Pac-Man ticket game. That was my bread and butter, but I digress.

We often play this Yahtzee game which has a progressive bonus and a progressive jackpot. The progressive bonus is based upon scoring 100 points in five games. Total score of the dice, not the hand value in a traditional game. If you roll lots of ones and twos and make a full house, your score will be 7 or 8, not 25. A score of 7 or 8 means you won't have a five game aggregate of 100, most likely.

The progressive bonus never gets very high, as it's not too hard to pick off. You try not to let chasing the bonus steer you toward bad game play. If the bonus is at 100 tickets, you don't want to spend your money not winning 60 or 80 tickets during individual games in order to win 100 after five games. It's a delicate balance.

Each game is two rolls, not three. If you get a Yahtzee, you win up to 1,000 tickets. It's a progressive jackpot, so it starts at 500 and goes up a couple of tickets with each game, I assume. It's almost always at 1,000, as it's not easy to get in two rolls. The producer and I have played this game dozens of times, and never hit Yahtzee. We hit four of a kind occasionally, and that pays 296 tickets, but Yahtzee eludes us.

As the producer was playing his fifth game of a series, his aggregate score was 87 after four turns, so he needed only 13 points in that fifth game to reach 100 and receive the current progressive bonus of 114 tickets. A nice little bonus, but not substantial. (It resets at 50 every time it is hit.)

In a rare occurrence, he hits four of a kind on his first roll of that fifth game, and it is sixes. So he will finish with a minimum score of 25 and will win the progressive bonus. And 296 tickets for that four of a kind.

But he has one more turn and a chance at Yahtzee. Will he or won't he get it? There's a 30-second timer to decide what numbers you keep and discard for your second roll. As you'll see, there's no actual rolling involved. I figured I'd better get some video of the second roll, to record history if it happens. Does it? Or does his fifth game end in heartbreak? The video will tell all.