It’s small, its relatively clunky, it sounds horrible, but Archade Games’ version of Yahtzee, aptly titled Minimal Yahtzee, will always be one of my favorite games of all time.

If you’ve never played it before, Yahtzee is a game where you simultaneously roll five dice. You select the dice with the most interesting numbers and can keep them. You roll the remaining dice until you’ve had a maximum of three rolls. You then tally up your score and write it down. The person with the highest score at the end, they win. It’s a lot like poker in its scoring and there are many nuances to the game. It will take some practice if you’re fresh to the game, but it’s worth it.

As for the game itself, Minimal Yahtzee is a fairly bland presentation. It’s mostly white and has few graphics beyond that. There are fade-ins and so on but it’s still very simple. The sounds are nothing more than short, low pitched clicking noises and the game play has little to it, apart from clicking “roll” a few times.

Playing for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch becomes tiresome with ease, but still, the package this game comes in will work on any system. I mean, ANY system. Back when I moved out of home I lost my parent’s expensive computer and was stuck with one which ran Windows 98 and crashed when two Internet Explorer windows were opened at the same time. I couldn’t get anything to run on this horrible computer until I found Minimal Yahtzee. It was a God-send – sure it was clunky, but it had high-scores I could try to beat. It had graphics which moved. It even had sound.

As simple as this game is, there is one thing which it does well… It provides a full experience of an interesting game with the least amount of fuss. It has no bells, whistles, add-ons or extras and it doesn’t need to. Play Minimal Yahtzee and be taken to a simpler place.