As a workaround for 12.04, here’s a command that replaces the settings file with an unwritable empty one that seems to prevent the issue from occurring:

$ rm -f ~/.openyahtzee && touch ~/.openyahtzee && chmod -w ~/.openyahtzee

This obviously prevents you from saving any settings, but then again you can’t utilize saved settings with the buggy version anyway.

To revert the workaround, remove the unwritable dummy file with:

$ rm -f ~/.openyahtzee