In general I love this game, but the horses were so warped that some of them wouldn't stand up at all. I used the hot water trick (soak in hot but not boiling for a minute, then hold them straight until they cool and dip in cold water.) That worked for a few days but eventually they leaned back over and I had to repeat the treatment. It's a shame because the horses look so cool running around the track. It's an inherent problem because the horses only connect to the bases through two tiny hoofs. Four hooves would have made them a lot more stable. I may end up replacing them with something else, or maybe using some glue to make more connections. Edit: I ended up buying these as replacements. They work great. You'd have to paint numbers on them, or be extra careful to keep them in their lanes: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N6PWJHN As others have said, the numbers are also very difficult to read from any distance. They're on the bases, and partly hidden by the horses' bodies. And then there are the very sticky cards. You could sleeve them and that would fix them. Or do what I did and shake them in a bag with cornstarch. For a while they shed cornstarch, but then they settle down and are OK. Now that I have that out of the way, I do love the game. The rules are relatively simple, though if you're not familiar with how win-place-show betting works you might want to read about that first. Also a bit of knowledge about the probabilities of two dice helps. 7 is the most likely sum, and 2 and 12 are the least likely. I watched some play-through videos before I bought the game, and after that I thought the rulebook was easy to read. It's four pages long. The goal of the game is to be the player with the most money at the end of four races. You get money from the purses (prizes) if you own a horse that wins, places, or shows, and also from betting on the horses. The game starts with a card draft to choose which horses you're going to buy: everyone is dealt a certain number of cards depending on how many are playing. You choose one card, and then everyone passes their hand to the left, and you choose a card from the new hand, and so on. There's a deck of cards that give the particular handicaps and purses for the each race (you play four races for a complete game, though some groups like to stop after three.) The handicaps are little tokens that go beside particular horses. Some give a head start of several spaces, others make the horse lose its first turn. This makes up for the probabilities of the dice in different ways. Not all horses are equally likely to win, but it's not always the same horses either. The odds change depending which set-up card you draw for that race. Some people don't like that the handicap tokens are wider than the horses, making them difficult to line up. But I wouldn't want to the to be any smaller, or the track any bigger, so I stagger them and it works OK. Once you see how the tokens are distributed, you place your bets by putting betting tokens on the board. Everyone has the same values of tokens: one "3", two "2"s, and 2 "1"s. You can think of these as denominations of money. You can distributed them on the various horses, betting "win", "place" or "show" as you see fit, though there are some limitations based on turn order. The board spaces are numbered with payoffs. For example, if you put a 3 token on a space marked with an 8 payoff, you have bet 3 units (dollars or maybe thousands of dollars), and each unit pays 8 for a total payoff of 3x8=24, which is interpreted as $24,000. If the horse wins but you only bet show, the payoff will be less. There's no cost for betting, which seems odd, but since all players are betting the exact same amount, it doesn't matter. To run the race, players take turns rolling two dice. You can either move the horse of that number two spaces, or move it one space and roll again. On the second roll you must move the horse two spaces. This gives you a little push-your-luck way of nudging the horses you want to win ahead and holding others back, but of course other players are doing the same for their choices, and the chance of the dice is a huge factor. Because of the handicap tokens, sometimes a horse will come from way behind to win the race. The race itself can get a little tedious, though it can be exciting at the end. After the race you collect your winnings, both from the horses you own and the bets you placed. The money is handled by moving player's cubes around a track, so there are no bills to handle. In summary I think this is a fun simulation of a horse race, especially for the price, but you do have to be willing to deal with the frustrating components. Weiterlesen
