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Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) Ready Set Bet - Alderac Entertainment Group, Horse Racing Betting Board Game, Ages 14+, 2-9 Players, 45-60 Min, White, Medium

£9.995£19.99Clearance
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Against all odds, Ready Set Bet manages to keep pace with the best racing horses of its genre and justify a place in my collection. I daresay it’s the top party game of 2022. But make no mistake, it truly requires a party to shine. At 3-5 players, I have no interest in playing this one over the much tighter Winner’s Circle. Meanwhile, Camel Up and Long Shot: The Dice Game maintain a much more consistent quality from their lowest to their highest player counts. Perhaps if Ready Set Bet had included a second side to its game board — one more condensed for 2-5 players — I’d feel much differently… It seems like a simple enough solution, and practically cost-free to create (aside from the extra development work). But at any rate, I’m plenty happy to save this one for when 6-9 players are gathered for a riotous time of gambling, groans, and glee. The other standout aspect of Guards of Atlantis II is the victory conditions. Your team can win in 3 possible ways: Predictably, my problem with Qin wasn’t that it was too bloated or broken or careless—I’ve never seen Reiner make those kinds of errors. Rather, after one play I found Qin to be too simple, basic, and redundant for my tastes. Mind you, I’ve enjoyed plenty of Knizia games that are simple and subtle, but I’m accustomed to such games having a clever twist that makes them special. With Qin, it felt as though that secret ingredient was missing.

To be fair, this game is now 6 years old which is like 40 board game years. But even in 2016, there were plenty of games already doing this kind of thing with much more flair and pizzazz. For my tastes, the same designers released a much tighter, faster, and more unique efficiency Euro in 2021’s Cryo (and the production blows Manhattan Project out of the water). If I’m in the mood for this style of game, Cryo is going to win the head-to-head every time. Despite having decades of experience playing hundreds upon hundreds of different games—both digital and tabletop—I have never played a MOBA until very recently. I suppose I’ve gotten close with real-time strategy video games like Starcraft, Warcraft II, and Rise of Nations, but the difference is that MOBA games don’t feature things like building construction, resource collection, and army raising. The trumpet sounds. Post time is near. The horses are about ready to take off. And you, dear reader, have the opportunity to strike it rich. Horse racing is a pretty easy sell for a theme for a board game. In Ready, Set, Bet you’ll be betting in real time as horses take off and approach the finish line.Where Marshmallow Test has a more satisfying arc, Cat in the Box and Ghosts of Christmas have more interesting twists, and The Crew provides a tighter experience, it seems that 9 Lives are too few to keep this one alive in my collection.

But the best improvement of all is undoubtedly the three-pronged path to victory. No longer is the game simply about slapping together an engine and then seeing who can crank out the most points. The dynamics increase tremendously by offering players 3 possible ways to win: But we don’t all have Mr. Clair coming over to do the rolling for us. The app is serviceable if a little less exciting. If a player controls the horses and gets into the callouts and process it can be quite entertaining. The fact that your team has multiple avenues for winning means that you can adapt your strategy to play to your team’s strengths while working to shore up your weaknesses. It also helps to keep the later rounds from feeling too similar to the earlier rounds.

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The cards in this version of Splendor also give you more to consider than simply “Which card is the most easily affordable for me?” You must also consider the bonus effects from cards that grant an extra turn or an additional gem or a wild resource. Just in the past year, I’ve enjoyed The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, Brian Boru, Ghosts of Christmas, Marshmallow Test, Cat in the Box, and now most recently 9 Lives. While 9 Lives is among the best looking games of this bunch, it saddens me to also admit that it might be among the weakest games of this lot. It’s certainly possible to sand down all the rough edges and sharp corners of a game only to be left with a dull experience. Qin flirts with that line enough to make me unsure of its staying power. Yet after spending more time with it, I’m realizing that I don’t dislike it. The lingering issue is that I haven’t yet found a reason for why I would play this over the dozens of other Knizias on my shelf. Ready Set Bet also comes with two six-sided dice. The House rolls these 2d6, with the sum of the dice indicating which horse moves. So if The House rolls double-five, the number 10 horse moves one space. This explains the horses numbered 2-12 - these are the variations you get from rolling two dice. The probability of what you roll is a natural bell curve: in theory, seven is the most common outcome. (1+6, 2+5, 3+4, 4+3, 5+2, and 6+1). Rolling a six or eight is close behind, with five and nine less common. It’s harder still to roll a 4 or 10. The race now continues until the first horse makes it past the finish line. At this time, the dice are not rolled any further and the race immediately ends. The horse to pass the finish line wins. The next closest horse is in the Place position and the next closest is in the Show position. If there is a tie for 2nd place, they both Place, and there is no Show horse.

Besides the fact that each race plays out surprisingly differently (that’s how dice work…. go figure), the betting board is different every round as well. Along the top and bottom of the board, you’ll find Prop Bet Cards and Exotic Finish Cards. These feature bets such as “Horse 4 will finish ahead of horse 8” or “The top three horses will finish within a short distance of each other” and so on. Furthermore, players will gain a unique VIP card between each race that grants excitingly powerful benefits and abilities. There is just the right blend of board variety and asymmetric powers to satisfy our spoiled hobbyist appetites from one play to the next.You can toss your betting tokens into the large, general area in hopes of nailing simple multipliers. The first person to bet on a winning horse gets the highest multiplier space (there can only be one betting token per space), and hopefully they placed their strongest betting token there. After all, the point is to win the most money. The board smartly features penalties on many spaces as well, where a bad bet can end up costing you. This introduces just the right amount of hesitation to the real-time betting (aside from the fact that you only have 5 precious betting tokens to work with). Will you enjoy Ready, Set, Bet? It’s hard to say. If someone asked if you wanted to play a game where the mechanic is betting on a set of dice rolls, would you be interested? For me, and most of the folks I played with, there was no amount of theme that could overcome that just being a somewhat underwhelming experience. Final Score: 2 Stars – Not the horse racing game we deserve. Almost no player agency and too few exciting moments of randomness. As sure as the sun rises in the east, there will always be another efficiency Euro that I somehow end up playing and writing about. And like the many others that have come and gone, this one is… fine. Splendor Duel follows a much more engaging arc by starting as a classic engine builder but finishing as a mad scramble to cross the closest finish line. By providing multiple paths to victory, the competition becomes 3-dimensional and bitey.

The Exotic Finish cards offer further tempting bets, but also with exact conditions. One is, for example, “All horses move 6 spaces or more”, and another is a Photo Finish. (This means the 3rd place horse must lose by three or fewer spaces.) Exotic Finish cards have three spaces on them, so three players can bet here, unlike other spots. You draw one per race, with them staying there for the race’s duration. So come race four, there’s four Exotic Bets to consider. Each player has five betting chits (numbered 2, 3, 3, 4, and 5), meaning they have five opportunities to bet each race. The main Bet Board is a grid, reminiscent of a roulette casino cloth. Along each row are each of the nine numbered horses. There’s three main columns, split into Win, Place and Show. As the race unfolds, the players can place their betting chits into these sections. It's a first-come, first-served basis. Once placed, the chits remain placed. The combination of a fluid shared map of competitive area majorities and a rigid action restriction puzzle means that it’s hard to plan out your turn until it actually is your turn. And once it’s time to get planning, it may take a while to reconcile what you want to do with what you actually can do. There are a couple of other prop bets available to players. You can bet on the color of the horse that wins. Or if a certain horse will finish in front of another. And a new prop is added each round giving some more variability to the game.The game doesn’t lend itself well to those who are AP prone, that’s for sure. It also throws a lot of numbers at players and expects them to juggle everything. Your brain will frequently chart this type of course “I need to spend 1 forest tile so I can move 3 wolves up to 4 spaces to these 2 forest spots, thereby bringing my region control up to 5 strength and barely winning over my opponent who also has 5 strength but loses the tiebreaker because I have 2 alpha wolves and they only have 1. Buuuuut, I don’t currently have a forest tile, so I first should spend these 2 tundra tiles to howl at a lone wolf which is on a tundra space and within my howling range of 3 spaces — thereby freeing up my forest tile…. Wait, what was I going to use this forest tile for again?” In Manhattan Project: Energy Empire, you’ll build tableaus and position workers to gain and convert resources as you feed your insatiable appetite for points. Speaking of points, this one feels quite point salady, as nearly everything you do (buying a card, buying a die, rolling dice, resetting your worker supply, etc.) gains or loses you points.

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