Night at the Races (Games Workshop?? 2023)

This one was a bit confusing right away: the box said Games Workshop and I got it because I like Games Workshop stuff, but the copyright said Professor Puzzle 2023.

The box said it's a "rapid-fire betting game" but what's actually in the box?  There's a cute little race track, some horses that have a good feel to them, a stack of play money and some cards of decent quality.  As for the pace of the game, the main die says STAY (move 0), MOVE (move 1) and GALLOP (move 2), distributed as 0-0-1-1-1-2, and half the spaces are red making you draw a CHANCE card where half the cards send you back, and a few make you lose a turn.  So that's not going to be fast paced.


Nope.  I think we started off rolling STAY three times in a row.  Whee.  Nothing happened.

There is a betting aspect, which is reasonably well planned, although the default win of $150 for a 2-player game versus even a moderate bet of $100 at 15-to-1 odds means it's more about which odds cards you picked than the bonus for 1st, 2nd or 3rd place.  Oddly, the rules kept saying three horses had to come in at the end, but the box did say it was for 2-6 players.  With two it feels off.  And the spaces on the board are way too small.  Our two horses were so squeezed together in lane 5 and 6 we ended up playing lane 2 and 5 deliberately, just the keep the horses a fraction of an inch apart.

With so few actual rules, you would think the rules could be described in enough detail to not have to argue over them.  But about half the spaces on the board were red and a third of those said CHANCE.  The rules said "when you land on a space marked Chance, draw a CHANCE card."  On our first run, we drew a card on all red spaces, which often pushed you onto another red space, so we would draw another chance card.  It wasn't until our second race that we saw not all the red spaces were CHANCE spaces.  Or were they?  Come on, rules.  If they're not CHANCE spaces, why are they red?

When all red spaces give CHANCE cards, the game is just a mess of doing whatever cards say.  Why bother even rolling the die?  And if only the CHANCE spaces draw CHANCE cards, and the blank red spaces are just red herrings (haha), the game drags badly.  It takes about 15-20 rolls to complete the mere 20 spaces in the race.

There was one mild comedic moment when this card came up:

 

Is that really a thing?

I don't know how a company can make a horse race so plodding.  Into the donate box for the Boys & Girls Club.  Maybe some younger players will get a kick out of it (and the other three games we found this weekend).  Unless kids shouldn't get betting games?  But it's not really a betting game either.  It's just playing with fake money.  Meh.  Slim pickings.

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