I must confess, before Ready Set Bet, I wasn’t one for real-time games. I’ve found the likes of Escape, Pit Stop, FUSE and Magic Maze too stressful! Yet here, the stress got replaced with sheer exhilaration. Ready Set Bet does a fantastic job of replicating the emotional rollercoaster of actual horse races. The base game can be so simple, which makes it so accessible to a wide audience. Exotic Finishes and VIP Cards are there as extra considerations for experienced gamers. So how did designers Bruno Cathala and Marc Andre take the good 2-player experience of Splendor and make it a great one in Splendor Duel? The answer is found across all of the gameplay changes. 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. 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.

In the best cases, you are rooting on a horse and hoping the dice roll your way. More often I found myself with bets all over the place and not entirely sure what outcome I really wanted to root for. Too often the fun, “stand up around the table” moments just failed to materialize. Final Thoughts: Though the main board stays the same, the prop bets and the VIP cards make each race feel fresh and different; thus far, we haven’t tired of things. Each race takes about ten minutes, and it definitely doesn’t feel that long as we play – as the game and the growing excitement of the race results end up usually being enthralling. This has the potential to replace “They’re at the Post” as my favorite horse betting game in my collection! 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. But for those who don’t mind a scruffy game and want to take on a multi-turn action efficiency puzzle while they compete for area majorities, The Wolves has some neat things to offer. It certainly captures the restless, roaming spirit of hungry hounds ever on the prowl. In short – Ready Set Bet is played over four rounds. Each round consists of a race followed by bet resolution. During each race, players freely place their bet tokens on the board while the race is going on. After each race, players win or lose money for each of their placed bet tokens, then receive a VIP Club Card to help them win more money in the following races. After four rounds, the player with the most money wins!

About Dale Yu

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. At first, when I heard that one player has to act as The House, it set off alarm bells. What? One player can’t even participate? Their task is to roll dice and move the horses? I’m delighted to announce, though, that I ate humble pie once I took on this role. On New Year’s Eve, I was The House for eight friends. I got them all to name the horses before I introduced the game. For my commentary, I used these horse’s names rather than bland numbers. “Oh no, Watch Me Neigh-Neigh has lost the lead!”

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. I can see why folks are raving about this game, as there is a lot to love. As for myself, I get the strong impression that MOBAs are not for me. Like I hinted at above, my experience was much more of a MABO – Movement Always, Battle Occasionally. While most of your cards have a “secondary” action of movement, I would argue that this is deceptively the primary action of the game. 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. So let’s dive into how it plays and see if it’s worthy of a spot in your gaming collection. Gameplay Overview:Even when you rotate the house bets, there is still a bit of “makeup” money involved. For me, I’d prefer to play with the app so that all the players in the game are competing for the same thing. Otherwise, just have someone resign themselves to being the helper for this 45-60 minute game (yeah, that doesn’t sound appealing to me at all). My very first game of this was played with the designer acting as the House Player, and he did an excellent job of keeping things exciting. IIRC, Mr. Clair will also be doing the audio for a number of the races in the app as well, and I’m sure that this will be our preferred way of playing once it is available for us to use.