Cost: ~$45.00 From:Upstarts, P.O. Box 163, Ipswich IP1 3TP, England Players: 2-6 Playing Time: 60-120 minutes Type of game: Family Complexity: 4 Skill level: 4 Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 2.3, Spring 1994
You've gotta love a game that lays it on the line right from the get-go. The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game (TRNHRG) is everything it claims to be. Six horses race around a track, earning money for winning owners and the players who bet on them. Thanks to the effects of strategically played cards, the game is also nasty. Really nasty.
TRNHRG comes in a huge, classy red box. Opening it reveals an equally classy interior. The box is filled with a plastic tray with a precisely-molded compartment for every component. These include a betting pad, dry-erase marker, deck of cards, stack of money, six pencils, six rounded-edge dice, and six large plastic horses-and-jockeys. You also get a wipe-off, stand-up bookie's board and an overside game board. Have you ever seen an old-time mechanical horse racing game, the kind used in casinos or penny arcades? The horses remind me of the ones used in those games. Two inches long and almost as tall, each individually-painted horse is a different realistic color and each jockey wears a different colored jersey. The jockey's faces are even caucasian flesh-colored. The game board is slick with simple yet effect graphics. The overall effect upon laying out TRNHRG is that you're about to play a quality product.
Everyone chooses a horse by its jockey's jersey color and starts with a betting sheet and a paltry twenty thousand pounds (hailing from England, the money represents British currency). In the course of six races, you hope to parlay that initial stake into a winning fortune. Each race has a different purse ranging from the piddling Lady's Plate (£20,000 to the winner) to the King's Cup (£250,000 to the victor). The order of these races is determined randomly. Once this is known, players must enter their horses.
Each player has six horses in his stable. Horse number one is the best horse, while horse number six is the worst. Most players are inclined to put their best horse in the race with the biggest purse. But if everyone does this, nobody will have an advantage. Perhaps it would be better to put your #2 or #3 horse in that race, putting your #1 horse in a race with a slightly lower payoff but giving you a better edge within it. Players write their stable entries on their betting sheet at the start of the game and may not change them later.
The race track is a simple oval with six lanes. Spaced fairly evenly around the track are a number of hedges which can play pivotal roles in the race-- more on those later. Horses are assigned a lane at random. The player in lane one begins, with turns continuing clockwise. On his turn a player rolls one die and moves his horse that number of spaces clockwise. A horse can move outward by reducing his forward movement by one for each lane he moves out. On a roll of a six, a horse may elect to move inward one lane (leaving five points for other movement). Only one horse can occupy each space. Horses are required to use their complete roll whenever possible, even if the only way to do so is to move outward to go around a horse which is blocking your current lane. The inner lane, having only one space around the turns, is far more desirable than the outer lane which has six. Thus the random lane assignments can have a tremendous effect on the outcome of the race-- a horse which stays in the outermost lane will have to move twenty more spaces than one in the innermost.
Three bands of spaces (each band a different width) on the track allow a horse landing there to double its movement for that turn depending on the horse's stable entry number. The best horses can take advantage of all of these bands, while the worst can only double its movement on the narrowest band. This is how stable entries can affect a race's outcome.
The first horse to cross the finish line earns the 1st place purse, with smaller payoffs going to the second and third place finishers. Bets are only paid when placed on the winner.
Before a race begins, players are entitled to wager any sum of money on any one horse. The amount wagered is public knowledge, but the identity of the horse wagered on is not. If you bet on the winning horse, you get paid according to that horse's odds. The value of stable entries and the inner lanes is reflected in the odds. Your best horse in lane one runs at 1:1 odds, while your worst in lane six runs pays 36:1. A horse with middling odds promises a good chance of winning at a decent payoff, often attracting a number of bets. And it is this often conflicting interest amongst the various players which really makes the game nasty, with a lot of help from event cards.
Everyone receives three event cards at the start of the game. These can be used during any race but are discarded when used. Because they're such a limited resource, use of event cards must be carefully timed for maximum benefit. Event cards can do a number of interesting things, but by far the most amusing is the ability to knock horses out of a race. Remember those hedges I mentioned earlier? Each hedge has two matching "Faller" cards. If one of them is played while a horse is on that hedge, those horses can be knocked out of the race. Nasty! This makes landing on hedges very risky. Often players will choose to move out a lane or two rather than stop on a hedge and risk being knocked out by a player with a sizeable bet on the horse that's trailing by a length.
But that's not all. "Remount" cards can put a rider who's just fallen from his horse back in the race. Some cards force a horse to change lanes as far as possible before moving forward. "Photo Finish" can reverse the standings of two horses in a close finish. Some cards can, on a roll of doubles, discover that a winning horse had been illegally injected with steroids and disqualify the horse, moving the second and third place finishers up a notch. Etc. Easily the most powerful card is "Slipped Up On The Flat" which tumbles any one horse not sitting on a hedge at the time. This gives the bearer the ability to knock out any horse practically at will. Once. The player with the most cash after six races is the victor.
The fun in this game comes from skillful use of horse position and event cards to muck about with the outcome of a race. Since the amount you've wagered on a horse is known, it's vital to keep the identity of your pick a secret lest someone knock it out to keep you from reaping any rewards. Since payoffs from bets are usually much larger than the purses, players are usually much more protective of horses they've wagered on than of their own horses. Strategically, wagering on yourself is generally a bad move, since it reduces your chances of winning by 50%. Splitting your interest gives you two horses to root for and less of a chance of being shut out of the money in any race.
Early races tend to see players much more interested in having their own horses win than in later races, since players start with relatively little money with which to bet. The purse of the first race usually represents a multifold increase in wealth. The Lady's Plate, although offering the lowest purse, is often the most hotly contested race. With such a low purse, players usually relegate their worst horses to it. This results in fanastically high odds and potentially enormous payoffs.
This was the case in my most recent game (at the Gathering of Friends). The Lady's Plate was the fourth race. By this time, most of us had managed to accumulate a decent bankroll. The high odds guaranteed large payoffs. Amazingly, absolutely no event cards had been played in the previous three races. Coming into the home stretch, cards had knocked out all but three horses. It had become apparent that at least three players had wagered on the new leader-- we'll call him Pink. Pink hadn't bet on himself and didn't want to give the other players a lot of cash. So Pink started landing on hedges, hoping someone would cause him to fall. Noone did. So he started moving outward as far as possible to slow himself down and let another horse overtake him. The second place horse started catching up, so its owner stopped on a hedge and knocked himself down with a Faller card-- he, too, had bet on Pink! Only two horses remained, and neither of those players had bet on Pink. The trailing horse (we'll call him Red) tried to catch up but couldn't quite make it in time. Pink crossed the finish line first. But it still wasn't over. Red used a card to accuse Pink of steroid use. Amidst anguished cries from the other four players, Red rolled a double-six and disqualified Pink from the race, leaving Red as the winner-- and the only horse to successfully reach the Winner's Circle.
As the above example illustrates, races can get quite exciting as cards fly and horses fall. There isn't much strategy to The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game. It's mainly a game of betting and dice rolling. But it's a beautiful-looking game, and rarely has dice rolling been such fun.