Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
I mentioned earlier Ready Set Bet gave me vibes of Can’t Stop and Camel Up. Can you warrant owning those and Ready Set Bet in your collection? Yes, 100%, yes. I’d argue this is easier than Camel Up, since there’s no pauses for individual leg scoring. It’s also a lot more tense than Camel Up, due to the pace of the real-time factor. 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. The betting players each have 5 betting chips. At any time after the start of the race they can place one of their chips on the board on the horse they think will win. Each horse has slightly different odds to win and only one chip can be placed on each space, so payouts become worse as other players bet in front of you. 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.
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.
About Dale Yu
The main betting board is a decent size for up to eight people to scrabble around. It’s in a classic shade of British Racing green (yes, that’s an actual colour tone!). Once all the cards sit above and below the Show/Place/Win columns, it can look a tad busy. It’s a little too easy to forget/ignore the extra Prop Bets or Exotic Bets in the heat of the excitement. Final Score: 2 Stars – Not the horse racing game we deserve. Almost no player agency and too few exciting moments of randomness. 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).
Repeat the process for 4 rounds. After the fourth and final race, players tabulate their winnings, and the player with the most money wins. There is a way to allow the race caller to also “play” the game by making a set of bets prior to each race. These bets do not affect the regular bets; they use a special L shaped token that leaves the bulk of the space free for the betting tokens. On the whole, I’m less of a fan of the House Player variants. I’m sure they’re been tested and hopefully balanced; but it still feels incongruous to have one player doing one thing while the rest do the other. 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. This grid might look complex, but it is, in actual fact, simple multiplication. In each spot within this grid is a number, which is a payout multiplier. Let’s say, for example, you bet on horse 9 to win (and it did win the race). You placed your number four-value chit on the 5x ‘Horse 9 To Win’ space. In this case, you’d earn four multiplied by five, for 20 money chips. With the logic of 7 being the favourite, its multipliers are, of course, lower than those for the other horses. 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.
Finally, each player is dealt 2 VIP cards, choosing to keep one and discarding the other. The VIP cards are placed in front of each player, and they provide ongoing bonuses for the rest of the game – they may allow the player to place a bet in an occupied space or to bet after the NO MORE BETS announcement, etc. 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. 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!”
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