New to Me – August 2022

September has been a weird month.

School has started again, so work has been busy.

I just haven’t really felt up to writing anything, but I don’t usually let that get in the way of doing at least this post.

However, things have just come up.

Like suddenly being able to play a bunch of action games on my computer and thus spending time doing that instead of, you know, writing.

I’ve picked up a bunch of games and finished Metro 2033: Last Light already. Then there’s Borderlands 3, which I’ve enjoyed the first two on my game consoles.

And too many others to count!

I’ll have to try and limit my distractions.

Especially when I have a month with 11 new to me games!

The Cult of the New to Me can’t even complain because there is some older stuff in there as well as new.

There’s even a 2012 game!

So without further ado (all of my ado was taken to build the next level of our condo anyway), let’s get started!

Ginkgopolis (2012 – Pearl Games) – 1 play

Designer: Xavier Georges

Artist: Gaël Lannurien

Players: 1-5

A lot of people on Boardgame Twitter really love Ginkgopolis, but I’ve never had the opportunity to play it to determine whether I would agree with them or not.

That changed in August, when it showed up at a game day and hit the table!

In Ginkgopolis, players are contributing to building a city by placing tiles. The trick is, compared to many other city-building games, that players can either expand outward or can actually increase the height of a tile by placing another tile on top of it.

The initial city looks like this, a 3×3 grid with three tiles of each colour randomly placed.

Players start with a player board that explains all of the possible actions as well as a screen to hide your stuff behind.

They then get 4 character cards and are going to be drafting them until everyone has 3 (discarding the 4th card). These cards will also give you your starting resources.

The cards that you drafted are placed in front of your screen and will be your starting effects cards.

Players are then dealt 4 cards to their hand. Each turn, players will choose one card to play and place it face down, then simultaneously revealing it. In turn order, the card is carried out.

You can choose one of three ways to play the card: Exploiting (just getting resources, playing the card by itself), Urbanization (playing the Urbanization card with a tile) or Constructing a Floor (Play a Building card along with a tile).

Exploiting just gives you a resource or a tile, but some of your characters in front of you may give you bonuses when you do that. Like the bottom yellow card above gives you one VP token when you do that.

Urbanization will let you place a new tile in the city, replacing one of the round green tokens. You then move the token so that it touches one of the sides of the new tile.

The other two cards above give you a bonus (a tile and a VP) when you do that.

This will expand the city, giving more locations for you to control! You put a resource from behind your screen on the tile to show it’s yours (and you can’t do the action if you don’t have a resource).

You then will get to utilize all of the tiles next to the new tile, as if you had urbanized them.

Finally, you can construct a floor by playing a building card along with the tile.

The building card you play must match one of the tiles on the board. That’s where you will be placing the new tile, playing the building card out in front of you so its bonuses will benefit you in future turns. The colour of the tile you play doesn’t have to match, but if it doesn’t match, you have to discard a resource. They can be scarce!

But that’s one way you can break up somebody’s powerful district.

If the number of the tile is lower than what you are covering, you have to pay VP for the difference. You will then put

The unused cards then go to the next player and each player draws up to 4 cards in their hand.

Play continues like that until all of the tiles have been exhausted. The first time that happens, players can give up tiles to the supply for 1 VP each.

Once that is done, the next time the supply runs out, the game’s over. Either that, or if a player uses up all of their resources.

Scoring is based on VP tokens, endgame scoring cards in front of the player, 2 points for each unused New Hand token (which you can use during the game to discard all of your cards and get new ones) and then districts in the city.

The player with the highest number of resources in each connected set of tiles of the same colour (a district) gets VP equal to all of the resources in the district. The player with the second highest number of resources just gets VP equal to their resources.

Whoever has the most VP is the winner!

I enjoyed this game, but probably not as much as some of the people I follow who do really love it. I’ve heard so many good things about it and while it’s ok, it’s not one of my favourite games.

At least on the first play.

Subsequent plays may change that! Though this is only the first or second time I’ve seen it hit the table at our game day, so it may be a long wait until the next opportunity.

NEOM (2018 – Lookout Games) – 1 play

Designer: Paul Sottosanti

Artists: Klemens Franz, Christian Opperer

Players: 1-5

Neom is an interesting game because it is kind of like a 7 Wonders drafting game but you are taking tiles and placing them on your city board instead of just playing cards.

Each player will get a random city board that will give you access to one basic resource (the resource is different for each player board).

This is also where you will be putting the tiles that you draft and pay for.

The tiles are separated into their specific generations, and there will be seven turns in each generation for you to draft a tile and then pass the remainder on to the next player (sound familiar?).

Prior to the beginning of the game, each player will choose three Cornerstone tiles which will be the end-game points, or perhaps something that will affect the rest of the game, that you are aiming for. These are also drafted. Four are dealt to each player. You choose one and send the others onward. Once you have two to choose from, you choose one and discard the other one.

The Cornerstone tiles are then revealed to everybody once you are finished.

Each generation, the tiles will go around. You choose a tile and place it on your city, making sure you have the resource required if necessary. If you don’t have the resource, you can pay a neighbour for it.

If you can’t place the tile, you can either play one of your Cornerstone tiles or sell the tile for money.

Cornerstone tiles are slightly different. You can only have as many Cornerstone tiles in your city as the number of the current generation. So you can place one per generation. However, if you don’t place one in the first generation, you could place your first two in the second generation.

Placing the tile requires you to connect it via road to your centre tile (though you could replace one of your existing tiles if you wish). Each tile has roads on it going off one or more sides of the tile. The roads must connect to your City Centre tile or you can’t place the tile.

The 2nd & 3rd generations will have a disaster tile that will affect everybody except the player who chose it (when you choose it, you have to play it, which unfortunately didn’t happen in our game for one of them because the player forgot you had to).

Some tiles (like the Public Safety Department cornerstone, in the Cornerstone picture above) will protect your tiles from the disaster. But otherwise you had to remove tiles based on what the disaster is.

Thus, since everybody knows these tiles are coming and they have to be played (unless it goes all the way to the end and it ends up being the tile discarded when somebody has two choices left, but that means nobody chose it and they were playing Chicken by not taking it themselves).

Eventually, the 3rd generation will end and you will have an almost full board (3 empty squares unless you overbuilt a tile earlier or had to sell a tile for money).

Victory points are calculated and whoever has the most VP is the winner!

This was definitely an interesting twist on 7 Wonders. The tile drafting is interesting and having to connec the tile you place to your city centre adds an extra layer of consideration when you are choosing tiles.

It also has that short duration (our 5-player game played in under an hour) which makes it ideal for lunchtime if you happen to have the game. That being said, there could be some AP for newer players which would affect that.

But it makes a great game for beginning or ending your game night. It also adds just that much more decision-making than 7 Wonders has.

I would definitely like to try this one again.

Flashpoint: South China Sea (2022 – GMT Games) – 1 play

Designer: Harold Buchanan

Artist: Terry Leeds

Players: 1-2

I was hoping to have a review of this one up before doing this post, but you know how it goes.

That being said, I’m not going to go into great detail because the review is going to do that and it will be coming shortly after this one.

The South China Sea is a dangerous zone where China and the United States both try to vie for supremacy. The various countries around the area are also just trying to survive and deal with the Chinese elephant that’s in the room.

Much like Twilight Struggle and other card-driven games, Flashpoint: South China Sea is a game where you are playing cards for either the Operations Points or for the event (if it’s a friendly event)

It also has the pendulum-like scoring board where if it ever reaches the maximum on either side, that side immediately wins.

Each “Campaign” consists of players playing 6 cards from their hand. They can play them for Operations Points to place influence cubes in various countries, FONOPS (Freedom of Navigation Operations for the US side) or CR (Chinese Reclamation) cubes in one of three disputed island chains, or conduct Political Warfare.

You can also play a friendly event, or you can use the Scoring for that card to score one of the seven scoring cards.

An intriguing thing that takes a bit from Red Flag Over Paris and an approved variant from Fort Sumter is the potential ability to play a friendly event (or scoring) from the top of the discard pile.

If the card you play has a matching symbol (the dollar sign, city, or fighter jet) of the top card of the discard pile, and the top card is “friendly” (meaning it’s your colour), then you can choose to play that event or that scoring possibility instead of your own card.

This adds a really neat meta narrative when you are playing your cards. Do I want to play this card which would really benefit my opponent? Maybe my opponent has a matching symbol? If I do it later in the round when my opponent only has one or two cards left, it might be safer.

The scoring cards have to be chosen based on the card you play, so not every card will be scored each campaign.

However, after the 3rd campaign, all scoring cards will be scored in numerical order (see the number at the bottom of each scoring card above?). Thus, you have to keep that in mind when you are playing in the 3rd campaign.

At the end of all this, whoever has the point marker on their side of “0” is the winner!

That avoids a bunch of little things, but I will save that for the review.

This is a really fun game, so fun that my (relatively) non-gamer co-worker wanted to play it again the next day after we played a game at lunch.

Yeah, the theme may not come out as much as you would like (though the cards do help with that, and they are so up to date that one of the cards has a COVID event), but it’s still an interesting puzzle of just where you want to focus your influence to possibly score points.

Political Warfare can lock a country down from your opponent being able to place influence there. Maybe that might be important?

After three plays, I still feel like I’m learning all the nuances of the game.

That’s the sign of a great game.

Whoops, I guess that might be a spoiler for the review.

MOB: Big Apple (2022 – TGG Games) – 1 play

Designer: Steve Finn

Artists: Ossi Hiekkala, David Sookochoff

Players: 2

Mob: Big Apple is a really neat little 2-player game from Steve Finn, the master of neat little games.

It has some elements of area control as well as dice manipulation where you are mobsters during Prohibition, spreading illicit booze around the city and facing off against a rival mob wanting to do the same thing.

Players are two rival crime families trying to corner the market on “booze, clams and dames.”

I like how the rulebook also has a nice disclaimer, stating that this was an immoral time and while the period is fascinating, nobody involved in the game condones or wishes to glorify violence in any way.

Anyway, the game is played over three rounds and you will be deploying henchmen out to the six different locations to take control of the illegal goods that are there.

The henchmen actually look pretty cool (this is the Kickstarter version, but I don’t think there are any major differences in components).

On your turn, you may want to send 1-3 henchmen to a car next to one of the locations on the board.

Rolling two dice (the dice are white and black, with only 1s, 2s and 3s), you determine the location and the other die is how many can go to the car. So if you roll a white 2 and a black 3, you can send 2 henchmen to the black 3 space or you can send 3 henchmen to the white 2 space.

That’s optional (though if you choose to roll, you do have to deploy the guys…you can’t wait to see what you roll and then decide not to), but what isn’t optional is sending 1-3 henchmen to an unoccupied space on the Action Board.

These actions will let you do things like move henchmen from a car into their location, or maybe move them to a different location. Each space has a Primary action (the action in white for the entire row) and a Secondary action (what’s in the space itself). All actions are optional, but you must place at least one henchman somewhere, even if you don’t do anything with him.

The actions could let you move crates from one location to another, move one of your moles (a secret guy you have in each location that will add strength to the area control), or maybe even influence the DA (at the end of the round, depending on where the DA is on the track above the Action board, a mole is revealed and some crate action is going to happen.

Some activity spaces will allow you to try and shoot (and remove) some of your opponent’s henchmen from a car at a location. You just roll a die and if your opponent has any guys in the car at that location, they’re all gone!

This continues until each player has used all 20 henchmen that they received at the beginning of the round. Then the DA is judged.

At the end of 3 rounds, all Moles are revealed and the relative strength at each location is figured out. Whoever has the most gets all the crates at that location.

Then, whoever has the most crates wins the game!

I only managed to get this played once but I do look forward to playing it again. Even with the dice rolls, there are some interesting choices in there and I definitely liked it well enough to try to explore some of its nuances.

But it plays relatively quickly (I think our play took 45 minutes) so it’s a perfect lunchtime game.

We’ll see what I think about it after a few more plays.

Las Vegas Royale (2019 – Ravensburger) – 1 play

Designer: Rüdiger Dorn

Artists: Antje Stephan, Claus Stephan

Players: 2-5

Las Vegas Royale is a casino dice rolling area control (kind of) game that also plays relatively quickly and has a lot of chaotic fun to it.

There are six casinos around the table and (if you are playing the “main” game) three of them will have separate mini-games as well.

The money cards are shuffled and dealt out into six pairs. The highest total value goes to the “6” casino, all the way down to the lowest going to the “1” casino. The first three casinos will also have a mini-game.

Each player will have 8 dice and 2 chips.

On your turn, you roll all of your dice and then choose all dice of one number that you choose. You will then assign those dice to the casino of the same number. If you want to spend a chip, you can sit out this round, meaning you get to see what other players are going to do first.

Once you are out of dice, you are out of the round and wait for the others to finish their round.

Then the casinos are judged for who has the most dice of their colour at it.

Two things to keep in mind about that.

First, the “big” die (each player has one) counts as two dice for this.

Secondly, ties result in all tied dice being removed from the casino.

Thus, you may think you were a distant last and not getting any money, but all of the dice ahead of you are removed so you’re getting $100,000 instead! (That’s not likely as the other players would have to be stupid to let you do that, but it is possible).

This continues for three rounds and then whoever has the most money is the winner.

The “Base” game plays like that. The “Main” game adds the mini-games to the first three casinos. I’m not going to detail all those, but here’s an example.

This one lets you take a die you just rolled (or even that you just placed in this casino) and put it on that number’s space. If somebody else is already there, you bump it out! Place it in the corresponding casino based on what number it is.

During payout, each player gets the indicated reward for where their die is.

These mini-games add a little bit of extra oomph to the game and I can’t imagine playing without them. Some people may not like them as much, though.

This is also a relatively short game at 45 minutes, and it is a lot of fun with the dice rolling, the smack talk and all of that.

We did get a couple of the mini-games wrong we later discovered, but that just means we need to play it again!

I enjoyed this one. It’s a dice-chucker so keep that in mind if you hate luck.

Otherwise, I’m happy to play it again.

QE (2019 – BoardgameTables.com) – 1 play

Designer: Gavin Birnbaum

Artists: Gavin Birnbaum, Anca Gavril

Players: 3-5

QE is a game that frightened me away when I first heard about the concept. It didn’t sound fun at all and I had no idea how it would even work.

It came out on a game day when the other options on offer weren’t the greatest so we decided to play it.

And while I still don’t think it’s up in my favourite games, I admit that I was wrong about it.

It is quite fun and easier to play than I thought it would be.

Each player is a nation bidding on various companies that are “too big to fail” (so essentially you are bailing them out).

The trick is that you can bid anything you want.

Anything!

You could buy every company that way! And win!

Except…at the end of the game, whoever’s spent the most money automatically loses.

Players are going for points based on a couple of different factors.

There are 21 different companies (you will remove some if you’re not playing with a full complement of players) from five different countries and five different industry types. Each player will also be given a secret industry type.

Each turn, one player will take the topmost company and auction it off.

They will place on their bid tile how much they are willing to pay for the company.

The other players than secretly give their bids to the auctioneer. The auctioneer looks at them all, secretly writes the highest bid on the back of the company tile, and gives it to the player who bid that much.

If nobody bid as high as the auctioneer, the auctioneer just takes it instead.

You can big “0” once per round, which will help you score endgame points. Your bid is revealed if that’s the case, so everybody knows you can’t bid “0” again until the next round (a round is finished when all players have been the auctioneer once).

Company tiles and industry tiles count toward Nationalization (companies from the same country) and Monopolization (companies of the same industry) points and there are other ways to score points as well on your scoresheet.

Finally, you calculate how much money you spent during the game.

Reveal that. Whoever spent the most money automatically loses the game. Then, whoever has the most points is the winner!

The “bid anything you want!” thing really threw me and made me not want to play this at all. However, the economy of the game quickly becomes apparent based on the opening bids for the companies.

Thus, it’s not a chaotic mess. It’s actually quite structured along the lines set by the players.

I still wouldn’t call it a favourite game of mine, but it isn’t something I would actively avoid like I would have before.

Next Station: London (2022 – Blue Orange Games) – 1 play

Designer: Matthew Dunstan

Artist: Maxime Morin

Players: 1-4

I am not a Roll & Write fan. I’m not a big Flip & Write fan either.

Next Station London, however, wiggled its way through that resistance to where while I won’t actively choose to play the game, I won’t avoid it either.

In Next Station London, you are connecting subway routes to score points.

The trick is that the game is played over four rounds, and in each round you are doing a different track (colour).

Each colour’s departure station is marked and that’s where you will be drawing your lines from.

During the round, a station card will be flipped over. You have to draw a line from one end of your route to a station of that shape. It can be either end of your route.

You can’t cross previously-drawn lines when you are connecting your stations, either, and you can’t backtrack. There is also a Railway Switch station card that will trigger another station card flip, but then players can draw a track to that symbol’s station from any station on their current line. Not just the two ends.

Each round ends when the 5th “underground” card is flipped. Thus, you may not see all 11 station cards.

Pass your pencils and now you are doing a new colour, until the end of the 4th round.

Total up the points you get for your tracks and whoever has the most is the winner!

This game wasn’t that bad for me, but again it’s not my favourite genre. This is definitely one I would be willing to play again if it comes up, however.

I haven’t tried the Boardgame Arena implementation yet, but it does eliminate a lot of the record-keeping, so that might be fun.

Dandelions (2022 – BoardgameTables.com) – 1 play

Designer: Takashi Sakaue

Artists: Anca Gavril, Daniel Profiri

Players: 2-3 players

Dandelions is a filler dice game, taking all of about 15 minutes to play.

Which is a good thing.

It also reimplements a game called Birth, which I have never heard of.

In the game, there are 5 garden cards and you will be moving your pawn around them using the dice that you roll.

But it’s not a roll and move game.

All players roll their dice simultaneously. Then players take their turn sequentially.

Choose one of your dice and move your pawn that many spaces (you start with 11 dice). Whichever garden your pawn ends up in, you place that die in the garden. If anybody else has dice of the same value as yours, you move those dice to an adjacent garden.

That could be good or it could be bad!

But hey, you chose the die.

If you land back on the start space, you get to reroll all your remaining dice.

This is literally the only dice mitigation there is in the game, so be aware of that.

The game ends when all of the dice are in gardens.

How do you score?

For each of the gardens (1, 2, 3, 5, 8), each die scores for the value of the garden it is in.

Then, the player with the most dice in each garden gets to score the value of all of their pips in that garden.

Add those together and whoever has the most wins!

This was…not that fun.

It’s definitely quick!

But the lack of dice mitigation other than rerolling them if you happen to land on the first spot just kills it for me.

Sure, there are some choices at the beginning of the game, but as you have fewer and fewer dice, your choices become much more limited.

It was fine. I probably wouldn’t avoid playing it again.

But I can confidently predict that I will never write about this game again.

Carnegie (2022 – Quined Games) – 1 play

Designer: Xavier Georges

Artist: Ian O’Toole

Players: 1-4

Two games by Xavier Georges in one month!

Considering I hadn’t really heard of him before, that’s actually quite the accomplishment.

Anyway, Carnegie is probably the heaviest game I played in August. It’s an economic game with some interesting twists and turns, but there is also some area majority as well.

First, the board is beautiful.

Anyway, basically players are a company trying to maximize their profits but also become philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie did as well. You’re going to be hiring employees, trying to expand your business, invest in real estate, and build trade routes across the United States.

Your company board actually has offices on it!

Kind of.

Each office space can hold three employees to do the action of that space. You can also later on get new offices that have cool powers to let your employees do their thing.

On a player’s turn, they will choose one action from the timeline board.

When you choose the action, the action marker moves to the next space on the timeline, triggering something. It could be getting income from a region, or it could be time to make a donation!

Once income or donations are done, the chosen action is done in player order.

The corresponding departments in your office can then be used, one at a time, if they have active employees in them.

These will let you do things like send employees out on missions onto the mapboard (the only way to gain income) or perhaps hire more employees. They could allow you to purchase a new office that you then need more employees to man. You could even move employees from one office to another one, though you then have to pay money to activate them (what, they don’t work for free? Communists!).

Sending employees on construction missions will let you place a disc in a city, building your trade route and the worker can generate income during an income turn for that region (though you have to bring the employee back to your office for that).

During a donation turn, you can also make donations that will give you endgame scoring points.

There’s even a donation that gives you 2 points per donation you’ve made!

A short description in this post can’t really do the game justice, because it is a complicated game, at least in trying to make sense of what you can do. The rules aren’t too complex (though we missed a major one that makes me want to play this again) but chaining together your actions to maximize your profits and points was extremely difficult for me.

The map with all of the construction chains is quite beautiful, though!

Once all of the action tokens are at the end of their row (thus there are only 20 turns in the game), you total up your points and see who wins!

This one burned my brain a lot. I do want to play it again knowing the rule that we missed, and if I’m in the mood for a heavy mental load, I would gladly play Carnegie.

I can see why it’s getting all the accolades.

I’m not sure it’s one I would want to play often, but I would definitely like to play it some.

The Castles of Tuscany (2020 – Ravensburger) – 1 play

Designer: Stefan Feld

Artists: Antje Stephan, Claus Stephan

Players: 2-4

When Castles of Tuscany was first announced, I was intrigued. How much like Castles of Burgundy would it be?

Turns out that it’s basically just the types of colours and stuff.

And that it’s a tile-laying game, but not in quite the same sense as its predecessor.

Each player starts with three region boards (A, B and C) that can go together in any fashion but they must join as one long continuous area (they can’t form an L or go off at an angle or anything.

This is where you will be putting the tiles you get.

Of course you put your starting castle on one of the dark green spaces.

You will have a player board where you will be keeping your tiles as well as your bonuses and stuff.

The three stacks of tiles on your board are the clock for the game.

Instead of dice, you are going to be using region cards to place tiles.

When you want to take one of the eight neutral tiles (not pictured, sadly), you just take it and store it on your board. You only have one place to store it at start, but you can gain additional storage slots if you need them.

You then take the top tile off of your leftmost stack and replace the tile you just took.

To place a tile in your estate, you spend two of that colour’s region cards from your hand. You can also spend two of another colour to make up for one card you don’t have. The tile must go into a region of the same colour that’s adjacent to one of your other tiles.

After placing a few tiles, your board will look like this.

Placing tiles will also have various effects depending on the tile. And like its parent game, if you complete a region, you will get points.

As soon as somebody empties their first stack of tiles, scoring occurs and it’s kind of strange.

All the points you gain during the round are done on the green track (with a couple of exceptions).

When the scoring round happens, you transfer all of your green points to the red track, but you don’t actually change the green track.

So if you have 4 red points and 17 green points at the end of the first round, you add 17 to 4 on the red track. You keep your green track where it is.

Next round, you may have 25 red points (you gained 4 red points somehow) and 36 green points. You will add those together and put your red marker on 61 points.

It was a bit confusing to me but I finally got it.

Don’t get me started on scoring Agriculture (green) tiles. I got the animal scoring in CoB, but this scoring gave me conniptions.

Anyway, after three rounds (where only one person will have gotten rid of all of their tiles, most likely), do the final scoring round and whoever has the most red points is the winner!

I didn’t mind this game that much.

It’s incredibly fast compared to its parent game (our game took 36 minutes, as compared to typically 90-120 minutes for CoB) but it’s also not quite as interesting.

The tiles are still kind of bland and the colours are muted.

It’s not a bad game at all. I’d definitely play it as a semi-filler after playing a longer game.

But as far as fun goes, it’s nothing like its parent.

Long Shot: The Dice Game (2022 – Perplext) – 1 play

Designer: Chris Handy

Artist: Clau Souza

Players: 1-8

Finally we get to the final new game of the month.

I’ve heard tons of great things about Long Shot: the Dice Game but never thought I’d get a chance to play it.

But it showed up at a game day and the fact that it played 6 players really helped as it was our wrap-up game of the day.

It’s a dice game, so definitely keep that in mind, but it’s also about horse race betting.

However, you’re not necessarily trying to get your horse over the finish line first.

You’re instead betting on who is going to cross the finish line first.

There are 8 horses who are racing around the relatively small track.

These horses all have their own cards as well.

Each player gets a scoresheet where you will be recording your bets.

They’ll also be getting a random starting card that will tell you what numbers to mark off and which two horses you have bets on.

The active player will then roll both dice (one 8-sided and one 6-sided). The horse that matches the 8-sided die will move the number of spaces on the 6-sided die.

Any secondary horses (the ones that are marked at the bottom of the horse card) will move one space.

After that, each player in order can take one action.

They can take a Concession, which means mark off one of the circles on the left matching the horse number rolled. If a row or column is filled, you can do one of the bonuses which could be a bonus action or money or moving horses backward or forward (useful when you know which horse you want to win!).

A helmet or jersey action can be done. A helmet will let you bet on the horse even when it’s past the “No Bet” line. A jersey means you can mark off any secondary horse on that horse’s card (meaning it will move one space when that horse moves).

You can also bet up to $3 on a horse or you can buy a horse. Once a horse is bought, you can use its ability.

This all is done with the active player moving to the left until three of the horses cross the finish line.

Each horse has a bet multiplier depending on where it ends up crossing the line.

You will get money for the horses, plus the listed purse amount if one of your horses finished in the top 3. Helmet and Jersey sets get you points and then whatever money you have left.

Whoever has the most money at the end is the winner!

I really love the aesthetic to this game. The hard plastic horses, the cards and dry erase markers and all of that.

It looks great on the table and it’s a lot of fun!

There was a lot of trash talking going on during the game as the horses that I bet on came in last and stuff like that.

It was a great time and it’s certainly a great game for what it is. And it only takes about 30 minutes!

I’d definitely play this one again.

So there you have it.

Way late and a ton of games, but I managed to get it done even with all of the distractions.

What new games did you play in August?

Have you played any of these? Thoughts?

Let me know in the comments.