Ready Set Bet.

Ready Set Bet is a raucous betting game that’s great for a larger group, with up to 9 folks able to play at once (and if you have ten, once can serve as the race’s announcer), from John D. Clair, the designer of Mystic Vale, Cubitos, Dead Reckoning, and Space Base. He’s also a Dodgers fan, if memory serves correctly, but regardless, all of his previous games have been more gamers’ games, while Ready Set Bet is much lighter and is more of a party game at heart – but a surprisingly fun one given how common and boring the betting theme can be.

Ready Set Bet involves four horse races, and players will bet in real time, placing their tokens on the giant central board, as someone rolls the dice to move the nine horses along the race track, betting until three horses pass the red line on the track. At the end of each round, all bets are paid off, and some bets require players to pay a penalty if those bets didn’t come through. After the first three rounds, each player gets their choice of two cards to give them an extra power through the rest of the game or a one-time bonus. After four rounds, the player with the most money wins.

The horses are represented by the numbers 4 through 10, plus two more horses that bear two numbers, 2 and 3 as well as 11 and 12. The dice you roll to move the horses are just two regular six-sided dice, so the horses in the middle (6, 7, and 8) have a natural advantage, but in Ready Set Bet, if you roll any total twice in a row other than 7, that horse moves several extra spaces to try to compensate. I’ve had the 4 horse win because I happened to roll it three times in a row, which moved it nine extra spaces and gave it an insurmountable lead.

There are two major tweaks to the common betting-game formula in RSB, both of which work quite well. The board has betting spaces for every horse to win, places, or show, and each space has a multiplier on it to represent the payout if that bet comes off. The multipliers are higher on horses farther away from the middle numbers of 6-8, but many of those bets also have a small penalty if you bet on them and the horse lets you down, although it’s generally just a dollar or two. There are also some betting spaces on the board beyond individual horses – betting that a horse in a certain color group will win, or betting on one of the “unusual scenario” cards that appear in rounds 2-4 that have conditions like one horse winning by a certain amount or at least four horses not getting past the one-quarter mark.

The other big tweak is that once someone places one of their tokens on a betting space, it’s occupied for the remainder of that race. Each player has a set of betting tokens numbered 2, 3, 4, and 5, and with fewer than seven players each player gets a second 3 token. To place a bet, you take one of those tokens and place it on any betting space that isn’t currently occupied. If your horse comes through, you get the value of your token times the multiplier on the betting space. There’s no benefit to keeping any of your tokens, so the incentive is to place them all before the third horse crosses the red line – roughly two-thirds of the way across the race board – and to do so sooner than other players do, since most of the betting spaces are limited to just one token.

I’ve played Ready Set Bet as a player, but also played it with family and served as the dice-roller and announcer, including my niece and nephew, who are now 10 and 6, respectively … and my nephew ended up winning outright, because he just bet big on any horse that got an early lead, and at one point got an extra 7 token by way of one of those end-of-round bonus cards, placing it on a 7x betting space for a horse that won. That points to the game’s accessibility, and the way that a little luck can balance things out. I didn’t expect to like this game all that much given the premise, but the simplicity of play and the way everyone, with folks aged 6 to 75 when I played with family, got into it ended up selling me on the game after all.