Ready Set Bet Review – Worth Taking a Gamble On?

A review copy of Ready Set Bet was provided by AEG. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

I’d heard good things about Ready Set Bet, and I’d heard it being played at another table one games night, so I was intrigued. John D. Clair makes some great games (Space Base, Cubitos, Mystic Vale), so a horse racing game with his name on the box had to have something special going for it. I was right to be excited because Ready Set Bet is great. If you’re looking for strategy though, you’re going to be left wanting.

In my opinion, a good game is one that gives you just the right amount of player agency that it needs. That doesn’t mean it has to be some complex beast with myriad choices, like Inventions (read the review here). After all, Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop is just throwing four dice and seeing what happens, but asking you when to stop, that’s where its genius comes from. Ready Set Bet gives the players a really limited range of player agency, but weaves a lot of table magic from it.

Timing is everything

Ready Set Bet actually has some of that Sackson DNA, but it’s implemented very differently. The board is a big matrix: the horses in the race down the Y-axis and the different bet types along the X-axis. It’s a real-time game where each player can place one of their betting tokens on a horse and its result (Win, Place, Show, which are first, second and third, respectively) at any time. First-come, first-served. There are multiple spaces available for each horse and each result, but if the first spots are taken, you might find less-favourable odds, or a penalty if your bet doesn’t pay off.

So, getting your bets down early is definitely in your favour, but how do you know which horse to bet on? In real life, you might look to previous form to make an informed decision, but each race in the four races that make up a game of Ready Set Bet is a blank canvas. So it’s just random? Yes, and no. This is where the comparison with Can’t Stop is drawn. The number of the horse that moves is the result of rolling two six-sided dice.

If you’re not familiar with dice odds or the maths behind it, that can make it sound like every horse from 2 to 12 has an equal chance of moving. It sounds kinda logical that rolling two 1s is every bit as likely as rolling a 2 and a 5, but you have to consider all possibilities. When you do that, you realise that if you take into account all of the ways a 7 can be rolled, it’ll come up more than 16% of the time, whereas a 2 or 12 coming up is less than 3%.

Tipping the odds

So just throw all your bets on the most likely results, then? 6, 7 and 8, for example? Logically, yes, but Mr Clair has tilted the tables somewhat with some modifiers. First up, you have the bonus moves. If you roll any result twice in a row, that horse gets a movement bonus. That’s only an extra space for number 6, for instance, but number 10 gets +3! So you can hang fire and see how the race is going, but once three horses pass the red line two-thirds of the way along the track, all betting stops immediately, and you wait to see what Lady Luck has ordained.

There are other ways the betting gets spicy, too. After the first race, and every race thereafter, each player gets two VIP cards and chooses to keep one. Some give you small bonuses whenever certain numbers are rolled, some let you place in the same betting spot as someone else, and some even give you extra, bigger-value betting tokens to use. On top of that, there are five prop bets that change each race, and exotic bets available to cash in on things like super close finishes, or races where every horse makes it a decent way down the track.

Ultimately, however, at the end of the day, it’s a game where you have no idea which horse will win each race. Number 7 is mathematically the most likely, which is why it has the worst odds in the game, but it doesn’t always go the way of the favourite. In fact, you can almost guarantee that if you decide to go all in on lucky number seven, you’ve doomed it to a trip to the lasagna factory.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I like Euro games. Games with strategy. Games with planning and forethought. So why do I like a game like this, where I have almost no knowledge to make an informed decision on? It’s a fair question, and one which becomes even more important when I tell you about the biggest issue the game has. One person doesn’t even get to play!

Dice roller wanted. App-ly within.

The out-of-the-box way to play Ready Set Bet is with one of the people at the table beng in charge of the nags. Someone has an extra little board with some cute wooden horsies on it, and they spend the game rolling the dice over and over again, moving the horses and ideally commentating excitedly too.

You see, Ready Set Bet is a party game in all but name, and if you want that party atmosphere, then you need someone with the energy of an excited squirrel in the throes of a sugar high. It’s not the same game at all if the master of ceremonies is Father Stone…

So you’ve got two pretty major problems baked into the game. You need someone engaging to move the horses, and that person doesn’t actually get to be involved with the betting fun. It’s a good thing, then, that AEG added some pretty decent mitigation.

First up, there’s a special mode with special betting tokens that the person running the game can use to be involved in the gambling. While it’s not quite the same, it’s still a decent compromise. The best option, though, and I hesitate to even call it an option, because I think it’s a necessity, is the app.

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There’s a version of the app on the Apple and Google app stores that you can run on a phone or tablet, and there’s also a web version that’ll run on just about any TV, PC or laptop with a web browser. The app is superb. It shows the horses, commentates on the race, reminds you when you have to stop betting, and even reminds you how to set up each new race. Additionally, it can’t miss or forget to do any bonus movement, and it reminds you of things like Snake Eyes and Boxcars (2 or 12, respectively,) which can be important for VIP cards.

Final thoughts

Ready Set Bet isn’t a strategy game, and even things like the VIP cards and being under the illusion that there’s some deeper tactical level at play don’t change that. It’s fun, though. It’s really good fun. It’s chaotic and noisy and funny and stupid, and I love it.

I feel a niggle at the back of the conscientious part of my brain when I introduce a group to a gambling game, because you never know what trouble a person might have had in their past with gambling, or how morally opposed they might be to it. Ready Set Bet handles it in a clever way, because you never get to gamble with your winnings. You use the same betting tokens in each race, and the numbers printed on them determine your stakes. But it doesn’t come out of your stash, and they don’t count towards your end-of-game winnings totals. It might not sound that important, but I think it’s a masterstroke.

Ready Set Bet is the evolution of those games you used to get for horse racing nights at home, where you’d gather friends and bet on a pre-recorded race on VHS. It’s a game with that sort of energy. An hour after you start, the game’s over, and you’ll have had a good time. I’ve played back-to-back games with the same group because it’s so quick and easy. In the same way that Magical Athlete made me laugh and laugh last year, Ready Set Bet does the same thing but with a bit more to it, and I highly recommend it.