Joined in 2023 
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63 About this deal
For a moment there, I thought it had finally happened. After searching for months, years even, I thought I had finally found a big box Knizia design that I disliked. Some have been just fine, most have been great, several have been phenomenal, but after my first play of it, Qin seemed like it would be the one that wouldn’t do it for me.
But I can’t fault the game too much for this issue. Ready Set Bet is, at its heart, a party game meant for large and loud crowds. It really sung during our 7 player session where the board felt immensely smaller. The game board tightness also forced those of us who had played before outside of our comfort zones and into the more zesty betting opportunities. 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. In short – Ready Set Bet is played over four rounds. Each round consists of a race followed by bet resolution. During each race, players freely place their bet tokens on the board while the race is going on. After each race, players win or lose money for each of their placed bet tokens, then receive a VIP Club Card to help them win more money in the following races. After four rounds, the player with the most money wins! The Exotic Finish cards offer further tempting bets, but also with exact conditions. One is, for example, “All horses move 6 spaces or more”, and another is a Photo Finish. (This means the 3rd place horse must lose by three or fewer spaces.) Exotic Finish cards have three spaces on them, so three players can bet here, unlike other spots. You draw one per race, with them staying there for the race’s duration. So come race four, there’s four Exotic Bets to consider.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. 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!”
In Qin, players are racing to put out all their pagodas first. Your hand contains 3 domino tiles, and each tile is made up of a combination of colors (red, yellow, or blue). Players spend their zippy turns placing out one tile and replenishing their hand. Whenever your tile establishes a new province (two or more connected squares of a single color), then you’ll place your pagoda on this province to claim it. Repeat the process for 4 rounds. After the fourth and final race, players tabulate their winnings, and the player with the most money wins. But the best improvement of all is undoubtedly the three-pronged path to victory. No longer is the game simply about slapping together an engine and then seeing who can crank out the most points. The dynamics increase tremendously by offering players 3 possible ways to win: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.
Ready Set Bet can accommodate up to nine players, and the box has a suggested play time of 45-60 minutes. This game length is accurate, since more players doesn’t equate to more down-time between turns. There are no ‘turns’ as such; players bet in a simultaneous fashion, ‘live’, during each race. You work out your winnings (and/or losses) after each race, then reset and go again. There’s four races in total, with the most accumulative prize money winning the game.
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Players now resolve all their bets – gaining the multiplier of the number on their bet chip if the bet is successful, and taking a penalty (money lost) if their bet is unsuccessful. Not all bets have a penalty associated with them – look for the red circle in the bottom right of each bet space to be sure. After all the bets are resolved; all player collect their betting chips. The prop bets are discarded and a new set dealt out. An additional Exotic Finish card is added to the previously available once. I can see why folks are raving about this game, as there is a lot to love. As for myself, I get the strong impression that MOBAs are not for me. Like I hinted at above, my experience was much more of a MABO – Movement Always, Battle Occasionally. While most of your cards have a “secondary” action of movement, I would argue that this is deceptively the primary action of the game. Prognosis: a forecast of how the game will likely fare in my collection, and perhaps yours as well. Ready Set Bet also comes with two six-sided dice. The House rolls these 2d6, with the sum of the dice indicating which horse moves. So if The House rolls double-five, the number 10 horse moves one space. This explains the horses numbered 2-12 - these are the variations you get from rolling two dice. The probability of what you roll is a natural bell curve: in theory, seven is the most common outcome. (1+6, 2+5, 3+4, 4+3, 5+2, and 6+1). Rolling a six or eight is close behind, with five and nine less common. It’s harder still to roll a 4 or 10.
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. In the best cases, you are rooting on a horse and hoping the dice roll your way. More often I found myself with bets all over the place and not entirely sure what outcome I really wanted to root for. Too often the fun, “stand up around the table” moments just failed to materialize. Final Thoughts: Besides the fact that each race plays out surprisingly differently (that’s how dice work…. go figure), the betting board is different every round as well. Along the top and bottom of the board, you’ll find Prop Bet Cards and Exotic Finish Cards. These feature bets such as “Horse 4 will finish ahead of horse 8” or “The top three horses will finish within a short distance of each other” and so on. Furthermore, players will gain a unique VIP card between each race that grants excitingly powerful benefits and abilities. There is just the right blend of board variety and asymmetric powers to satisfy our spoiled hobbyist appetites from one play to the next.There are a couple of other prop bets available to players. You can bet on the color of the horse that wins. Or if a certain horse will finish in front of another. And a new prop is added each round giving some more variability to the game. But we don’t all have Mr. Clair coming over to do the rolling for us. The app is serviceable if a little less exciting. If a player controls the horses and gets into the callouts and process it can be quite entertaining. 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.
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