Horses Love It!

So here is our latest obsession: a game called Royal Turf. Cy has a friend at work who is a board game fanatic and has over 600 games, and he recommended this game and let us borrow it. It is actually a German game--fortunately Cy's friend printed a copy of the instructions in English so we knew what to do. The gist of the game is that you have 7 horses and each one has a corresponding card to show how many spaces it gets to move on a certain roll (you can roll a horse head, jockey cap, saddle, or horse shoe, with horse head being the most frequent roll). Based on these possibilities, and based on the starting position of the horses, you decide which horses to bet on. You have 4 betting chips - 2, 1, 1, 0, and you place them upside down on the horses so that the other players are unsure which one is your high bet (2) and which one is your fake bet (0). Then you roll and can move your horses to a better position or use your roll to keep the other horses from moving as much. It requires a lot of strategy to play well, and sometimes your strategy can actually backfire on you if you guess wrong about your opponents' bets, or if you spend so much time thwarting each other's moves that a random other horse ends up winning (yes, I am speaking from experience). You are also likely to fail if you can't remember which of your own bets is which (as Cy can attest) or if you get the horses mixed up and keep moving the wrong one (I did this but somehow it worked to my advantage halfway through when I figured it out). So basically, there is a lot to think about when playing this game. We are completely addicted to it! We tried to find our own copy and couldn't find Royal Turf, but did manage to track down an updated British version called Winner's Circle which appears to be the same, so we ordered it immediately. It is a super fun game, and we would highly recommend it!