R&R Games Homestretch - Race to The Finish, Board Game for Adults and Kids, Ideal for Family Night

The media could not be loaded.  I can’t wait to play at my son’s horse racing birthday theme party in October. The cards are clumped together like any new deck of cards, but once you separate the cards without any damage they won’t get stuck again as you can see in my video.

I'm a board gamer and I like unique games and this horse racing board game is probably the best horse racing game out there!! The mechanism of this game is easy to understand/learn and fun to play! I highly recommend this game for your board game addition!!

In general I love this game, but the horses were so warped that some of them wouldn't stand up at all. I used the hot water trick (soak in hot but not boiling for a minute, then hold them straight until they cool and dip in cold water.) That worked for a few days but eventually they leaned back over and I had to repeat the treatment. It's a shame because the horses look so cool running around the track. It's an inherent problem because the horses only connect to the bases through two tiny hoofs. Four hooves would have made them a lot more stable. I may end up replacing them with something else, or maybe using some glue to make more connections. Edit: I ended up buying these as replacements. They work great. You'd have to paint numbers on them, or be extra careful to keep them in their lanes: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01N6PWJHNAs others have said, the numbers are also very difficult to read from any distance. They're on the bases, and partly hidden by the horses' bodies.And then there are the very sticky cards. You could sleeve them and that would fix them. Or do what I did and shake them in a bag with cornstarch. For a while they shed cornstarch, but then they settle down and are OK.Now that I have that out of the way, I do love the game. The rules are relatively simple, though if you're not familiar with how win-place-show betting works you might want to read about that first. Also a bit of knowledge about the probabilities of two dice helps. 7 is the most likely sum, and 2 and 12 are the least likely. I watched some play-through videos before I bought the game, and after that I thought the rulebook was easy to read. It's four pages long. The goal of the game is to be the player with the most money at the end of four races. You get money from the purses (prizes) if you own a horse that wins, places, or shows, and also from betting on the horses.The game starts with a card draft to choose which horses you're going to buy: everyone is dealt a certain number of cards depending on how many are playing. You choose one card, and then everyone passes their hand to the left, and you choose a card from the new hand, and so on.There's a deck of cards that give the particular handicaps and purses for the each race (you play four races for a complete game, though some groups like to stop after three.) The handicaps are little tokens that go beside particular horses. Some give a head start of several spaces, others make the horse lose its first turn. This makes up for the probabilities of the dice in different ways. Not all horses are equally likely to win, but it's not always the same horses either. The odds change depending which set-up card you draw for that race. Some people don't like that the handicap tokens are wider than the horses, making them difficult to line up. But I wouldn't want to the to be any smaller, or the track any bigger, so I stagger them and it works OK.Once you see how the tokens are distributed, you place your bets by putting betting tokens on the board. Everyone has the same values of tokens: one "3", two "2"s, and 2 "1"s. You can think of these as denominations of money. You can distributed them on the various horses, betting "win", "place" or "show" as you see fit, though there are some limitations based on turn order. The board spaces are numbered with payoffs. For example, if you put a 3 token on a space marked with an 8 payoff, you have bet 3 units (dollars or maybe thousands of dollars), and each unit pays 8 for a total payoff of 3x8=24, which is interpreted as $24,000. If the horse wins but you only bet show, the payoff will be less. There's no cost for betting, which seems odd, but since all players are betting the exact same amount, it doesn't matter.To run the race, players take turns rolling two dice. You can either move the horse of that number two spaces, or move it one space and roll again. On the second roll you must move the horse two spaces. This gives you a little push-your-luck way of nudging the horses you want to win ahead and holding others back, but of course other players are doing the same for their choices, and the chance of the dice is a huge factor. Because of the handicap tokens, sometimes a horse will come from way behind to win the race.The race itself can get a little tedious, though it can be exciting at the end.After the race you collect your winnings, both from the horses you own and the bets you placed. The money is handled by moving player's cubes around a track, so there are no bills to handle.In summary I think this is a fun simulation of a horse race, especially for the price, but you do have to be willing to deal with the frustrating components.

Another Excellent game from Frank DiLorenzo and R&R Games (great company). Easy to learn and a fairly quick play. Very exciting to play with multiple players and makes a great family game night game. As your horses get closer to the finish line, you might actually start cheering out loud (my family and I did). If you're looking for a simple game with a high level of fun and excitement, I highly recommend this one.

The game is a little more complex than I initially thought it would be, but it is a lot of fun. There is a significant amount of luck involved, but statistics and probabilities play a large roll in this game. I don't have kids, but if I did I'd love them to play this game to help them understand probabilities.

We bought this as a gift and had it delivered to our son's home. When we visited the grandkids were playing with it and appeared to be enjoying it, so it appears to be a winner.

Makes for a fun and loud time. Mostly luck with a little strategy, but that fits the theme of the game exceptionally well. A laugh riot.

Good party game for a family group or light gamers. The game consists of four races and the winner is the one who has the most money at the end. In the beginning every one drafts several horses of their choosing. You can also place bets on a bet tote board on who you think will win. The bets are placed faced down so that nobody knows how much you are betting. The horses are moved by rolling two dice. The total sum of the dice is the horse that is moved. The good horses are the ones numbered 4, 5, 6, 7. This is simply because the chances of a player rolling these numbers is greater. The longshot horses are the ones numbered 2 or 12 because the chances of you rolling this dice sum is much less. The game does add a variant to this rule by placing handicaps on the good horses and an advance boost on the longshots. This makes the game a little more fair. For example you might have a good horse that is way ahead and then all of a sudden the longshot horse who was sitting at the gate gets their boost and then quickly jumps out into a competitive position. Very unrealistic but it does make for some exciting talk with your play group. The game board has a money tracker and token for each player so there is no play cash to hassle with. This game is good if your looking for a quick family game that is easy to learn and lasts about 30 mins.

Excelente juego de mesa para jugar en familia.