Knights of the Cardboard Castle

With all three nieces in town, we had to think of some simpler and not too time consuming games to play. With the youngest niece being only 13 years old, trying to find a game that would accommodate all six of us wasn’t an easy task. Continuing our string of racing-themed games, Sean decided to try Hare & Tortoise first, or at least the German version of it that features a hedgehog instead of a tortoise.

Unlike both Formula D and Um Reifenbreite, this game doesn’t use a roll and move mechanic. As in the fable, the players are rabbits who must race each other to reach the finish line. Rabbits are of course fueled by what else but carrot-power! Each player starts with the same supply of carrots, represented here as cards of various denominations, and must spend them to advances along the spaces that make up the race track. During his or her turn, the player simply decides how many spaces to move, consults a handy chart to see how many carrots are needed to move that many spaces and discards carrots up to that value. The more spaces you want to move in one go, the more carrots you need to spend.

There are of course ways to replenish your carrot supply. Some spaces along the track are marked with numbers. If a player starts his turn on a space with a number that matches his current position in the race, he gets carrots equal to ten times that number. For example, if I stopped on a space with the number two printed on it and I ended being second in the race at the beginning of my next turn, I would get twenty carrots. This means that turn order and anticipating the moves of other players are very important.

There are a number of other rules to mix things up some. First, players can’t share the same space. Secondly, each player starts with three cabbage cards and must find a way to discard all three in order to be able to cross the finish line. This can be done on spaces with the picture of a cabbage printed on them or through a lucky die roll when you stop in a space with a rabbit picture. Finally, players must not have too many carrots with them when they cross the finish line. The first one must have no more than ten carrots, the second no more than twenty and so forth. In addition, there’s a hedgehog space that allows a player to backtrack to it and gain carrots equal to ten times the spaces moved backwards to reach it.

All this makes Hare & Tortoise a more cerebral game than I initially expected. The three nieces learned it quickly enough but seemed very cautious at first about moving forward. Sean, on the other hand, was perfectly willing to spend huge amounts of carrots to leap far ahead, running the risk of being unable to move later and be forced to restart from the beginning. For me, I was too lazy at first to think much about turn order and missed valuable chances to get rid of my cabbage cards. Shan eventually won the game, partly because she actually stayed behind for a few turns to build up a good supply of carrots and then blowing past everyone in a couple of turns. In a game with six players, being last and staying on a space with 6 printed on it means that you get a whopping sixty carrots. I even lost to the youngest niece who probably took more effort to think through things properly than me.

Overall however the game is a little too dry for me. I also felt the same way about Power Grid after replaying it recently. Despite initially liking Power Grid, I’ve come around to agreeing with my friends on QT3 that it’s just too much of an abstract maths calculator to be much fun. I need something with more theme and a bit more variation between plays to really enjoy it. Hare & Tortoise is much the same for me. There’s no doubt that it has some very interesting strategy but its reliance on a strict turn order and the need to calculate carrots far in advance makes it too dry for me to really enjoy.