Long Shot: The Dice Game Review – Pure Trackside Energy in a Small Box

In Long Shot: The Dice Game you’re off to the races to bet on horses. Praying that your horse is more a pegasus than a cow in a brown costume. Although, unlike our last visit to the track in Camel Up, you have a lot more options to influence the race this time around.

Within Long Shot, you have the singular aim of earning as much money as you can in one race. While betting is the obvious route to collecting large sums of greenbacks, you also gain money through buying horses, upgrades, and playing bingo.

Each player starts with 12 dollars in their pocket, a dry-erase marker and a player board where they’ll record their actions. From there, you take turns rolling two dice, one determining the horse that moves, while the other shows how far.

Move that horse, and then check the horse’s reference card. On it, you’ll see a list of all the other horses. Any horse with an X beside its number also gets to move for free.

Once all the horses have moved, everyone carries out an action for the rolled horse. These actions include:

• Marking the horse on your player board, allows you to bet on it while it’s in the no-bet zone.
• Modify a horse’s reference card so that an additional horse can get a free move.
• Bet, or add up to three dollars on an existing bet, on the horse.
• Purchase the horse and gain its ability. Additionally, if the horse comes 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, you win some extra prize money.
• On the 4×4 bingo grid on your player board, cross out a coloured circle space matching the current horse. Completing a line or column gives you a powerful instant ability.

Keep taking turns until three horses cross the finish line. Then count up your winnings, your leftover money, and any other bonuses you’ve earned. The richest player wins.

Learning to love roll and writes

When roll and write games first came onto the scene, everyone lost their mind. But I bought my ticket, hopped on that hype train, played Kokoro: Avenue of the Kodama, and didn’t like it all.

Since then, I never felt the need to revisit the genre. As a whole, they typically play a lot like NMBR 9, where everyone is focused on their own board and there’s zero interaction between players. Not in the mechanics, and not in the table talk, making for a dull board game.

Furthermore, with the roll and writes I played there was nothing unique about each player’s position. So nothing stops you from copying another player’s solution to the puzzle – intentional or not.

Thankfully, Long Shot: The Dice Game sidesteps all of these pitfalls. Players have asymmetrical starting positions, and everyone has their eyes on and interacts with the eight horses racing around the centre of the table.

With these horses jockeying up and down the field in unexpected ways, this race can be incredibly exciting. Especially as players begin to make their moves towards the end of the game, interfering with or boosting horses out of nowhere. You never know who’s going to win until they cross the line.

But this race is also a megaphone – amplifying the energy you put into it. So while playing with active and energized players cheering their horses towards victory, this game is incredible. One of the all-time greats.

However, without that energy, Long Shot: The Dice Game isn’t nearly as thrilling. As a result, I wouldn’t recommend playing it with less than five players. Because at that player count, the energy and chaos the additional players bring just aren’t there.

It’s all about taking the long shot

Strategically speaking, Long Shot: The Dice Game offers a trade-off between betting on horses and influencing the outcome of the race. Leaving it up to you to balance the two sides carefully.

Or at least that’s what I originally thought. However, due to the nature of the rewards, your best bet is to go all in on specific horses rather than spreading your money strategically.

For example, in one of our games, a player went all in on a horse early on. So he was either going to win or lose. Either way, it would be extreme. This happened more than once in our plays and seemed like the winner would always be the one who went hardest on the winning horse.

This boom-or-bust gameplay dilutes the strategy surrounding the game and pushes players towards making bad decisions and hoping for luck. This lack of strategy is hidden behind the large number of different actions you have to interact with the horses. Giving you the impression that it’s a deeper game than it really is.

But who cares for strategy when Long Shot: The Dice Game leans so heavily into the feeling of being at the race track? Where no matter what moves you make, you can only sit helplessly by as the horses thunder down the track. Hoping beyond hope, that your horse makes it to the finish line first. And when it comes to betting board games, what more could you want?