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HARE & TORTOISE
A clever race game with a classic theme...
...where even he who hesitates can win
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rules of play |
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Hare & Tortoise was first published in Britain by Intellect Games UK in
1974 and has been in print ever since, though Intellect has long since
vanished from the scene.The first German edition, published by Ravensburger in 1979, became the first ever winner of the now prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award. Its title "Hase und Igel" (Hare and Hedgehog) refers to a similar fable by the Brothers Grimm.
Hare & Tortoise has since sold over 2 million units in at least 10 languages, including two known pirated editions, and has never been out of print.
The latest edition, incorporating slight revisions and improvements, was republished by Ravensburger Games in 2008, and in a redesigned English-language edition by Gibsons Games in August 2010. For full details of the latest versions see Hare & Tortoise Rides Again!
But there's a catch!
The catch is that the further you move in one turn, the faster the cost of moving accelerates. Therefore -
- If you play like a hare, taking great leaps forward at each move, you risk running out of carrots so fast that you may lose valuable time trying to get them back. But:
- If you play like a tortoise, plodding along as cheaply as possible, you risk lagging so far behind that you may never have time to catch up with the others.
So, unlike traditional race games, Hare & Tortoise is won by superior strategy and player interaction. The element of chance is not only reduced to a minimum, but can be eliminated altogether by agreeing to avoid landing on Hare squares, which are, by design, the only external chance elements in the game.
Playing hare-wise, you could get home in just one move, but only if you could afford the 2080 carrots such a leap would cost. To add to your problems, the further ahead you are, the fewer the carrots you earn when you land on a pay-out square. In Hare & Tortoise, unlike certain other games, you don't collect 200 carrots every time you pass Go.
In Aesop's classic fable the hare is so confident of winning that he takes a
nap and wakes up too late to find himself overtaken by the
plodding tortoise. His moral is "Slow but steady wins the race". In
Germany and elsewhere the game is called "Hare and Hedgehog"
(Hase und Igel), being based on an equivalent fable by the Brothers
Grimm. In this, the hare doesn't nap but speeds ahead. The hedgehog
wins by concealing all his relatives along the route. As each lap
begins the current hedgehog immediately hides and the next one
pops out of concealment just ahead of the hare. This moral is
"Slow and cunning wins the race". Or perhaps: "If at first you don't succeed,
cheat".Above: Yr Ysgyfarnog a'r Crwban, from a series of murals depicting Aesop's fables at Castell Coch, near Cardiff, Wales
Update: Apparently they do. Here's an item from the Corrections and Clarifications column of The Guardian dated 1 March 2005 and referring to a previous article about the evolution of modern turtles: "The accompanying photograph showed a tortoise, distinguished by its domed shell and clawed limbs, but was described in the caption as a turtle. Turtles have flattened shells and flippers. The agency which supplied the photograph captioned it according to the American convention, calling it a turtle."
Just goes to show how few English people are capable of using their own language properly any more.
I invented Hare & Tortoise in 1973, basing it on an original movement
mechanism devised in 1969 for an abortive game called Space Race. (It was
the year of the first moon landing.) Its development was remarkably rapid:
invented 13 October, first played 20 October, revised and replayed 4 November,
play-tested soon after by the Games & Puzzles review panel, and
licensed to Intellect Games (UK), a relatively new company, on 17 December.
Pictured left is the prototype after first revision. (Click to enlarge.)
Haring forwards at great speed, Intellect had it on the shelves by the following
June. The first edition (right) was designed by Shirtsleeve Studio in
Victorian style. In 1975, in the first Game of the Year Award inaugurated by
Games & Puzzles magazine, a readers' poll placed Hare & Tortoise in the Top Ten
after Scrabble, Mastermind, Diplomacy and Monopoly, and ahead of Cluedo.
Unfortunately, Intellect Games was taken over in 1976 by a new company seeking
to establish itself in the games market. Poor management led to the virtual loss of
the game from the UK market, though it continued to rate high in British Game of
the Year polls.
Ravensburger published the award-winning first German edition in 1978 in a design best described as Ruritanian, or fairy-tale romantic. By the end of the year it had become one of Germany's fastest-selling games. Sublicensed to other European manufacturers, the same design appeared in French (Le Lièvre et la Tortue), Dutch (Haas en Schildpad) and Spanish (La Liebre y la Tortuga).
The Italian edition also featured the Ravensburger board and cards, but
surmounted it with this visually garish and conceptually corny box-lid.
Having discovered by now that H&T was not really a kids' game, Ravensburger
produced this more restrained box design for the French edition, which was
also used for their English-language edition published in the USA.
With the demise of Intellect Games, the UK licence was taken up in 1980 by
Waddingtons House of Games, with abysmal design and production values. They seem also to have
sublicensed it to Majora, a Portuguese company. Thomas Malloy kindly sent me a picture of
"A Lebre e a Tartaruga" of which he recently purchased an old, battered copy, and I have
prettied it up for reproduction here.
Waddingtons also produced this promotional version of the game in which carrots were
replaced by glasses of Britvic fruit juice. It would have been nice if they had
sent me a copy (I only managed to get this image courtesy of www.thegamesjournal),
but at least I got some royalties for it.
Then again it was not until November 2009 that I stumbled upon this image of an edition of the game
evidently sublicensed by Waddingtons (who again told me nothing about it) to the Australian
games company John Sands.
Waddingtons also sublicensed the Scandinavian rights to the Swedish games company
Alga, who published it in Swedish, Norwegian (right), Danish, and, I believe,
Finnish ("Jänis ja kilpikonna"), though I have never actually seen the Finnished product.
Alga subsequently smartened up the box design to make it look less like a kids' game. Here's the Swedish version.
I first heard of the pirated Czech edition from Tom Werneck (a founder of the
Spiel des Jahres award), who sent me a black-and-white photocopy of
the box-lid. For a complete set of the real thing (right) I am indebted to the
French games-collector François Haffner, who was kind enough to let me
have it in exchange for one of my only two remaining copies of
Shoulder to
Shoulder. An image of the board can be seen on Haffner's website. An unexplained
curiosity of this game is that lettuces are replaced by apples. Does that mean
Bohemia is a lettuce-free zone?
Another pirated edition was produced by a South American games company called Tipo's. My thanks to Jaime Poniachik of Buenos Aires for this copy.
In 1984 Wolfgang Großkopf, a games enthusiast in the then GDR (German
Democratic Republic, i.e. communist East Germany) home-produced a one-off version
of Hare & Tortoise using standard playing-cards for his hand-made board and
renaming it "Energie". Großkopf similarly reproduced many other
western games that took his fancy, and recently donated his entire collection of
them to the European Society of Game Collectors, whose co-founder and first president Rudolf Rühle I thank for
providing me with these images.
Gibson Games, of whom I then lived within walking distance, took up the UK rights in
1987 and had the happy idea of going back to Shirtsleeve Studio (who designed
the original Intellect version) for a new design. Shirtsleeve responded by
updating it from early to late Victorian. It was for this new edition that I
revised the layout by shifting the first lettuce square from seventh to tenth
away from Start, which experienced players recognise as an obvious improvement.
The German rights reverted to me in 1999 and were taken up
AbacusSpiele (left). Given the self-evident requirement of producing a new and
distinctive design, their designer effected a clever updating that combines
fantasy with modernity.
Back to Ravensburger again (right), nearly 30 years after they first published it!
This one reverts to its most widely known design, but incorporates
the improved layout of 1987 (with the first lettuce on the 10th square) and
some changes to the hare-card instructions that you draw when you land on a
hare square.
In 2010 Gibsons republished the game for the English-language market (left).
Michael Gibson decided, with my agreement, to break away from the traditional
Ruritanian ethos and commissioned Simon Chadwick to produce a design more in
keeping with the intellectual nature of what is essentially an abstract game
with a light thematic dressing up. As it does not reproduce well on the small
scale shown here, it may be worth pointing out that the outline sketches
surrounding the actual race track depict famous English landmarks, including
St
Paul's Cathedral, the Blackpool Tower and The Angel of the North.
- The Games Journal
- Review by Greg Aleknevicus, pictures of boards and boxes, details of different course layouts, analysis and notes on strategy.
- Jeuxsoc
- François Haffner's site is devoted to favourite games from his specialist collection. It includes a substantial page (in French) on Le Lièvre et la Tortue, with many illustrations.
- The Boardgame Geek
- Review and move-by-move accounts of individual games played by the Dallas Metrogamers.
January 2012
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