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HARE & TORTOISE RIDES AGAIN!
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New Ravensburger edition 2008
New Gibsons edition 2010
The latest edition of both the German and the English game incorporates two significant modifications that make it, as far as I'm concerned, definitive.
First, it uses the re-arrangement of the race-track layout introduced in 1987 for the Gibson Games edition and repeated in 2000 by Abacus. Pretty well everybody agreed that this was a great improvement on the original arrangement of 1974 and 1979.
The second modification concerns the method of "jugging the hare". I've already discussed the problems with this feature on the Hare & Tortoise Rules page, so here I need only explain what the new system is.
Jugging the hare
The new method reverts to drawing the top card from a pack of Hare Cards and obeying the instruction printed on it, as introduced by Ravensburger in 1979. In the old version, however, these instructions failed to make a distinction between hares and tortoises, so it turned out to be equally worth while (or not) to land on a hare square regardless of whether you were ahead or behind. In the 2008 version, as you will see from the table below, I have found a way of combining the hare vs tortoise differential with the convenience of simply drawing a card and following an instruction.
In drawing up these instructions, I have also taken into account various criticisms and suggestions made by Hare & Tortoise players in the on-line board games newsgroup (rec.games.board) under the heading "Thinking out loud about the Hare Spaces" initiated by Kevin J Maroney in October 2006.
The strongest criticism related to the most powerful eventuality, namely the one that entitled you to treat your hare square as a lettuce square. Everyone agreed this was too strong and manifestly unfair on the others, so I've now abolished it. While I was at it, I also abolished all instructions that prompted you to move forwards or backwards to another square, since doing so very often changed your relative position in the race and could consequently spoil other players' carefully calculated strategic plans. Such instructions had the further disadvantage of requiring elaborate rules to cover cases where the square you were invited to move to was occupied by someone else.
As you will see from the following revised set of instructions appearing in the latest edition, jugging the hare now has only the effect of increasing or decreasing the number of carrots you hold. Furthermore, these instructions tend to favour tortoises rather than hares, which always was my original intention.
| Instruction | Clarification |
|---|---|
| Give 10 carrots to each player lying behind you in the race (if any) | (a) If you haven't enough carrots, give them five each; if still not
possible, one each. (b) A player who doesn't want extra carrots may throw them to the carrot patch |
| If there are more players behind you than in front of you, miss a turn. If not, play again | (If equal, of course, play again) |
| Restore your carrot holding to exactly 65 | If you have more than 65, pay extras to the carrot patch; if fewer, draw extras from the carrot patch |
| Draw 10 carrots for each lettuce you still hold | If you have none left, miss a turn |
| Free ride! | Your last turn costs nothing: retrieve the carrots you paid to reach this square |
| Lose half your carrots | If an odd number, keep the odd one |
| Show us your carrots! | Count your carrot cards face up to the table so that everyone will know how many you have left |
| Shuffle the hare cards and receive from each player 1 carrot for doing so | Do not replace this card at the bottom of the pack but include it in the shuffle |
There are two of each card except the last, making a total of 15.
August 2010
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