HARE & TORTOISE RIDES AGAIN!

Hase und Igel (literally Hare and Hedgehog, the German equivalent of Hare & Tortoise) is to re-enter the Ravensburger fold after spending time in a different format with Abacus Games.

Ravensburger first published the game in 1979 in a design that proved to be everybody's favourite and helped it win the first ever Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award.

For this new edition Ravensburger are reverting to the rustic style of their original design but are also incorporating two significant modifications that will make it, as far as I'm concerned, the definitive edition.

First, it will use 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 - completely new for 2008 - concerns the method of "jugging the hare". I've already discussed the problems with this feature on the Hare & Tortoise Rules page so needn't rehearse them again here. Instead, I'll explain what I've done, what has led me to it, and why I think I've found a happy compromise between the two different approaches.

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 new 2008 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.

There are two of each card except the last, making a total of 15.

Ravensburger will be launching the new edition at the Nürnberg Toy Fair, 7 - 12 February 2008. I hope by that time to have news about an English-language edition.