The same horse-racing board game has been published and republished for decades under at least seven different names — Dubble Kross (1991), The Horse Race Game (2004), Wooden Horse Races Game (2004), Horse Race (2005), The Racing Horse Game (2006), Horse Racing Game (2007) — plus a run of unnamed wood-and-metal editions. Nobody seems to know where it came from or who designed it.
Alexander Bjoy, who got hooked on it, describes a non-game with no input from its players: you don't move the horses, you don't decide when to bet, and you have no say in how any of it plays out. He calls it a "skill-free gambling machine" that "wouldn't require much effort to turn it into a zero-player affair."
Here is how the luck runs. Eleven horse tokens are numbered 2 through 12, and their lanes are different lengths to match dice odds: horse 7 gets the longest lane, while the long-shot 2 and 12 sit two slots from the line. Players hold cards matching the horse numbers. In a Scratch Phase, four horses are knocked out by dice rolls, and the players holding their cards pay escalating penalties into the pot. Then everyone takes turns rolling two dice, and whichever horse matches the total moves up one space. First horse to the end pays out, and players holding its card split the pot.
Bjoy can't explain why the thing exists or why it keeps coming back. "I have no idea," he writes, calling the puzzle of "what on earth is this non-game, where did it come from, and why does it keep being repackaged" the best part of playing it. His verdict: it's "strange, and entertaining, and I love it." He says he'll probably build his own coded version someday.
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