Roll-and-write games flooded the market after the success of titles like Welcome To and Cartographers, and most of them blend together in a haze of sheets and shared dice. Long Shot: The Dice Game, designed by Chris Handy and published by Perplext in 2022, stands apart by building its entire experience around horse racing. Players bet on, influence, and sometimes own horses in a race that unfolds through dice rolls, with each player filling out a personal sheet that tracks their bets, abilities, and investments.
What separates this game from the roll-and-write crowd in community discussion is how much noise it generates at the table. Players report cheering for their horses, groaning when a rival pulls ahead, and experiencing genuine tension as the race approaches its finish. That emotional engagement is unusual for the genre, and it’s the primary reason the game has earned such a loyal following.
The Thrill of the Roll
The betting system is the heart of what makes this game work. Each turn, one player rolls the dice, advancing a specific horse and activating spaces on the track. All players simultaneously choose how to use the roll on their personal sheets, marking off bets, purchasing horses, activating abilities, or collecting bonuses. The shared roll creates a communal experience where everyone reacts to the same event but makes different decisions based on their individual positions.
Horse ownership adds a layer of investment that transforms passive watching into active rooting. When you buy a horse and it starts winning, the payoff feels personal in a way that most abstract games never achieve. The combination of strategic positioning (choosing which horses to invest in) and uncontrollable outcomes (the dice determining which horses advance) mirrors the actual appeal of horse racing surprisingly well.
Player interaction comes through competition for the same horses and bets. When someone buys a horse you were eyeing, it changes your entire calculation. The concession stand spaces allow you to take actions that specifically interact with the race outcome, and managing these limited opportunities creates small but meaningful decisions throughout the game.
Scaling from one to eight players without significant downtime is a genuine achievement. Because everyone acts simultaneously on each roll, adding more players doesn’t slow the game down. The social experience actually improves at higher counts, with more people invested in different outcomes and more cheering when the dice cooperate. Most community feedback identifies four to six as the ideal range, but seven and eight work well if everyone knows the game.
The 20 to 30 minute play time makes it one of the fastest-playing games that still generates memorable moments. Sessions end quickly enough that replays happen naturally, and the race narrative provides a built-in arc from start to finish that gives each game a satisfying structure.
Where the Odds Drop
Strategic depth is genuinely limited. Once you understand the basic framework, the correct decisions in most situations become fairly obvious, with bets on horses near the front being clearly better than long shots (despite the game’s name). Experienced gamers looking for meaningful strategic tension between sessions will find the decision space here thinner than they’d like after a few plays.
Dice luck determines outcomes to a degree that some players find frustrating. If the horses you’ve invested in simply never get rolled, your sheet stagnates while other players advance, and there’s limited ability to mitigate that bad luck. The game includes some tools for hedging your bets, but fundamentally, if the dice don’t cooperate with your chosen horses, you’re going to have a rough race regardless of how well you played.
The horse racing theme, while effective when it clicks, does nothing for players who find the subject matter uninteresting. If the idea of betting on horses doesn’t spark even mild excitement, the game’s emotional engine has nothing to work with. The mechanical framework underneath is solid but not distinctive enough to carry the experience without thematic buy-in.
At two or three players, the communal energy that defines the experience at higher counts dissipates noticeably. The game still functions, but the cheering-and-groaning dynamic that makes Long Shot special requires a critical mass of people invested in different outcomes. Smaller groups may find it pleasant but wonder what all the fuss is about.
Betting on Excitement Over Depth
The smartest thing Long Shot: The Dice Game does is prioritize emotional engagement over strategic complexity. Many roll-and-write designers focus on creating clever optimization puzzles, and the genre is full of games that are satisfying to solve but forgettable to experience. Long Shot goes the other direction, building a game where the decisions are relatively straightforward but the emotional payoff of those decisions is unusually high. The horse you own crossing the finish line feels like a victory in a way that filling in an optimal row on a grid never quite matches.
Should You Play Long Shot: The Dice Game?
This game shines with groups of four to eight who enjoy social games with a competitive edge. If your table lights up during shared-experience games where everyone reacts to the same events, Long Shot will be a hit. It works well as a gateway game for non-gamers, as an opener or closer for game nights, and as a go-to option when you need something that plays fast with a large group.
Skip it if you want deep strategic decisions, if the horse racing theme leaves you cold, or if you primarily play at two. The magic of this game is in the shared experience, and that requires enough people at the table to create the energy the design depends on.
The Verdict on Long Shot: The Dice Game
Long Shot: The Dice Game proves that a roll-and-write can be loud, dramatic, and memorable. The horse racing theme provides an emotional framework that makes dice results feel consequential, and the simultaneous play keeps games moving even at high player counts. It won’t satisfy the optimization crowd, and it needs four or more players to reach its potential. But when the conditions are right, this is one of the most purely fun experiences the genre has produced.