A Lame Horse

With a setting of the Wild West frontier, Dark Horse is a resource allocation game rather in the mold of Kingsburg (assuming you've played that). Each round, every player rolls two dice, and then in turn allocates those dice to acquiring resources in different ways. Those resources are in turn used to build out your network of towns on a hex board, all trying to maximize your points for a fast approaching endgame.

A designer I'm unfamiliar with, Don Lloyd, is the man behind Dark Horse, and every one of the design decisions he has made here is something of a double-edged sword. In the family of dice-rolling resource games, Dark Horse is about the shortest game I've played. It's shorter even than the typical game of Settlers of Catan due to the lack of any trading component between players. The box claims the game can be as fast as 30 minutes, and while the time I played took twice as long as that, it did involve more than one new player. I can see that run time shrinking down.

On the other hand, dice are fickle things. Part of what makes their inclusion in games like Settlers of Catan and Kingsburg work is that they get thrown a lot in those games. Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), enough dice are rolled over the course of those games to flatten out the statistics and make an expected curve of results. By crushing Dark Horse down into a such a short game, there's no real opportunity for statistics to win out. So it's possible -- as I experienced firsthand -- for you to get on a bad rolling streak that doesn't end for the entire run of the short but quite unfun game.

In short, I had a pretty bad experience playing Dark Horse. It wasn't so bad that I'd refuse to play again... though if I had a second experience like the first, I probably would refuse after that. I'd sooner recommend Kingsburg, with all its flaws.