Alexander Shen’s Race Day is a pleasant little journey

 Alexander Shen has described their puzzles and games as maybe not the best sandwich but still a sandwich and one you wouldn’t give a one-star review of. I think that explains the appeal of their work very well.

Seriously, Shen is like that hole-in-the-wall diner that you go to regularly. It may not be an event to go there but you eat more burgers there than you go out for steak. It’s comfort food gaming and I feel like if PnP were more mainstream, Shen would be a go-to designer 

Race Day is a pretty good example of this. It doesn’t do anything that will surprise you. Instead, you look at it, know where you stand and you’re good to go.

Race Day is an 18-card PnP solitaire game. Each card shows Sadie Cat (reoccurring character in Shen games) along with two of her friends with a winding path leading from each of them. 

Shuffle up the deck. Lay down three cards so that each character is at the start of their path. It’s a tile-laying game and you now have three rows you can build off of.

On each round, you will draw five cards and play three of them. They go opposite end to the start cards so the paths end on the characters. You play three rounds, going through the entire deck.

At the end of the game, only the rows where all three paths begin and end on the same character score points. A nice touch is that you don’t have to play a card on each row each round. In fact, the highest scoring combination is to successfully use all nine cards on one row.

Race Day is kind of solveable. Each card shows up three times in the deck. Since you get to discard two cards each turn, you get to filter through the deck. The biggest random factor is what the three starting cards will be. 

Instead of bothering me, this turns Race Day into more of a puzzle that I can noodle around with. Putting patterns together and adjusting to the random elements. To be fair, a lot of solitaire games have puzzle elements. (Shen has also created just straight puzzles as well as games) In fact, I more often play with personal victory conditions, like making one long row or having every row be scoreable.

Race Day isn’t a challenging work. Instead, it’s a relaxing one that’s using ideas that are familiar. It has become a game I’ll pull out so I can chill out. That’s the case for me with many Shen games and puzzles.