One of my favorite games of all time is Pocket Card Jockey, a 2016 3DS game that combines solitaire, horse racing, and some incidental life lessons.
You’re the rookie jockey on the scene, you’re impatient, and all you want is to make it to the biggest race around. You meet a trainer and demand to ride the best horse, convinced that you have what it takes to be a champion. You’re given access to a prized racehorse and told to train. You try to force this horse to do as you say and are quickly bucked off, trampled, and come face to face with an angel. You’ve died.
Here’s where the game opens up and is honest about what it really is. Both the main character and the angel realize that as a jockey, our impatient rookie doesn’t have what it takes to win The Big Race right now and so they’re asked if they have anything else that they like or any hidden talents. The rookie hesitates, but then declares that they’ve been playing a lot of solitaire recently, but they’re not especially gifted. A contract is formed between the two and it’s decided that as long as they can play solitaire well, they’ll race well and eventually be able to win.
Pocket Card Jockey is about raising better and better horses to win races that you run by playing solitaire. But it’s also, in my experience, a game about being bad and learning to be okay with that. You raise your horses and take on each new race as they come to you, but often you’ll be up against horses that are much faster, stronger, and just all around better than what you’re bringing to the track. When you come up against one of these scenarios you’ll likely push your horse as far as they can go, use up all their stamina and still come up short. Or you’ll have bad placement during the homestretch and be boxed in by other slow horses when you know in your heart of hearts that you could have taken 1st place.
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The horse host with the most, Horse-Off-Course |
A friendly, but potentially annoying NPC companion will pop up at the end of the race to let you know what you did wrong and after the third or fourth time, you’ll click away from his advice without seeing what he has to say. But sometimes you’ll end a race and this same NPC, Horse-Off-Course, who is of course a horse, will tell you that you did everything right. His post-race summary will be that you and your horse ran hard and didn’t mess up at any crucial points, you were just outclassed and outplayed, and hopefully you’ll get ‘em next time. This can definitely be infuriating to read when you were so close to winning a new race or this was your last chance before your horse matured or retired, but after awhile it can become a nice mantra to play by. There are no real last chances in Pocket Card Jockey, no limits on how many horses you can breed or race throughout your time with this title, and no particularly punishing penalties for screwing up. You might feel bad losing a race, but it always comes back around.
I’ve played a lot of Pocket Card Jockey and I might say I’m good at it, but being good at this game doesn’t necessarily look like having a stable of godlike horses and winning every race, though it could. For me being good is accepting a loss and moving on to the next race without too much fuss, maybe raising my current horse with the next generation in mind. The trophies are nice and you’re rewarded with cute images for every 1st place you get under your belt, but even if a single horse’s career ends without a victory I still had a fun time playing solitaire, racing horses, and accepting that sometimes I'm kinda bad at both.
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