A unique concept for a game, horse racing but you gotta be good at solitare so your horse goes faster.

Gets repetitive pretty fast, also it immediately kills your character you make at the beginning and then says your character will go to heck for eternity if you don't succeed in the goal of winning the big tournament. Which i take as a threat.

6/10

If y'all are thinking that this is a helluva lot easier than the original, try changing the difficulty to Tough.
Still too easy? Try to get all Blue-base trophies by clearing them on Tough, too!.
STILL not enough? Get the Red-base trophies by clearing them on Tough while also dealing with the special condition.

Even despite a couple of performance hitches, this game is still real good. Game Freak seems to have given the FR/LG treatment to their OG.

Computer, generate a niche game.

If you've ever played one of those "make-your-own-game" games like Game Dev Story or Game Dev Tycoon or Mad Games Tycoon or any of the millions of fucking Kairosoft knock-offs out there, you're familiar with how the real-world game design process tends to be abstracted into gameplay. In order to keep things from getting too complicated, these tycoon games usually have a design pipeline which asks the player to combine a "genre" tag with a "theme" tag. The more "appropriate" the combination of tags, the better your fictional game tends to sell. Mixing "action" with "shooter" is almost universally a safe pick, as is something like "simulation" with "motorsports". Where you'll fall into the weeds, however, is when you decide to get experimental; making an "action farming" game or an "extreme sports RPG" tends to guarantee little more than poor sales and middling reviews. I played Game Dev Story a lot growing up, and it always annoyed me that what I thought were the most interesting and unique combinations always resulted in something that capped out around mediocre. I had game dev aspirations of my own — among other ideas, like being an astronaut or a lawyer — and I vowed that on the day that I could start running a studio of my own, I would never turn down even the wildest of ideas. I would play them, and support them, and make sure that everybody knew how good they truly were.

And I don't especially enjoy this horse-racing solitaire game.

My biggest gripe just comes down to the fact that what we have here is a fairly uninteresting horse racing game standing alongside a fairly uninteresting solitaire game, and the two exist in distinct and separate layers like how oil sits on water. Racing the horse seems to be the primary gameplay element — you can fail to full-clear the solitaire minigame and it doesn't count as a loss, with wins and losses instead coming down to the result of the actual race — but the horse's performance being abstracted into the solitaire minigame really doesn't feel as though it accomplishes much. There's no harmony between these systems. You do solitaire to make the horse run faster and more efficiently, but you could slot any sort of minigame in here and nothing would change. If this was Pocket Sudoku Racer or Pocket Slide Puzzle Racer, the core of racing the horses would remain wholly untouched. How close you got to finishing the minigame before the timer runs out or your deck empties gives you a boost or a penalty, but there are a dozen different games you could substitute in here without noticing a difference. The solitaire game and the horse racing game are hardly reliant on the other, nor does one make the other shine; they just exist together, each acting as an interruption of whatever the last mode of gameplay was.

Of course, Pocket Card Racer isn’t bad, but I don’t believe it to be especially good. The solitaire minigame is decent enough for an hour or two, and the raising of the horses implies that there’s going to be a lot more depth to the racing than there actually is, and it’s all okay. It’s a vehicle to play solitaire as filtered through the lens of being a jockey who’s whipping a horse named Nintendo Biggs on the final stretch of the track. There are far better and far worse ways to play golf solitaire. Grab a deck and imagine a horse running in your mind while you do it. Put on one of the tracks from the game to really immerse yourself, because they’re bangers. You’d get a comparable experience and save yourself some cash.

This is the kind of game that’s going to hit at an exact intersection of what an incredibly small group of people have been begging for all of their lives.

This was one of the games that I heard about after the 3DS eShop closed and I was disappointed I didn't get to check it out. I was very happy when it shadowdropped for the Switch.

One of the thoughts I had while playing the first few tutorial races was "this is brilliant". Now that I'm 9 hours in, I still agree. The mechanics all work very well together, and there are many factors to consider during a race before deciding what to do next.

It's always fun to come up with different strategies and tweak them based on your current horse's age and abilities. I find that no matter what, it's very important to pick up a card with a heart on it at the starting gate. This will conserve your horse's stamina for the first part of the race. It seems that if I don't get one of these cards, I end up losing because my horse runs out of steam.

No matter what strategy you choose, your horse's performance in the race will depend on your solitaire performance. I hadn't played solitaire in years before picking this up, so I enjoyed relearning it and gradually getting better. Every real-life day, you can play a round of solitaire with no time limit and win an item to use in a race if you get a perfect score. This serves as a great refresher before you get into a race.

The tutorial races at the beginning of the game and the pointers you get whenever you lose a race are helpful, and there is an in-game guide full of extra information. However, I do wish some things were explained when you first encounter them in a race, such as junk cards. Also, besides horse breeding and raising foals, pretty much all of the game's mechanics are introduced in the first hour.

The horses themselves are adorable, and it's fun collecting different variants. Coming up with names for them never gets old, and neither does reading the names of other horses you're racing against. There are cool and intimidating-sounding names as well as silly names like Shampoo Hat and Mocket Ponster.

This simple gameplay loop is extremely fun, and I found myself surprised that I was racking up hours in this game faster than my prized racehorse, Spectral Omnibus, racked up G1 trophies.

I've got to come clean, here. I'm not really into most horse racing games. I mean, I like the idea, but pretty much everything I've tried has been really stat-heavy and management focused. They generally seem tailored towards those who are heavily invested in gambling, and following the fine details of what makes a reliable bet, rather than those who just want to play a nice horsey game. There are exceptions. Obviously, I'm really into the horse stuff in the Zelda and Red Dead Redemption games, if I'm ever lucky enough to come across a Final Furlong cabinet, that's a great day, and for all the convoluted design elements that comprise Bomberman Fantasy Race, there's a really fun arcade horse racing game at the heart of it (even if the horses are cartoon kangaroos and bipedal rhinoceroses). For a straight-up good horse racing game, though, I've never found anything that could compete with Pocket Card Jockey.

Its premise is actually quite relatable for me. Your protagonist wants to be able to win horse races, but has no aptitude for it. They're better at card games. Through a deal with god, you're allowed to compete in horse races via the medium of quick-fire games of solitaire.

This isn't just a fun facade to put on the front of a card game, though. It's not like a licenced pachinko or pinball machine with funny animations. This is a horse racing game first, and a solitaire game second. You choose a good horse based on their natural statistics, develop their skills as much as you can in each race, and attempt to carry them through a career before they grow too old and get sent to the farm to produce offspring. Between each game of solitaire, you'll need to decide where best to line them up with the rest of the pack to maintain speed and stamina, while sticking close to the inside lane for oncoming corners. You're making decisions as a jockey, and relying on your abilities as a card shark to stay competitive.

The solitaire stuff is dead simple, but deliberately so. Cards are arranged randomly in the tableau in front of you, with you drawing cards at random from your deck. If your drawn card is one number higher or lower than the one on top of a stack, you can remove it from the game. Clear the board quickly, and your stamina loss will be negligible. Don't clear it in time, or run out of cards before all the cards are removed, and you'll really feel the impact. One bad hand can ruin an entire career, and you'll be struggling to make anything of your horse before it's time to move to a new one.

It's how frequently your focus is shifted that makes Pocket Card Jockey so addictive. In the heat of each solitaire game, your whole attention is on drawing the right numbers, and looking out for good sequences of cards to leave on the table for a big combo down the line. Then you zoom out, and you're back to the race, watching stats and trying to find the best place to set yourself. Then you zoom out further, and you're looking at your horse's career, trying to pick the best races to put them in, and buying items to boost their abilities. And you can zoom out further still, trying to make sure you've got a good horse waiting for you afterwards, and picking out good breeding pairs. There's constant distractions, but that sense of momentum never goes away. It's all headed in the trajectory of becoming a champion.

This is all well and good, but what really holds Pocket Card Jockey together is its charm. If you hadn't known already, this is a Game Freak joint. While they're, understandably, most known for Pokémon, I feel their true character comes through most in their independent games, like Jerry Boy, HarmoKnight and Pulseman. They're relentlessly creative, and have a history of consistently lovable titles with great art, music and writing behind them. Pocket Card Jockey is a surprisingly funny game, and can blindside you with its dialogue and characters, while maintaining a friendly, unassuming appearance. It isn't afraid to go full shonen anime for the more intense races, transporting your steed into a neon-filled techno dimension as you rapidly draw cards looking for a 7 to place on a board full of 6s and 8s. Something like this could easily become dry and predictable, but Game Freak have enough tricks up their sleeve to make sure you're always having a good time.

Pocket Card Jockey was initially a 3DS eShop game, and was later revived as the Apple Arcade mobile title, 'Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On'. That's the game that's been ported to Switch. There isn't too much to distinguish between the two games, with the bulk of content, including the script, horses and races, being pulled from that original 3DS entry, though the fully modelled 3D races are a flashy new tweak. There are some low-level changes to the ruleset beyond that, but after a race or two, you'll forget all about them. The real change is how the game has been reconfigured for a single-screen format, and subsequently, a home console. The sacrifices are comparable to Splatoon or Mario Maker's Switch sequels, without a second screen to provide useful information. It also plays a lot slower with a pad than a stylus, with a lot of the design clearly tailored towards a touchscreen, though you don't have to give that up if you're playing in handheld mode. The controls have been mapped quite carefully for those who do opt for the big screen experience, though, and there's a real satisfaction in flicking the right analogue stick to draw a new card. It's not a game that works as well here as it did on the 3DS, but they're trying their best.

Be honest with yourself, though. Are you really going back to play your 3DS on the reg again? If you are, good for you. I'm sure you'll enjoy the original. For the rest of us, we're much more inclined to turn to the Switch when it's time to play a game, and it's great to have Pocket Card Jockey as one of our selectable games. It's welcoming, cheap, compelling, and sessions can run from five minutes to all day, depending on what you're willing to put in to it. Look at my top five favourite games, and you'll see that four of them are available to play on the Switch. In a robust library of all-time classics, it's really great to see Pocket Card Jockey come into the fold.

I would like to thank Game Freak for bringing my Switch out of retirement. Not for Pokemon, but for their actual best game. Freed from the void that is "Apple Arcade", Pocket Card Jockey finally reaches a current audience that'll actually play their game. Well, with Game Freak's reputation in the gutter, maybe that's less likely as of late, but I'll take whatever Ws I can get here. Horse racing and solitaire sounds like a very "peanut butter and tuna fish"-tier combination, but it's executed seamlessly. There's a careful balancing act between the horse racing and the solitaire, their systems constantly feed back into each other.

Solitaire is simplified down to matching your current card with one that's one step higher or lower off the play field. Here's a quick refresher on how to count, if you need it. There's an inarguable aspect of luck in not knowing what cards are coming next in the deck, but in Pocket Card Jockey, solitaire is about playing proactively. Chain together cards to clear out large chunks of the field in one swoop, leave certain cards alone so you have a higher chance of being able to make use of the next card you draw, that sort of thing. It's about working around the luck. Frantically dancing up and down the field, clearing out entire waves of cards, it's a feeling like no other. Also, perfectly clearing out the field in a Level 3 zone gives you Super Unity, which causes the dopamine receptors to fire on all cylinders (and turn your horse into an invincible card vacuum).

In between rounds of solitaire, you get a chance to move your horse. There are bonus cards you can try to pick up that accelerate your horse's growth, but you're ideally aiming for the one of three comfort zone levels. Higher levels mean harder games of solitaire, but significantly better rewards. Leftover energy not used in movement can be manually converted into "motivation", a culmination of your performance during a race. Movement can be the most luck-based part of the whole game if your motivation isn't high enough. You can try to lead your own horse to water, but if there's another, more motivated horse in your way, you can probably forget about trying to get your horse to drink. The other horse's movements are also completely unpredictable. You're given all the information necessary to make an informed move, but sometimes The best you can do is watch the comfort zone radar and pray.

Game Freak carries over their Pokemon breeding expertise by letting your horses mate, having offspring inherit stats and beneficial skills. Yep, skills. Some of them affect your horse, but most of them directly benefit your solitaire games, like one that gives you a larger card stock, or another that yoinks the last card off the field for free. With careful planning (and a bit of luck), you too can raise your very own super horse! I kinda fell out of grace with nicknaming Pokemon (along with disowning the franchise in general), but I love nicknaming my horses. The in-game names are absurd, so I don't feel too bad about letting my gamer brain let loose. Hold on, I gotta check in on Robert Cop and Doctor Meow; oh my lord, it's a filly, and she's cracked.

Game's got Pokemon-tier music courtesy of a certain primary Pokemon composer, Go Ichinose. He brings us bangers that sound like a classy gambling parlor in fast-forward, with some funky jams, and a JRPG final boss theme (minor volume warning). Again, horse racing and solitaire. The art style is simplistic, with thick, rounded edges. Everyone manages to have a distinct design, including the variety of unique horses. Love their stubby legs and huge noses. Gotta raise 'em all and fill out my Horsédex.

Anywho, G1 trophies are the main macguffin, and you get a new story scene after collecting a certain amount of them. To see the ending, you need most of them. To see the credits roll, you need all of them, which is definitely a tall order. I wasn't sure that I was up to the task of doing it all again, but I managed to do it anyways. It's really hard to put this game down! The Switch version also has a few much-needed QoL changes, like letting you put your current horse on hold to raise another, and having your funds all be drawn from the same pool. On the 3DS, winnings were tied to each horse's owner, which was absurdly inconvenient. The UI during races has more info to parse than the 3DS version while still being perfectly readable at a glance.

The one big thing holding this game back is the Switch itself. No, it's not because the game is poorly optimized (it kinda is) or that the Switch is underpowered (it is, but that's irrelevant here). The real issue is that using the touch screen is still the most natural control scheme for this game, but the Switch doesn't share the one-handed form factor of the 3DS (or an Apple device, for that matter). You thought Kid Icarus: Uprising gave you hand cramps? Try holding a Switch with one hand for extended periods of time. The button controls they implemented for this version work, but they're not ideal in a pinch. You're certainly not beating any speed records while playing like that. Buying a mesh stylus and playing in handheld is basically the only way to go, in my eyes.

I know a lot of people have recently gained a gambling addiction through games like Buckshot Roulette and Balatro, but Game Freak has done me one better(?) by causing me to relapse on an addiction that started eight years ago on my 3DS. People are about to sleep on this game again, and it's gonna keep me up at night. Pocket Card Jockey is just a taste of what Game Freak can do when divorced from Pokemon, something we always need more of.

I love this silly little horse card game.

Played it on Switch basically every day since it came out. Yeah I know that's only since like January but that's a long time for me. Kinda gettin bored of it now, so it'll probably be a long time (like a week) before I pick it up again.

The economy of time in my life is an enigma.

More fun than I thought it'd be, but it doesn't really explain itself well. There's a lot of loading and I think it'd be nice if there a few more QoL improvements like better explanations, the ability to access the shop and use items whenever, being able to cancel a race if you entered on accident, and more on-screen elements to convey info during a race. It definitely feels like a 3DS game ported to the Switch with its UI too. I don't regret spending money on it, but I felt like I saw the bulk of what the game has to offer within 10 minutes.

Marking as 'finished' since I beat Top Jockeys for the first time after about 30 hours. Pocket Card Jockey is just flat-out great game looping. There's a good amount of variance & randomness to prevent it from getting too monotonous, although I think the difficulty curve is tuned just sliiightly too high for the amount of randomness – no clue how much, if any, balancing they adjusted from the original 3DS version but it doesn't feel like they changed much there. Foals also feel a little irrelevant compared to several premades that Just Work at an equal level to some of my best foals, though I'm not sure how much my foals will start to get juiced up after breeding some from my Top Jockeys winner, could be significant. All in all, very unchanged from the 3DS version (except for the fantastic new 3d graphics) and that's a great thing. Razor-sharp localization, too – just one of the most raw fun games I've ever played.