In a short time period Pocket Card Jockey has gained a reputation for its complex array of mechanics that require a long-winded tutorial period. In that complexity lies the key to why I loved my time with the game, but how the long-term strategy forced me to play in ways I didn’t want to.

You begin as a jockey at the start of your career, riding many horses over the course of this career seeking to win races. The races are categorised and gated by: distance, required age, gender of horse, and prestige. The main overall goal being to win all 21 G1 races (the hardest and most prestigious races).

To achieve this goal you must master the mechanics of the game’s three distinct types of play: the game of solitaire, the race, and horse management. You start each race with a simple hand of solitaire. Unearthing the best of six cards will provide you with more unity power (used to determine the speed of your horse on the final sprint) but a slower start will leave you out of your horse’s comfort zone, and a poorer passive unity power gain throughout. The race then flip flops between more games of solitaire and race management.

Here, you position your horse on the course. Being close to the inside on a turn burns less stamina, but being on the outside provides you an easier hand of solitaire. You try to weave around other horses into the path of all manner of power up cards, but these must then be won in the following hand of solitaire. You sit in your favourite comfort zone to gain more unity power, but at the cost of a harder game of solitaire.

And finally as you round the last corner, the unity power you have gained gets converted into enthusiasm. You play stamina cards that still remain, and the boost cards you won along the way, you are neck and neck with your opponent, you inch ahead, and...you win! You performed well, got yourself some luck of the draw, and played your cards to pull away on the home stretch. But was it all worth it?

Maybe not, as the issue I have with the game is that those three types of play: solitaire, race, and horse management, don’t always coalesce. The main culprit here is that those cards you collected to help you in the race, they also help develop your horse’s stats. You begin developing a horse as a colt at 2 years old and have 2 years worth of races before they come of age. At this point, the horse’s stats are locked in and they cannot be further developed. So when you are racing with a fully grown horse, it's a no brainer. Use the cards you collected in the race to help you come in first place. But if that horse is still developing, the situation is different.

Before coming of age you will race a horse about 10-12 times. As this is the only time for improving your horse’s stats, it makes strategic sense to focus on collecting cards but doing so will often cost you the race, and simply isn’t fun. Many of my races with colts end with me being hopelessly being overtaken on the final stretch because I feel forced to refrain from using any of my boost cards, knowing it’ll help me develop my horse in the long run if I save them.

Their just doesn’t seem to be many reasons to try to win with a colt. Prize money is next to irrelevant as the price of race-helping items inflates hugely after a couple of hours play, and even if you are performing poorly, the horse’s owner often just throws money at you try to get a win. Some wins come accidentally, and some G1 races can only be won as a 2 or 3 year-old, but once you have won those races, the first couple of years with every new colt become a grind of counterintuitive min-maxing.

Instead of playing the best race I could, I often found myself running on the outside to try and get an easier hand of solitaire. Perfecting a hand in a level 3 comfort zone enables “Jin Ba It Tai”, which sucks in all nearby cards, but expending energy to move to the outside of the track likely costs you the race.

The game’s breeding mechanics also promote dull short term play for long term gains. Match two fully grown horses to breed some new colts to start developing, but that requires both a male and female horse. In my game the colt generation just wasn't producing any decent female horses. The result was that I had to grind development of female horses for two generations before I had one even remotely matched with my best male horse.

And all this would actually be tolerable if not for all these parts to the game being kept separate by poorly designed menus. Instead of everything being contained to a central career hub the game is split into growth mode, mature mode, and the farm. Each is segregated, forcing you to back out to the main menu to switch between them. Couple this with the fact that you can only develop one colt in growth mode at a time, makes me feel less like I’m creating my stables and building towards winning trophies, but instead just working on one horse at a time, hoping to finally get good enough to take down the big guns.

I can’t stress how much fun I have in races when I’m trying to win. After internalising the complex mechanics there are exhilarating situations of quick decision making when playing solitaire, and tactical risk reward maneuvering during a race. However the game fails where strategy games like XCOM and Total War succeed in the combination of gameplay at different discrete levels. I want to develop better horses, but not at the cost of trying to win races.

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This is the first time I have written anything remotely long about a game, so if anyone is willing I would love some feedback or discussion. Hopefully I did a decent enough job of explaining the mechanics of the game throughout, it's pretty weird!