Pocket Card Jockey

Genre: Card Game (Solitaire) / Sports (Horse Racing)

Players: 1

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Review:

Pocket Card Jockey, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2016, is an odd combination of Solitaire and Horse Racing created by Game Freak, a developer best known for the Pokemon franchise. And if that last sentence had you scratching your head, you’re not alone, as this not only seems like a bizarre combination of genre, topic matter, and developer, but an even stranger one to somehow find its way to a Western release. However, perhaps the most strange thing about this game is that… it all kinda’ works?

In this game, players take the role of a young, headstrong aspiring jockey looking to make a name for himself on the horse racing circuit. The only problem? He’s not actually all that good with horses, apparently. As the jockey tries to train a horse for their first big race, the jockey is tossed from the saddle and promptly dies, only to be rescued by an angel who’s inspired by the jockey’s passion, and asks the jockey if there’s anything they actually are good at. Apparently, the only thing the jockey could come up with was Solitaire of all things, so the angel ties the jockey’s performance in the saddle to his Solitaire-playing skills, and brings him back to life with the declaration that his revival will only remain permanent if the jockey succeeds in his dreams of horse racing victory.

It’s a bizarre, kooky setup that seems like it was designed solely to give the game an excuse to combine these two very disparate gameplay elements, but it is to Pocket Card Jockey’s credit that its silly charm manages to pull off this absurdity.

This is helped by the game’s simple but appealing presentation, with simple cartoonish 2D characters and colorful settings, with an art style that reminded me of the WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven franchises. This is backed by a whimsical soundtrack that fits the game’s quirky themes well enough, albeit without being especially memorable.

For the gameplay, players mostly interact with the game by playing a version of Solitaire that’s roughly similar to the Solitaire Card game Putt Putt (itself a variant of the Solitaire game Golf). Players clear cards from the tableau by selecting cards that are immediately higher or lower than the current top card of the waste pile, ideally aiming to clear the entire tableau from the screen. At different points in the game you have variations of this, such as a quick start version where players only have a few seconds to play and try to unveil a high-point card to get a good start to a race.

Individual games of Solitaire would go by pretty quickly even if there wasn’t a timer at the bottom pushing players to hurry up, however they don’t exist in a vacuum – playing well in these games improves the mood and stamina of the player’s horse, and unlocks single-use abilities to help players during the race. What’s more, between Solitaire games, players must decide on a path for their horse to take through the crowd of competitors, try to find the optimum spot in the crowd to conserve energy, or opt to stay in the same relative position to conserve energy directly. This sort of race track strategizing ensures that the horse racing element of this game is more than a theme slapped onto a card game.

There is one other thing I should mention here, an odd quirk of the game that’s something of an annoyance – once a race starts, you cannot pause the game in any way, not even shutting the 3DS. Doing so counts as an automatic loss. This seems like a needlessly frustrating element, and I cannot imagine why it was included here, except perhaps to enhance the urgency of each race, I dunno.

Still, odd quirks aside, Pocket Card Jockey largely succeeds in its odd pairing of Solitaire and Horse Racing. This unusual pairing of elements may make this seem like a niche game, but the mix of elements here is well-done and enjoyable enough that I think anyone looking for a fairly unique Nintendo 3DS game would do well to check this out.

tl;dr – Pocket Card Jockey is a game that combines Horse Racing and Solitaire, and as odd of a combo as that may seem, it actually works quite well, with both halves of the formula playing an important role in the gameplay. If you’re looking for a quirky and unique game on Nintendo 3DS, this one is well worth playing.

Grade: B

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