Solitaire usually bores me. It's a basic, downright stale card game I lost interest in by the time Windows 98 rolled around. That's why I was surprised to find myself playing it almost constantly on my Nintendo 3DS ($320.00 at Amazon) . Pocket Card Jockey takes the simple solitaire formula and adds some very light JRPG and sports elements to create a remarkably addictive experience. At $6.99, it is a perfect time-killer.

The premise is predictably silly. You're an aspiring jockey who must play hands of solitaire while racing to make your horse perform well. It's a lighthearted, anime-inspired framing device that informs everything about the game besides the cards themselves. The small cast of characters include your kindly manager and horse trainer, a cute Japanese traveling salesgirl who provides items that can offer help during races, and a handful of wealthy, eccentric horse owners to please, including a slacker rich kid, an idol singer, and a mad scientist.

Playing With Yourself

Racing consists of two to six hands of solitaire, depending on the length of the race. The form of solitaire is a simplified version of Klondike, the classic solitaire best known for being included in Windows since its early days. You start with any card at the bottom of any of the columns of cards, and work your way from there by finding cards of adjacent value. Each card you tap disappears from the screen, and you win when you clear all of the face-up cards from the screen. If you can't, the remaining cards hurt your horse's mood and performance. Most solitaire hands also have a timer, so there's a definite sense of pressure on top of everything.

Several traditional Klondike rules are ignored or changed to make the game much faster paced. Every card lies face up in each column, letting you plan strings of taps to quickly clear large chunks of the screen. You don't have to worry about alternating colors, or what suit each card is. You don't need to carefully arrange stacks on the tableau (the main arrangement of cards in a solitaire game), while digging out the lowest value cards to put them in the foundation (the goal piles of cards in a solitaire game). It's much simpler than that: Tap a card that's one increment above or below the last card you tapped, and it will disappear. Then repeat until the cards are all gone.

This might sound like Pocket Card Jockey makes solitaire too easy, but it really isn't the case. The game certainly isn't as strategic or deliberate as Klondike, but it allows for a much, much faster pace that keeps it engaging. You have to choose your cards quickly but carefully, and plan ahead based on what card is in what column. When you have multiple choices between the available cards and your remaining stock, you have to plot out which choice will result in a longer chain of sequential cards.

Equestrian Tactics

The results of each hand don't directly affect your horse's place in the race. Instead, they feed directly into a strategic layer that makes each race a matter of tactics, as much as cards. Winning hands give bonuses like improving your horse's mood, boosting its unity power (explained below), and most importantly, preventing any stamina drain in the next section of track.

Horses are governed by their unity power, energy, stamina, and mood. Unity power is how much you can push your horse, and is determined by how well you play the quick-draw hand at the start of each race, and whether you ride in your horse's comfort zone (the place in the pack where each horse feels comfortable running, like the front of the pack of in the middle of it). Energy is how fast your horse runs in the home stretch, the ultimate factor that determines whether you win the race. Stamina is whether the horse can run all-out in the home stretch or if it will get tired, and whether you can push it for bursts of speed. Finally, the horse's mood determines how well you can convert unity power into energy, and makes the horse break out into an uncontrolled and stamina-draining run if it suffers.

Between each hand, you can draw a path on the lower screen to guide the horse through the pack, ideally to navigate it into a spot where it feels the most comfortable and can build up energy and unity power. You can't move your horse just anywhere, though; its unity power drains based on how long you make it navigate (the length of the line), and its energy determines whether it can push horses aside and follow their path or will simply go flying, knocked several lengths away from its position by the more energetic horse. Different bonus cards that offer experience points, skill points, energy, and speed boosts appear ahead of the pack in each track section, which adds another factor to consider when jockeying for position. If you need energy at this point, you can rub the horse's colored mood icon to turn unity power into it. The rate of that conversion is based on the horse's mood, and it varies wildly; don't even bother converting unity power if it's red or orange. Stamina also drains during these sections, but how much it drains depends on your horse's mood, its place in the pack, and the results of the last hand.

The last part of each race is a homestretch sprint. Any leftover unity power is added to the final energy total, which is then converted into an enthusiasm score between 1 and 100 (this conversion is based on the length of each race; more energy is needed in longer racers). You can then semi-directly control your horse with arrow buttons on the lower screen. Maneuver your horse so you don't get blocked by other racers and, if you have a high enough energy, run ahead. You can also use your remaining stamina cards to give your horse temporary boosts, but be careful: If your horse's stamina runs too low, it will become exhausted and slow down considerably just before the finish line.

Putting this tactical layer between the solitaire hands and the results of each race makes the simplified card game have a much greater sense of depth than it otherwise would. The depth is added with a very light JRPG-like stat system on top of everything. Your horse has two stats, speed and stamina, that dictate how many stamina cards it gets each race and how fast it can go in the home stretch. By collecting experience cards, you can level up your horse to improve its speed and stamina. Your horse can also get up to two skills by collecting skill cards in each race, which contribute to a skill experience pool similar to the horse's level experience. These skills can add bonuses like making it more forgiving of mistakes in solitaire hands or letting you see the next card on your stock pile before you draw it.

Good Breeding

You can't simply grind your horse's level up to be the fastest land mammal on earth, though. Leveling up only takes place in Growth Mode, when your horse is between two and four years old. Each race advances the time a bit, and you can't re-do any of them. When your horse turns four, it can't get any more experience and is locked at its level and skills. It then can be used in Mature Mode to win more races, or retired to the farm.

In both modes, you can earn money by placing in the first three spots of a race. You can use this money to buy items that offer temporary, but very useful, bonuses in the next race, like giving your horse more stamina, or putting jokers in the deck. Just know that if you don't place first, that race counts as a loss, and if you lose three races in Mature mode your horse is automatically retired to the farm.

The farm is the last chunk of depth Pocket Card Jockey has to offer. You can pair your retired horses together to produce stronger, faster foals that inherit their parents' traits. It's almost impossible to win the Triple Crown with your first horse; you need to build up over generations of steeds. It's rewarding to develop a really powerful racehorse by pairing the best horses you already put through their paces. It gets even more fun when you develop a rapport with the horses' owners, unlocking new visual designs for horses; you start with the standard selection of cream, brown, and black horses, but even eventually get ninja, witch, and fire ponies.

A Hearty Horse Stew

All of these disparate components combine into a surprisingly addictive package. I found myself turning to my 3DS to run quick races whenever I had a free minute, seeking to breed the best ninja or witch horse and bring home every trophy possible. The faster, simpler solitaire was a draw rather than a disappointment, because it let me just jump quickly in and out whenever I wanted with at least one hand completed before I closed my 3DS.

Pocket Card Jockey throws several things together into a pot and hopes for the best, but each part is so complementary to the others that the end result works really well. Quicker, faster solitaire hands, a tactical, turn-based race structure, and horse breeding with levels, stats, and skills make Pocket Card Jockey feel incredibly satisfying and accessible even without any one aspect of it being particularly deep. There are certainly much larger games I like better on the 3DS (Hyrule Warriors Legends has been warming my handheld's card slot for months), but for $7 Pocket Gard Jockey is just about the perfect little time-waster. Pocket Card Jockey's engaging and complex without feeling too deep to be a pick-up-and-play distraction, and for that it's an Editors' Choice award-winning Nintendo 3DS game.

Artboard Created with Sketch. Pocket Card Jockey (for Nintendo 3DS) 4.5 Editors' Choice See It $6.99 at Amazon MSRP $6.99 Pros Solitaire games are quick and fun.

Horse racing offers surprising tactical depth.

Addictive RPG elements. Cons Tenuously ties together several different game genres. The Bottom Line Pocket Card Jockey combines solitaire, turn-based tactics, and JRPG-like experience and skills into an incredibly fun, accessible diversion on the 3DS.

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