The Sims 3: Pets

The Sims franchise is all about simulating and playing out the lives of individual fictional people. In countless iterations and expansion packs, what those lives can look like has been reinvented over and over.

In the case of The Sims 3 and its Pets expansion, your sims can become jockeys and horse breeders. The game has an extensive character creator for humans and pets alike, which allows you to choose from a wide variety of horse breeds or mix, match and edit every detail yourself.

While the horse mechanics on their own are not incredibly deep by Sims standards, the fact that your horses can have personality traits and learn skills like jumping and running by exercising still makes for more engaging gameplay than that of many horse games.

And because these mechanics are embedded in the otherwise complex system of Sims’ economics, skills and life progress, you can basically make your own horse game out of it, building stables, breeding horses and seeing to their needs being met.

Thanks to the general fame and acclaim of the Sims series, Sims 3: Pets maintains an active modding community that creates all sorts of new horses and tack.

Sims 3: Pets was released in 2011. A bundle of the base game and the Pets expansion is available on Steam.