Pocket Card Jockey:Ride On! (NSP, XCI) ROM

Pocket Card Jockey:Ride On! – The beloved Pocket Card Jockey from Nintendo 3DS now races onto Nintendo Switch, delivering heightened enjoyment! Simple to grasp yet brimming with hidden intricacies, you’ll craft optimal hands to propel your horses towards victory!

In this rendition, Solitaire involves clearing cards adjacent to your current one by a single number higher or lower. While the core remains familiar, fresh regulations introduce strategic depth, alongside exhilarating 3-D racing segments.

Whether engaging in daily races, challenging global contenders with your finest breeds, dominating prestigious competitions, or simply amassing adorable equines, entertainment is ever-present!

GAMEPLAY

Pocket Card Jockey’s gameplay uses the card game golf as a basis for its gameplay. In golf, the player must clear all cards from the field, which they accomplish by selecting a card that is either one point higher or one point lower than the focus card that they drew from their deck. Once this is done, they can then attempt to get another card that is higher or lower than the card they just picked up.

The Ace and King cards are the opposite ends of the card sequence, and the player can move from an Ace to a King, and vice versa. The player can keep doing this until there are no more cards in the playfield, at which point the player has to flip a card from their deck and begin the process anew with that one. Once the deck runs out of cards and the player runs out of cards to select from the playfield, the round ends. An extra mode exists that allows the player to play the card game outside of the context of the racing game, aiming to clear the cards in the fastest time possible.

How well the player performs in the card portion determines how successful their horse is in the race. The more cards left in the playfield when the round ends, and the more times the player fails a round in a race, the more likely their horse will do poorly or potentially run amok. Successful rounds will increase the unity between the jockey and their horse, leading to better positioning in the forthcoming race.

The more cards left over in the deck, the better unity gain they achieve, and excess unity is converted to energy. The player uses the Nintendo 3DS touchscreen to determine their horse’s position on the racetrack, needing to take into account the positioning of other horses. After a few rounds of cards and positioning, the player enters the homestretch portion. All of the excess energy from unity is converted to enthusiasm for this; the more enthusiasm, the better potential the horse has to win. Due to the randomness of the cards and competing horses, some aspects of the race will come down to luck.

Horses go through a period of the game called Growth Mode, where the player’s horse spends two years growing until they hit maturity. These two years are spent winning races, leading to the horse’s stamina and speed increasing. Once the horse matures, they stop leveling up, and the player must win as many races as they can with it.

Once the horse has lost three races (meaning second place or worse), the horse must be retired. Upon retirement, they will be sent to the farm to breed. The better the horse performs before retirement, the better their offspring will be. This offspring will go through the same loop, though you can also go through this loop with a horse you purchase from a non-playable character.

PLOT

Pocket Card Jockey puts players in control of a jockey, which can be made male or female. The male jockey wants to one day take over his father’s orange farm, and the female jockey wants to one day get married and have kids. The jockey loses their first round and gets trampled, leading to an angel descending on them to encourage them and teach them to view horse racing as a game of solitaire.