Pokemon developer’s new Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! brings free-to-play grind to a game that isn’t free to play

The good news is that the cult favorite 3DS solitaire-driven horse racing game Pocket Card Jockey is back if you have an Apple device and a subscription to Apple Arcade, where you can also find such fine fare as the highly recommended Air Twister.

The bad news, the reason you shouldn’t get too excited right away, is under the hood. The core racing gameplay is as clever and addictive as it was ten years ago: a bite-size fusion of luck and skill that never loses its appeal. But as always seems to be the case with mobile games, the problems are on a meta level.

But let’s get back to the premise of this game, which is a cult title for good reason: you name your jockey, choose a look, begin a “riding” tutorial and are immediately trampled to death by horses. In death you meet God, who— feeling sorry you were so bad at riding a horse that you were immediately trampled to death— revives you with the ability to ride a horse by doing something you’re actually good at: playing a round of solitaire.

Such is the justification for a tightly-designed and free-time-devouring arcade game. Over the course of just ten or fifteen minutes, players position their horse on the course and play rounds of solitaire, building up energy points with each card cleared. As you steer the horse down the final stretch, its speed is determined by the amount of energy you’ve picked up. Everything is riding on your skill at the game’s simple solitaire variant, to the point where when you screw up you feel a bit like you’ve failed the horse.

Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! appears to be building on a previous mobile free-to-play entry in the franchise that never left Japan. Though I can’t check on this game myself— it long ago ended service— the characters and basic systems are recognizable. However, Ride On! is not, as I suspected, a direct mobile port of something developer Game Freak (yes, that Game Freak, the Pokemon developer) had lying around: it introduces adorable 3D graphics for the horse races, a major upgrade.

But the meta-game feels like it was built for free-to-play, with a deliberately glacial speed of progression. Like a rogue-lite, it’s understood that you won’t beat Pocket Card Jockey with your first horse: their stats are low, and if you play very well you’ll quickly be entered into races with overpowering horses who beat your modest steed by sheer numbers. If a horse loses three races in adulthood, it’s retired to breed.

In the first few generations, it’s easier to accept how weak your horse is, because the expectation is that as you retire horses you did well with, you’ll breed them and make even stronger champions.

The thing is, you never get a stronger horse. After raising over ten different horses through 18-20 races each, I have never had a better run than with my second horse, Stepping Selection (yes, of course I’m naming them all after retro games).

So you end up having a horse with some unique quirks, but pretty much the same stats, and you have close to the same experience over and over again. Over and over again you level up a horse through the first ten races, hoping for a success, and seven or eight races later realize you’re coming up short in the exact same places you were the last time. No amount of player skill will help a B-grade horse beat an A++; it’s just not happening. Most of my horses have run the same amount of races before retiring: 18.

It’s one thing to be out-leveled for a few generations, and totally different to be out-leveled for 100+ races with no sign of progress. The 3DS version wasn’t like this, right?

Yeah, it wasn’t. One of the things that’s happened in Pocket Card Jockey’s transition to mobile is a tightening of resources that’s usually only done when a game goes free-to-play. Breeding, as well as the power-up items that give players a very slight edge, are now exorbitantly expensive, and the cash rewards you get even from finishing in first place are pathetic. Then there’s the ten-race wait for your horses to breed, and the fact that the 3DS version doesn’t have this money squeeze at all, and it really feels like this was based on a game that allowed players to buy coins for real-world money to speed along the growth process.

The thing is, as an Apple Arcade game that’s required not to have an in-app purchases or paid DLC, this Pocket Card Jockey doesn’t even have that route to get ahead. Every player is a free player, so every player gets to enjoy an impoverished experience. Apple Arcade is supposed to be an antidote to the tricks, manipulation and upsells of mobile gaming, but in Ride On! I find myself living with the worst of it for five bucks a month.

It’s a testament to how strong the core game design of Pocket Card Jockey is that I’m still playing it. It’s a really fun game! I can’t pull myself away! I’ve lost sleep to it! But due to all these outside factors, every run is frustrating and disappointing. I frequently ask myself, over a hundred races down the line, what the hell I’m doing still playing it. I never thought I’d feel that way about good old Pocket Card Jockey. It’s a little sad.