Pferd & Pony – Mein Pferdehof

Summary
Mein Pferdehof is a stable management simulation. There is no real story apart from inheriting the horse farm with the task to build it up again. You start with one horse and you earn money by breeding and selling horses, housing guests, and winning tournaments. The game is round-based, you decide when you've finished with a round and manually start a new round. Starting a new round will affect horse stats like hunger or exercise.

Game Design
The game's art style is a cartoony, brightly colored 2D world. There is a farm overview and a town overview, from which you can enter the different locations. There's no open world, you navigate by mouse (mostly) within a menu button area, except in riding mode, when you control the horse via keyboard. The game saves automatically after every action you do. Nothing gets lost and you can not return to a former savepoint.

Character customization
You can customize your player character with a range of different skin tones, facial expressions, hair styles, accessoires and clothing. However, the only times you actually see what you look like is when you pick your save game or win a tournament, which requires you to put on tournament tack first. You do not have to purchase anything, you just need to pick and wear it. You also need to decide whether you're a boy or a girl, which does not influence the character customization at all. It only shows up in riding mode, where you're either wearing red and a blonde ponytail, or blue and short hair, both with white skin (regardless of what you chose to look like in customization). While you can buy a few different items of horse tack, it never shows up on the horse (in riding mode, there's a generic saddle and bridle) and makes no difference in stats, either.

Locations
There are two overview maps - one for your horse farm and one for the town. On the horse farm overview, you can access the stable, office building, and breeding pasture; other parcels can not be entered, but you can buy parcels, upgrade or demolish buildings from this menu. These parcels are a parking lot, a guest house, a pasture, a training parcours, a round pen, and an indoor riding arena. From the farm overview, you can also get into town, or start a new round. On the town overview, you can access the vet, farrier, breeder, retailer and tournament arena, and get a bank info about how much credit you get.

Your Stable starts out with one stall, but you can upgrade it to up to five stalls. With each upgrade, the stable background gets a bit more fancy.

Horse Care
Every round, your horses' stats are changed as the horse grows hungry, thirsty, dirty, and restless. If you don't take care of their basic needs, horses will lose trust, as well as strength and endurance if they are not exercised. You can regain this across a few rounds by taking better care and giving them exercise. Via the menu in the stall, you can take care of all needs, equip tack, or change the location of the horse (pasture, stall, trailer, breeding pasture, or training paddock). In the horse book, you can see information about your horses name, sex, pedigree, age, coat color, stats, tournament level, and sales price. Some stats you can raise to 100% by regular horse care, sometimes over a span of a few rounds - these are trust, hooves, exercise, coat, feed, and water. Other stats are capped at individual values that you can increase by breeding better horses - these are health, strength, and endurance.

The horse has idle animations that slightly change based on its health and trust, and the cleanliness of the stall. It will also show excitement if its exercise is low and you saddle it. If a mare has a foal, she will also interact with it, and the foal will react negatively to sending the mother away from the stall and leaving it behind.

If the stall is dirty, a horse will flick its tail and shake its mane to avoid the flies that are part of the dirt visualisation. The dirt gets worse until day 5, if you still don't clean, it stays at this level. There's no evident consequence to the horse stats if you don't clean up. But you'll feel guilty.

If a horse's trust falls below 70, it will look away while you're in the stall (unless when nursing a foal). From 70-90, it will not look away, but also not look at you. At 90 or above, the horse will turn to look at you when you enter the box, as well as from time to time turn to look at you and snort affectionately. It's worth it.

A horse will show signs of being unwell at a health lower than 75. It will get worse again below 51, and by lower than 30 (? you can only get there by tournaments, as regular training is banned with the horse's health below 60 - tournaments don't check health stat) it looks REALLY suffering. If you don't take care of a sick horse by feeding it good food, you risk it being taken away by animal welfare. You will probably get a warning first to take better care, if you ignore that, your horse will be taken away and be gone from the game irrevocably.

Food Stats
A healthy horse can manage 2-3 rounds without food, but by the third round, it will already lose health. Also, it will be so hungry that you can't fully satisfy it due to a restriction of no more than 5 portions of food per round. Better food fills up more stat points, as you can see in the table. The water gain or loss doesn't really matter, as you have unlimited water supply with one click. Since you can only feed a horse 5 portions of any food per round, best quality is the only type allowing you to feed a very hungry horse all the way. Unless you need to save money, you can use this type all the time, otherwise you can alternate and mix. If you plan on riding the horse, make sure to not feed it before, as you already use up portions that after riding will just be enough to fill the horse's stomach. * The price is calculated by bulk price, which is in effect from 50 portions upwards.

Riding
There is no open world, you can only enter riding mode by navigating to the training paddock, riding out cross country, or entering a tournament. The game will then load a sub-program (game devs, please give me a professional term), in which you control your horse's gait (Walk, Trot, Canter, Gallop) and speed within the gait with arrow keys and jump with space. The animation is a side-scrolling 2D with a set start and finish. You need to jump obstacles while in the right speed at the right time. In training, you need to beat a time limit and not fall down in order to get to the next level of training, while in tournaments, you need to beat NPC times (which slightly vary randomly), while falling or refusing jumps does not disqualify you, but slows you down significantly. While riding, you can see colorful bars displaying speed, strength, endurance, and trust. Also there's a colorful horse changing color according to the horse's wellbeing. If it stays blue or green, you are riding carefully and giving it enough rest, while yellow towards red warns you of injuries to come. The way you ride will affect the horse's stats within the ride and afterwards. If you fall a lot, or gallop without giving the horse enough time to recover, the horse will lose health points. It can also get injuries, which heal over time or can be treated at the vet's. Falling or refusing a jump will also subtract trust points, while successful jumps (even when there is no obstacle) will increase trust. If you race your horse until the red strength bar is completely empty, the ride will be over for you. If you give it some time in slower gaits without jumps, it will recover its strength. How fast strength decays depends on the endurance stat. The more trust you build, the more readily your horse will react to changing gaits.

Breeding
Breeding horses is a great source of income, as well as a way of achieving better stats in health, strength, and endurance. If you own a stallion as well as a mare, you can use the breeding pasture and perform the breeding action there; otherwise you can pick a stallion at the breeder's and use him at a fee of ~400-1100 Cr. Sometimes, you need a few tries for the mare to get pregnant. On the breeding pasture, you can only try once a day, while you have unlimited tries at the breeder's. You can test at the vet's whether your mare is pregnant, but you can also save the 200 Cr by making the game update the horse value (either by taking it to the breeders and get a buying price offer, or by starting a new round) which goes up by ~2000 Cr if breeding is successful. Pregnancy takes 9-11 rounds. After that, you'll get a notification of a foal being born. If you're attentive, you can also spot it the round before, when your horse has a lower feed and water stat than usually. You can breed your horses for most of their lifespan - from when they are adults at 12 rounds, until they are 159 rounds old. After that, a horse will stay with you until it's 182 rounds of age, then you get notified that it's moving to a retirement farm and it disappears fom your game.

Coat Variations and Genetics
Horses come in six base coat variants: Grey (with one of three dapple / spotted patterns), Palomino, Buckskin, Liver Chestnut, Bay, and Black. This is translated from what they're called in German and not in any way accurate with real horse genetics.

There are a few starter horses at the breeder's that are approximately called Chestnut or Light Bay, but if you breed with them, you'll end up with one of the six breedable base variants. Fun Fact about Black Horses: Depending on whether you have the oldest version or version 1.2a, you might have different shades of black horses. In the first version, blacks were purple. There was a shader patch that changed new born foals to be black instead. Version 1.2a came with the shader file already containing the new black, so the only purple horses are starter horses the breeder offers.

Within a coat color, the individual shades vary.

Everything about hereditary genetics in this article is the author's guess work after 15 years of obsessively playing the game, and no solid facts.

If you mix horses with different base coats, you seem to be most likely to get one of the two, and sometimes a different one. There seems to be some factor of dominant and recessive colors, as you sometimes get a Liver Chestnut out of nowhere (or out of previous generations) when you mix base coats. A foal's mane and tail will always match its base color, it will not be a mix between differently colored parents.

If you keep breeding for several generations within one base coat, there's hardly a chance of getting a different base coat.

The exact color shade of a horse could be hereditary or random, and possibly medium color shades are more frequent / dominant than very light or dark ones. I still did not manage to breed rose colored Liver Chestnut horses out of my wine red Liver Chestnut breeding program...

Horse Stats are hereditary, but there also seems to be a random component involved - a foal can be worse or better than their parents. However, horses do get better by constant inbreeding and always crossing the best ones. Inbreeding has no negative effect.

Foal Care
A foal stays in its mother's stall from age 0 (birth round) to age 5. You can not feed it yet, it gets fed by its mother. You need to groom it and build trust by petting it. Building full trust takes 5 rounds. At age 6, it becomes a yearling requiring its own stall. You now have to feed your horse, but can not saddle or ride it yet. If you don't have an empty stall, your young horse will end up in the pasture (not visible on the farm overview, but it exists) until you have a stall for it - but it will get hungry and you shouldn't ignore it for more than 2-3 rounds, or it will be taken away. At age 12, your yearling is a grown up horse and you can train and breed them.

Management
Running a horse farm costs money. The in-game currency is called Credits. You have to manage your finances well enough so they balance out with the costs of running a horse farm. Every round, you lose or gain a little bit of money. Every third round, it's pay day and you get a finance notification that tells you whether you've made financial losses or profits. In random (?) intervals, you might also get a notification to pay taxes or other bills; or a fee for the breeders' association when you have 5 horses or more (it repeats if you drop below 5 horses in between). It makes sense to think about which buildings you really need, as each has maintenance costs. If you want to upgrade a building, you need to upgrade your office building to a certain level, too. You can earn money by selling horses and having guests staying in your guest house, as well as winning tournaments. In the office building, you can access different features like statistics, hiring staff (riding instructors, stable hands, and farriers), or place ads for more guests.

The game gives you 5 (optional) goals for the game:


 * Raise trust with your horse to 95 to gain 1200 Credits.
 * Breed a foal. Make sure there's a stall available for the yearling. You get 4000 Credits for this.
 * Successfully finish the training on the training paddock and gain 2000 Credits.
 * Raise the income of your guest house to 1500 Credits per round and win a balloon flight.
 * Win the Champions' Tournament.

The first three give you financial boosts at the beginning of the game, while the last two are rather prestige achievements later in game. You get a balloon animation flying across your farm overview once for the fourth goal, and when you've reached all 5 goals, there's an airplane with a banner with the name of your horse farm flying across every once in a while. The game is not over, however, until you run out of fun, your computer crashes for good, OR you reach round 999. If you do, you can still start a new round and your horses' stats go down like any new round, but it will be round 999 again and forever - no aging, no new foals. I suppose the game devs did not expect us to have fun with the game THIS long.

Strategies
This way, you save time and resources by having “external“ breeding mares, and you don't have to wait for your yearling to grow up before you can ride it (usually, growing up takes longer than the exercise stat decays to an uncomfortable point). This way, you only wait until it actually gains enough strength before you can start training. Plus, if it's a mare, you can add her to your breeding program right away.
 * Your horses have way less exercise decay if you leave them in the pasture overnight. Having more horses slows the excercise decay even more.
 * The first time you finish a level 3 training session successfully, you gain 2000 credits. Since it's still early in the game, you might need more money. If you wait until you have several horses you can train all of them on level 3 within one round, you get the prize for each one!
 * Selling a mare? Increase her value by ~2000 Cr by getting her pregnant by a cheap stud (usually ~500 Cr stud fee) first.
 * A mare's pregnancy goes on even if she's sold to the breeder. If you re-buy her 20 rounds after she got pregnant, she will give birth to a foal the next round which is already ~11 rounds of age. After another round, the game checks its age and it grows up immediately.
 * Among the starter horses, there are two “Easter Eggs“: If you buy the mare Jackie (Dark Chestnut with Flaxen mane), she comes with a foal named Summerrain, a grey gelding. The same is the case with buying the stallion Abony (Black with purple mane), he's bringing his daughter Eclipse, a buckskin with chestnut mane.

Trivia

 * Usually, you do not need the vet's services. Your horses will heal over a few rounds, and are not particularly affected by their ailments in any case. The farrier's service isn't necessary, either, but will decrease the hoof stat decay for a few rounds.
 * Getting a stallion neutered doesn't affect the horse or its stats in any way.
 * About 15 years ago, when the game was still young, THE horse to have was Dahooka, a “Chestnut“ (rather palomino) stallion with 92 Strength and 100 Endurance. He is indeed the starter horse with the best stats available. However, there was an Urban Myth that if you changed any other horse's name to Dahooka, it would get awesome stats as well. It's a Myth.

Bugs
The game has a few minor bugs, some of which you can use for cheating, while others are just aesthetic or funny.

Slide
In riding mode, when you press and hold up+down+right simultaneously, your horse will appear to slide. You can still jump, which will show the jumping animation and then return to the frozen sliding horse.

Obstacles without Hitbox
Some obstacles on leisure cross-country tracks are not marked with a hitbox, so you can just ride through them. Not too useful, just funny.

Into the Ground
On trail rides, when you reach the goal posts, your horse gets automatically slowed down. If you go at it full speed and time one last jump just before you reach the goal, your horse will get further on the “landing strip” and, if it gets to the end, will sink into the ground a bit as it comes to a halt. No effect, just a funny little challenge at the end of the right to achieve this.

#000000 Horse Coat
You can not create this bug, it just happens sometimes - a foal is born with either its base coat or mane / tail completely black (#000000). If you then restart the game, the black parts will change into the color of the starter horse (brown coat or palomino mane), creating unique horses you couldn't otherwise breed. It still belongs to the coat color it inherited and will pass on its genes regardless of its unusual phenotype.

Groom the air
While the game will show an error message if you try to feed a horse that's not in the stall, it fails to do so for grooming or petting the horse. You can send it out to the pasture and then do the grooming - the hitboxes for mane / tail and coat will still be where the horse usually stands. You can also increase your horse's trust by petting the wall behind where the horse should be. This doesn't gain you anything apart from a little chuckle.

Remote Birth
If you leave a mare that's due a foal the next round on the pasture overnight, the foal will appear in the stall, making a really angry face because it was born all alone in the stall while mum was out grazing.

Strength Refund
If you can't afford a saddle pad (which would even out the loss of strength the horse gets when wearing a saddle), you can click on the greyed out whip in the equipment panel after you've saddled your horse - it has the same effects. You do not need to own a whip for this to work.

Trailer Discount
If you select and sell the trailer on the parking lot, then go back once and click the buying icon, you can rebuild for 150 C what you just sold for 465 C (parking lot level 2), 1150 C (level 3), 2100 C (level 4), 3500 C (level 5), leaving you with up to 3350 C profit, and you can repeat it until you get bored! This works with some other building extensions as well, but the trailer is most profitable. Make sure not to de-select the option, as buying the extension for its regular price will be double the price as what you got for selling it. And make sure not to do this when you do not have at least 150 C to buy back the trailer!

Infinite Horse Sales
This is the luckiest financial bug in the game. If several of your foals grow into yearlings, but you do not have an empty stall for them, they will end up in your pasture until you sell one of the horses in the stalls. In the now empty stall, open the menu to pick a horse to go into the stall. Pick the first one, put it in the trailer (you can take good care of it first), and sell it to the breeder. Go back to the empty box into the selection menu, but don't click on a horse there - with any luck, the name of the one you sold is still displayed. Just click OK and your sold horse is BACK to sell again. And again. Until you select a different horse to go into the stall and the magic is over.

GBA Version
Considering the limitations of the GBA, the game looks very similar to the PC version, gameplay is obviously much simplified. Does not include the town as a location. The riding is also done in a 2D side-scrolling manner.

Titles: Mein Pferdehof (2004,DE) Let's ride! Sunshine Stables (US) Pippa Funnell: Stable Adventures (UK) ALexandra Ledermann 2 (2005, FR)

OGDB Entry Page on spieletipps.de (German) Review on jeuxvideo.com (French) Review on gamecola.net (English) Video Games Museaum Entry

System Requirements & Compatibility
The game runs on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP; it requires Pentium3 with 500MHz, 64 MB RAM, 32 MB Graphics Card, DirectX-7, 600 MB free disk space. Getting it to run on anything newer is unfortunately tricky. Running it on Linux Mint with Wine: partly successful (riding mode always crashed). Running it on Windows 10 with VirtualBox: mostly successful – the game runs in all its features. But whenever VirtualBox crashes, the current save game disappears. The file is still in the save file directory, but the game does not recognize it as such... *incoherent unprofessional screaming*. The second problem which is visually annoying but not game-breaking, is a display bug where the horse animation loop flickers in gallop and jumping animation, which distracts my eyes from judging the distance to obstacles correctly (probably can be learned to ignore....). This is related to color depth – i get a notification by VirtualBox upon starting riding mode, suggesting to change color depth to 32 instead of 16 colors, and doing so manually will remove the display bug, but the game automatically resets color depth to 16 colors after every time i enter riding mode.

If you want it to work, let's keep showing interest by writing to Limbic Entertainment and asking nicely for a re-release!