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 2D world. There is a farm overview and a town overview, from which you can enter the different locations. The game is mostly controlled via mouse, in riding mode via keyboard.

Gameplay
oh, the stories i can tell.

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.

The Stable
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.

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 it enough time to recover, the horse will lose health points and look very unwell back in the stall the worse the health stat goes down. 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.

Management
In the office building, you can access different features like statistics, hire staff, or place ads for more guests.

Strategies

 * 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.
 * Your horses have way less exercise decay if you leave them in the pasture overnight.

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.

#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.

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
The GBA version has fewer features (if you played this, pleease edit!)

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 (save games disappear).

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