The studio that developed Pokemon has made a horse racing game that is also a Solitaire game. It's awesome, it's addictive, and you don't need to wear a big, dumb hat in order to enjoy it.
'Pocket Card Jockey,' available now for the Nintendo 3DS for $6.99, can be boiled down like this: You play Solitaire to make your horse run faster and be happier, hopefully winning every race you enter.
Like Solitaire, you are presented with multiple columns of playing cards, and you have a separate stack of cards that you can draw from. Unlike Solitaire, though, you actually want to get rid of cards instead of stacking them up.
Cards can only be played (eliminated from the board) off of a card that is either one value higher or one value lower than the card in your hand. For example, if you are holding a three, you can only play a two or a four. (As opposed to regular Solitaire, the color of the cards don't matter.)
Ideally, you want to chain together plays so that you can eliminate a three, then a four, then a five and so on, getting as many cards as you can off the board before you have to take a new card from your draw pile.
The better you do at this Solitaire game, the more energy your horse will have on the race track. With that energy you can change your position on the track, getting an edge on other riders and hopefully collecting items that will help improve your horse's overall performance. You'll also want to make sure you're ready with speed boosts for the race's final stretch.
It's fast-paced at times, but there's also a surprising amount of strategy to keep in mind with regard to where you place yourself on the track and how you spend the energy you earn from playing cards.
That's the gist of the action, and if you're the type of person who's been addicted to similar takes on Solitaire (like Fairway Solitaire on phones and tablets, which has certainly stolen many hours from my life), then you might already be sold.
Outside of races, though, you'll spend some time managing your horses (once you get more than one), equipping them with different skills (which can make certain parts of the Solitaire game easier) and buying items for them with the gold you earn from races.
It's an unlikely mashup of of game types that makes for something incredibly addictive. So when everybody else is freaking out over horse races that they have no control over (like, say, the Kentucky Derby), I'm gonna be stacking cards on top of other cards to make a cartoon horse run faster so I can earn fake money. Just like God intended.
