You know I’m a sucker for app games, and by golly I’ve been hit by a real doozy. Billy Holiday approached me just two days ago, telling tales of a horse game — because he knows that I have a history of an interest in that kind of thing.

I must say that I was skeptical. An original player of browser based games such as Horseland, and then some other one I forget the name of, and then Howrse, and then a dozen apps promising to be the BEST horse game EVER (each lasting about 20 minutes of my time before uninstalling), I have known the sour taste of disappointment of a game about horses.

Setting aside the fact that they are normally soul shatteringly boring, they are also often monumentally tedious. You wait days — actual DAYS! for foals to grow into weanlings and then days more of clicking while you train. In some games, it is up to you to groom the horse daily, hourly, or dear lord five-minutely. You lose your mind as you race around, usually repairing a barnyard, while you keep feeding horses and then training and then showing them. You can’t relax. Everything cycles in mere minutes.

And then to add insult to injury, the graphics are ugly or extremely dull as they just use the same image colored differently, depending on the outstandingly detailed work the designers of the game have included about real life horse color genetics. Amazing, but SO BORING. I am not a geneticist!

However, this game has none of that. There is some storyline about you saving the ancestral horse racing stable, bringing it back to glory. There are easy to attain goals, allowing for you to take your own time. The horses look realistic enough, although they are all patterened unusually for Thoroughbreds. Do they take into account actual genetics? You can bet I don’t care!

Racing is a simple ordeal once you get the hang of it. Training only takes some clicking of buttons and do not require you to do repetitive tasks. That’s why you’ve hired a trainer!

But what they have got the most right of all is that when you produce baby horses, they just grow up. None of that waiting around. None of that “three actual, real days equals a horse year” garbage. It goes from “your mare is nursing” to “welcome your new horse!” in fifteen to sixty minutes. Glorious.

Also, you get to name your horses and sell them off quickly if they displease you. For instance, I had a glitched horse named Dainty Hooves who was apparently invisible. That’s no fun at all, so I sold her away and didn’t feel even a little bad about it.

How long will this mania last? This horsecraziness that Billy instead of Dollissa for a change and I now have. We are in deep. It is all that we talk about. We have become like actual horse racing people, speaking in terms of winning, of wealth. Here is a small sampling of our new lives in simple comic form. Can you smell our cigars? Our cognac? Can you taste the success in the air all around us? It is our world. It is all we know.