Horsing around

Stable Genius

About 5 years ago, the then-president of the United States had his mental acuity challenged in the media, and in contesting those allegations, he said, in public, on Twitter: "Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.... I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star... to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius....and a very stable genius at that!"

Pretty much ever since then, I thought it would be funny to see a horse management game or something entitled Stable Genius. Years passed, and I still haven't seen any such parody game, and recently I had some thoughts about how a game like that might go. Here are some ideas...

1. A horse training game, where the you're trying to get the best trained horse in the stable: the Stable Genius 

2. I can imagine a Euro-style game where you manage a stable, assigning horses to things like races (for money), dressage (for points), farming (for food), breeding (for more horses), or sale. You could upgrade or expand your stable to maintain more horses, speculate on horses (buy low, sell high), breed horses to sell, race, or show, and in the end, the best manager could be labeled a Stable Genius

3. A twist on the above, same thing but add a Mental Acuity track - which would range from "stable" to "unhinged," and would trend downwards (toward "unhinged") over time. Perhaps you would suffer in-game penalties if you drop below a certain threshold, and at game end maybe you gain a bonus for being ahead of other players on the Acuity track. Or like corruption or unrest in some other games, maybe the least stable player straight up loses the game! There could be Mental Acuity challenges which you could earn: cards with in-game conditions on them which, once satisfied, move you up the track. Or maybe even better, literal mental acuity challenges, such as riddles, logic problems, or word puzzles, which you would need to solve to gain those advances.

At that point I took a step back and realized that if I were really to base a game on a pun/meme title that refers to some politician 5 years ago, I'd really have to lean into it, make it look like a parody,  not some game that tries to take itself seriously...

4. As if out of Orwell's Animal Farm, you are a horse angling to be crowned ruler of the ranch, and you'll have to use all your acumen and political machinations to defeat your opponents - for the role will only be won by a true Stable Genius!

Wingspan of Horses

To be honest, the idea that interests me the most is number 2 above, and I don't think it's worth shoehorning in that pun title. But it could be a fun code-name until I come up with a better title. I like the sounds of Equestria, but that appears to be the name of some place in My Little Pony lore, so I'm not sure if it's OK to use. So maybe just Equestrian or something. Lean into the realistic aspects of managing a stable, and maybe I can design, as my playtester put it, the "Wingspan of horses."

Side note... when I heard "Wingspan of horses," all I could think of was Pegasus. My response was "wingspan of horses? What is that - about 35 hands?"

So here are some details I thought of about a potential game about horse management. You may be amused to hear that as a sounding board, I "talked this through" with ChatGPT (the AI chat bot you may have heard about), and it actually proved very helpful!

There are a lot of details that could go into a game about race horses specifically. Pedigree is a huge deal, and while a race horse can earn money by winning races, my understanding is that the real money is in studding out your champion horse. That could be a game all in itself, but I was attracted to the idea of managing a stable of horses, and having to decide what to do with each horse every round. Do you send this horse to the track to earn money? Or should you breed it instead, so you'll have more horses to work with later? Should you train this horse for Dressage to earn some victory points? or put it to work on the farm to produce food to help keep your other horses fed? Should you expand your stable to hold more horses? Or keep your stable small, requiring less food and other resources to maintain?

Breeding

One idea I had - and I think this isn't really accurate to how horse breeding works, but maybe it's acceptable artistic license - was that your horses start out generic, and if you send them to a race, then they "become a race horse" - they are now "better at racing" (whatever that means), and if you breed them, you have a better chance of getting a new horse that's "better at racing." That's the artistic license part - I'm pretty sure the breeding is just based on genetics, I don't think you can pass down training to an offspring. but maybe one can say that you sent the horse to race because you noticed it was good for that, so *hand wave.* Anyway, I liked the idea of having to choose between racing your champion race horse, or breeding it.

Another, different idea I had was that maybe you don't have to choose to breed a horse over doing something else (because I didn't want players having to just breed their horses all the time and not do anything else with them). Instead, maybe you have a number of "Stallions" (which you could increase), which just means you get that many new horses each round to assign to races, shows, farms, sale, etc. Maybe the current configuration of your horses influences whether you get foals of a particular type - for example, maybe you roll a special die for each stallion, and the resulting face shows you what type of horse you get... brown (generic), green (good at racing), purple (good at dressage), yellow (good at farming). Maybe you have a yellow die with 1 each of those faces, plus 2 more yellow faces - so 50% likely to be good at farming, and then similarly a green die, a purple die, and a brown die. Then for each Stallion in your stable, you roll a die, and you get to choose the color of each based on where your horses are assigned.

Both of those sound kind of reasonable to me, depending on how the rest of the game works.

Lifespan

Another aspect is that a horse's useful life is only so long, and it's even shorter for a race horse. So maybe your horses only last a few rounds (like 3), then you have to sell them off or something. And maybe a race horse only lasts 2 rounds instead, representing their shorter useful lifespan due to injury and like, wear and tear. 

If a horse is past its useful lifespan, maybe you automatically sell it for some minimal amount of money, but based on the Input Randomness card mentioned above, maybe you could choose to sell a horse that's on its last legs for more money (and points?) rather than race it or work it.

Input Randomness

In order to make it a game, and dynamically change player incentives, I thought there could be an Input Randomness card drawn each round. it could indicate things in the game that are variable, such as:
* Price at which you can buy a new horse
* Price at which you can sell your horses
* Available races and contests where you can send your horses

Races, Dressage, Selling, Farm work

... sadly, I started writing this post back in February, and I had stopped writing at this point. Having only come back to it now, *8 months* later, and I'm not sure I remember all the details I had in mind at that time. This is why it pays to finish posts or note taking right away!

I know I had been considering that you would assign your horses to the following things each round:

* Racing, where you earn points and money from winning races to supplement income

* Selling, where you can sell your horses for money rather than keep, feed, and use them - see Input Randomness above

* Dressage, where you earn big points for winning First in Show

* Farm work, where you produce food to help feed your horses (vs having fewer horses to feed, or buying food for them)

So each turn you would gain some income and new horses, assign your horses to various jobs, resolve things, and finally feed and age your horses.

That's about all I have at the moment. It kinda sounds like a euro-style resource management game to me... what do you think?