I think I read about Winning Post for the first time a few months
back, from one
of Kimimi’s old posts and I’ve been kind of curious about it since
then, in the way I sometimes am for ephemera from The Silent Abyss; I
say, looking at the copies of Herdy Gerdy and Goblin Commander and Ford
Mustang on my shelf. Now, while Kimimi did ultimately conclude the games
were well-made I think the review still came off a bit undercooked, and
I mean, I get that. As far as I understand it horse racing games are to
Japanese game shops what old copies of Madden are to American game
shops. Immersed in the milieu of game discussions they can slide off the
mind as completely and utterly unremarkable even if you’re doing your
best to engage with them. Kimimi’s review stayed pretty surface-level so
I didn’t quite get what was going on there beyond “It has a good core
loop”.
Now I’ve been reading up on Japanese horse racing a bunch recently
because of Umamusume so I think if I sit down with one of these horse
racing games I could maybe delve a bit deeper into the appeal than
Kimimi did there and maybe add something real to the conversation, even
as my Japanese reading level remains in roughly the sort of dismal state
you usually only see in American third-graders who were taught to read
wrong. But I think I have enough domain experience now to scrape by.
Part
1: Initial impressions and preliminary review after 35 hours of
playtime
So, first and foremost: Winning Post is a Koei Tecmo game – from the
Koei end of the company at that – and I think by starting there we can
get an idea of the kind of place it’s coming from. As with most of the
rest of Koei’s original series, Winning Post is a historical simulation
game, though the histories it’s simulating are the horse racing eras of
the late 1970s onward instead of Nobunaga’s conquest of Japan. But even
though the subject matter is different, the core appeal is pretty
similar. We’re going to put you in the shoes of a horse farm and ask you
if you can get a better outcome for your favorite actors of that era.
It’s not too uncommon for horses to get injured and retired, which
creates an infinite well of what-ifs to pull from. What if Ines Fujin
didn’t get hit with tendonitis after the Derby? What if Agnes Tachyon
got to finish running the Classics? Could King Halo have beaten Special
Week and Seiun Sky if he’d been trained differently? Could Kitasan Black
have picked up a few more major wins if he hadn’t retired after the
Arima Kinen? Could you do it better?
These sorts of questions are at the
core of the appeal of the game, and if you don’t know any of those names
it can be hard to care. But this is true of any sports game. If you
don’t know the athletes or the teams it’s hard to make judgement calls
or get invested. If you’re not already invested in horse racing to some
degree it’s hard to look down the list of names and hear anything but
gibberish.
Parsing
through a sea of katakana is a pain at the best of times, and if you’re
not into horse racing it’s like. Who are these? What am I looking at?
ehh sure I’ll try to buy the gold one I guess? Manhattan Cafe’s pretty
good, after all. But if you are a bit deeper into horse racing it’s
like, Dantsu Flame is my GOAT and they’re starting the bidding at 6700??
They’re sleeping on Dantsu Flame; I’ll make him a Triple Crown winner.
Agnes Tachyon ain’t shit. They’re starting the bidding for
Believe for only 8400 are you out of your mind?
Believe’s one of the best sprinters to ever do it get me Believe right
now.
That’s kind of the difference in how it feels, anyway.
There are a ton of systems in Winning Post and, in the 35 hours I’ve
played of it so far, I’ve only just barely scratched the surface. The
horse breeding system is deep, and I don’t understand it well enough
yet. The training system has you working to increase their stats within
some limits, and it gets a bit unwieldy as the number of horses
increases, since you only get three, sometimes four training sessions a
month (barring DLC). Past a point it’s probably better to have the
horses race to juice their stats than it is to keep training them, and
use the downtime to let them rest up and spend the training time on
other horses. Early-game the incentive structures benefit just racing
the horses with as little downtime as possible while avoiding injury,
and it’s better to race them in races they can win because winning seems
to improve stats and mood more than losing. You need the horses to win
to get more money to get the funds to improve your farm and also buy
more horses, since they don’t live forever, and you want to hedge
because sometimes they do just break their leg and die in a race.
This game is hysterically big. I’m on year 3 right now. It’s taken me
35 hours, counting all the savescumming I did to get my horses to win or
at least place in the major races. The time limit on these missions is
like 30 years, and once I clear out these missions I can start getting
into the marriage and dynasty mechanics. At the start of the year if you
didn’t choose an arranged marriage and you’ve met the friendship
requirements for the NPCs you’ll get the option of marrying them and
having kids. I still haven’t run into these choices myself, but there’s
a menu that shows the conditions you need to meet for each of the NPCs,
and while a lot of it is things like just winning big races, I think one
of the options I saw was something like “opening a farm in Europe”.
Then, after picking your marriage partner you have kids and raise them
in real time, setting educational policy and watching them grow before
handing off the farm to them and doing it over again. At least, that’s
how the manual describes it.
So. Who would get something out of Winning Post 10? First and
foremost: Umamusume fans would get something like an Umamusume career on
steroids. The rhythm of the game is pretty similar, but more. You train
your horses, you schedule races, you try to keep their mood and energy
up so they don’t break their leg while racing, and you manage sparks for
breeding. Races are way harder though. Even on Easy mode every G1 feels
like it’s Group A in Champion’s Meet, at least if your horses are good
but not great. I got King Halo to 2 G1 wins and Stay Gold to 3 G1 wins
and that took some work. I was micromanaging everything from
the specific sub-style of running to the choice of jockey to even the
title they had equipped. All of it needed to be just right to
win with horses that were good but not as cracked as TM Opera O or
Special Week or Seattle Slew. It will make you respect the races you
cruise through in the average Umamusume career, and give you some more
respect for the characters as well. After a few years of dealing with
some absolute losers who struggle to get through their maiden or a 1 win
open you really start to appreciate a horse who can win a race – any
race – but especially one who can win a graded race.
Next: I think Football Manager and other spreadsheet game fans would
get a ton out of this. There are so many spreadsheets. There are so many
data cells. There are so many statistics and graphs and bar charts and
submenus within submenus, so many little details to get hung up on. One
of my friends plays a bunch of Football Manager and she says this game
seems like it would be perfect if it were translated, especially since
the most recent Football Manager is kind of bad.
And next, I think this game has some appeal to a subsection of
Stardew Valley players. It doesn’t have the overworld exploration or
talking to NPCs in their day-to-day life aspect, or as much variety in
what you can do to run your farm, but you are still managing a farm and
taking care of animals, and that scratches a similar itch sometimes.
Now all this leads me to the elephant in the room. None of these
games are in English and no translation projects exist. I think they
could do well on Steam with the right approach over here, and I’ve
emailed Koei Tecmo asking for a localization but they never got back to
me.
Though, saying that, if you’re trying to learn Japanese then horse
games like this one are an incredible way to work on your katakana
reading speed. The bulk of the game is spent staring down reams upon
reams of names written in katakana.
I think I’ve hit all the core points that I need to so now I’d like
to unpack this all a bit more. I condensed everything I felt during my
first go-through there into a bouillon cube of information so now I need
to pour some water over it, spread it out a bit, add some depth, so
let’s go through a campaign.
Part 2: Campaign write-up /
Let’s Play
After I wrote everything preceding this I was frustrated. My horses
were up against some really stiff competition and I felt like, maybe if
I just started in an earlier scenario then I could have my farm built up
to a place where I could win with my favorite horses by the time I got
back there. Or maybe I’d gain some insight into some of the rest of the
systems that I hadn’t gotten to engage with and build up something while
I dealt with horses I didn’t have as much emotional investment in as the
1998 crew.
1971-1975
Because of this, I went back to the main menu and selected the
earliest scenario, 1971. This is so far back that the internet databases
don’t have any information on the horses who ran then. This is so far
back that there is nothing of note at the auctions. This is so far back
that in year 3 the informants came by to tell me about a little
up-and-comer named Secretariat.
There’s a slight error in the automatic translation here. Google
Lens is confusing something to the effect of “G1 5 count” with “G1 15
count”.
Secretariat wasn’t on that crazy of a run.
I think I heard this and went “lmao I’m glad I don’t have any dirt
horses, Secretariat would kill them”. Thankfully, I was minding my
business in Japan so I only had the legendary horse Haiseiko to worry
about. Haiseiko is to the 1970s what Oguri Cap was to the 1980s,
comparable in status to maybe Seabiscuit. In real life, Haiseiko won the
Satsuki Sho, a bunch of G2s and G3s, and then the Takarazuka Kinen, the
medium-distance fan-voted race. In this run, Haiseiko won the first two
legs of the Triple Crown, lost at the Kikuka Sho, won the Arima Kinen
and Osaka Hai, and a few others. He was a monster, and a real pain to
try to outrun. I think I got maybe one or two wins over him at distances
where he struggled.
Now, in the early years of the run I had, functionally, two horses:
Bell Wide and Nasuno Chigusa. In real life Bell Wide was a solid horse
who won a few opens, had a couple decent finishes in some G2s, and whose
big win was the 1972 Spring Tenno Sho. Meanwhile, Nasuno Chigusa was a
decent mare who won a couple of G3s and the Japanese Oaks and put up
decent finishes in a number of other graded races. I picked her out of
the options I was given as a second free horse in year 2 because she had
a speed-boosting epithet and a Japanese Wikipedia page, so I figured
that would help. I had other horses as well, because I bought a couple
of mares with rainbow tags at auction, Top Ryuu and Senjuu, two horses
who seem like they were mostly notable for being right at the edge of
the 5x5 pedigrees for Tokai Teio and Oguri Cap, respectively. They were
not very good, and produced horses with unrecoverably bad speed. They
were great for other stats, but the horses they produced were really bad
for winning races. In retrospect, I forgot to look up when they
produced their most notable progeny, and so I was stuck with overpaying
for some dud dams, but I didn’t realize this at the time.
So, functionally I had two horses. With a bit of savescumming and
spreadsheeting I managed to get Bell Wide to 7 G1 wins, and that was
really good. He started to fall off a bit toward the end of his seventh
year, and while I think he probably could have kept going, the
competition was getting pretty strong and he was getting pretty old. He
got wins in the 1971 Kikuka Sho, the 1972 Tenno Spring, the 1972 Tenno
Autumn, the 1972 Japan Cup, the 1973 Osaka Hai, the 1973 Takarazuka
Kinen, and the 1974 Tenno Spring, and then a bunch of G2s and G3s. That
is a very good and very respectable record and it’d make him one of the
best horses to ever do it. 
Now for Nasuno Chigusa. I wasn’t expecting much of this horse, but I
mean the Keiba sites said she won the Oaks in real life so she should be
decent at worst right? So I entered her into the start of the Triple
Tiara. She won the Oka Sho. Alright, next up, it’s the Oaks. She won
that too. Alright, I’ll enter her into a G2, she took it easily.
Alright, let’s see if she can take the Triple Tiara. She won the Shuka
Sho. Alright, well the Queen Elizabeth Cup is an alternate win condition
for the Tiara that’s more appropriate for the era so, what the hell,
let’s go for that as well. She won the Quadruple Tiara. Oh whoops, I
wasn’t expecting that and I still have her entered for the Mile
Championship, she’s taken that one too. Alright, let’s put her in a G2,
she’s won that as well. She narrowly finished in second place at the
Osaka Hai, but then won the Victoria Mile. Alright, what the hell, let’s
enter her in the Yasuda Kinen and the Takarazuka. She took both of those
as well. She is at 8 G1 wins now, so I decide I should try seeing if she
can win abroad. She finished second in the French Rothschild Prize, and
then won the Nassau Stakes in England. I could keep going but she had so
many major wins in so many countries that listing them all off one by
one would take way longer than I’d like.
She ended up with 27 G1 wins across seven countries. She couldn’t win
the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe or some of the other really major races,
but she did manage to win the Breeders Cup Fillys Turf in America and a
number of other huge races, and she could have won more but I’d picked
up Tokino Minoru and wanted to pair her with him before he bit it, since
he was 27 at that point and that’s really old for a
horse.
Oh right, Tokino Minoru. I picked him off of a list at the start of
the run as a special horse because it was the only name I recognized out
of all these horses. In real life, he was an undefeated horse from the
1950s who ran in 10 races including wins at the Satsuki Sho and Japanese
Derby, before dying a few weeks later from sepsis induced by tetanus.
Uma Musume fans will know Tokino Minoru as the suspected identity of our
friend, the Green Devil herself, Tazuna Hayakawa. As a side project in
this save I decided I’d try to continue Tazuna’s legacy, because that’s
the only horse anywhere near this era I really recognize and I am
clinging to any names I can recognize like a shipwrecked sailor clinging
to a piece of driftwood in the open sea.
Along the way to this point I had built up a couple of the highest
tier of tokens I needed to get more notable horses and with them I’d
picked up a young overseas colt named Seattle Slew. In real life,
Seattle Slew was one of the best horses to ever do it. He won three G1s,
then won the American Triple Crown in 1977 and then went on to win two
more G1s, a couple of G3s, and only ever finished outside of the top two
once. In the game, he is a freak beast that’s not losing unless you’re
getting really sloppy with it in something like the Prix de
l’Arc de Triomphe, or running against a horse that’s somehow even
stronger.
In the breeding realm, I also went and picked up Northern Taste and
Wishing Well with some of the tokens and money I’d accrued from Bell
Wide and Nasuno Chigusa raking in the cash. Wishing Well is the dam of
Sunday Silence, arguably the most important horse in Japanese horse
racing over the last 30 years, and Northern Taste is a fantastic horse
who also shows up in a ton of lineages, who Uma Musume fans probably
know better as Director Akikawa.
1976
At the end of 1975 I opted to retire my best horses so 1976 was a bit
of a dead year for the farm. Most of the year’s two year olds managed to
win their debut and got a couple other wins, which I really can’t take
for granted. I’ve been staring down a lot of pedigrees while trying to
figure out which horses I should buy and there are a staggering amount
of horses that never won a race, so I can’t take for granted that all of
my horses in 1976 were at least in the 1-3 win class, with one even
managing to win a G2. But, man, trying to get horses with F speed and
worse through races is grueling. If the competition is really
bad they can squeak out some wins with a good jockey and a strategy that
really plays to their strengths but it sucks. Towards the end
of the year Seattle Slew debuted and proceeded to win six races,
including a Jpn1 and the Hopeful Stakes. I am back to having one good
horse, and to be fair, he’s a really good horse.
1977
1977 was about what I expected. Seattle Slew won the Satsuki Sho, the
American Triple Crown, the Ireland Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe,
and the Senior Autumn Triple Crown. The rest of my horses got a couple
of wins in some of the low-tier races. Tokino Minoru died of old age.
There’s not a lot to say. The horse I bought to win big won big
effortlessly and the rest of my horses sucked shit.
Now since the year was a bit boring for me in-game I’d like to talk
about the real 1977 a bit. There were a lot of crazy good racers that
year. 1977 was Maruzensky’s Classic year where he was dominating every
race he was allowed to enter, and there was a great trio of competitors
dominating the storyline. Tosho Boy, Ten Point, and Green Grass had been
building up a great rivalry in the classics. Twitter user
oju isosan has a good thread on it all which is where I’m taking
this all from, but it culminated in a legendary Arima
Kinen where, after Maruzensky had been withdrawn the field was
smaller than usual with only eight racers. However, even though
Potential Man Maruzensky was out, the race was still really good. From
the jump, Ten Point and Tosho Boy were fighting it out in front and the
rest of the field was way behind. 
By
the third corner Tosho Boy and Ten Point were still duking it out
without giving an inch , with Green Grass following behind.
Entering the final straight it was
still Tosho Boy and Ten Point neck and neck in front, with Green Grass
and the rest of the pack behind them.
Around the 200 meter mark Green
Grass started pulling up and the rest of the pack was struggling to keep
up. It was a three way race, with nobody having a clear advantage until
the very end. 
At the 100 meter mark
it was just the three of them still fighting it out, the rest of the
pack nowhere in sight, though Ten Point had gotten a slight lead.
It was a dead heat until the very
end. Incredible race, one of the best there’s ever been.
They were so far ahead of the rest I
had to go frame by frame to get to this shot, the only point where they
and the rest of the pack were on-screen at the same time, where you can
barely see Green Grass’s tail on the left side of the screen, and you
can barely see the fourth-place horse’s nose on the right hand of the
screen. 
Anyway that’s some 1977
horse trivia I read in a thread once. Back to the video game.
1978
In 1978, Seattle Slew continued his unbelievably dominant winning
streak. The game gets a bit anachronistic in some places so even though
the Saudi Cup was first run in real life in 2020, it’s offered as an
option here, and I had Slew win it. I don’t want to go down all of
Slew’s wins here – there were too many – but some of the competition did
get a bit tougher. I switched Slew over to running the Breeders Cup Turf
at the end of the year because Affirmed was just a bit too much in the
Breeders Cup Classic. Now, I was wondering who Affirmed was and why he
was winning against my very strong horse so I looked him up and
Yeah you know what that’d do it.
With 14 G1 wins, Affirmed looks to be one of the best to ever do it,
even more than Seattle Slew. Affirmed and Slew were the last two
American Triple Crown winners until American Pharoah in 2015. We don’t
see as many American Triple Crown winners these days because the races
are a bit too close together and a lot of owners usually opt to skip one
of them in the interest of the horse’s health. This seems like an
organizational issue in American horse racing to me, and i think it’d be
better for the health of the sport if the Triple Crown races were spread
out a bit more so that up-and-coming horses could reasonably run them
all without health concerns.
Outside of Slew, most of my horses continued to be middling, except
for one surprise. A couple years back I picked up Five Hope, a decent
mare who in real life won the Oaks, because it feels like I always get
good results from Oaks winners. Five Hope ended up sweeping the
Quadruple Tiara and the Mile Championship. I think 1978 was also when
the kids started entering school and the wife wanted to send the first
one to a Spartan summer camp. I said yes sure whatever but the kid
didn’t get anything out of it.
1979
At the start of 1979, Seattle Slew hit number 1 on the world horse
rankings, and this triggered some kind of scene where the secretaries
dragged me off to a deserted island where they wore swimsuits.
It was a bit jarring. There wasn’t even a CG, it was just four sprites
talking and then it was over as quickly as it started. Weird shit.
Anyway, in 1979, Seattle Slew continued his unbroken winning streak,
sweeping a bunch of the major races again, and Five Hope picked up the
Victoria Mile and Yasuda Kinen before falling off at the end of the year
with 16th place in Elizabeth Cup and 13th place in Mile Championship.
The second kid wanted to do math class over summer and it raised her
wits by one rank. Nasuno Chigusa’s first foal, Mint Gaia, started racing
and picked up Hanshin JF and Hopeful Stakes. Shadai Dancer started
racing and put up some good results in some G2 and G3 sprints.
Every horse has a growth type stat that I think tells you when they
peak, as well as a stat telling you their current condition. Five Hope
and Slew peaked early and were a bit weakened at the end of the year,
and the other two horses were late bloomers in decent condition. I opted
to retire Five Hope since she’d been struggling and it didn’t look like
she’d get it back together. 
1980
1980 marked the start of a new decade, so the game gave me the option
to change the difficulty and swap out the secretary. I felt like I had a
better grasp on the game at this point, and I was positioned pretty
well, so I bumped it up to Normal and swapped the secretary for a change
of pace. I think the red-haired secretary’s secret quests were all
focused around winning the Dubai Sheema Classic and the other races in
Dubai that week. I think I’ll save that for Stay Gold.
Seattle Slew finally started falling off a little bit in 1980,
finishing second for the first time at the Saudi Cup. He won the
Takarazuka Kinen and the Cox Plate, but he finished second in the Dubai
World Cup and the Breeder’s Cup Classic, finished tenth at the Arc,
eighth at the Japan Cup, and third at the Arima. These are still good
results but he’s clearly past his prime so I opted to finally retire him
with a record of 46 races, 40 wins. He was undefeated for 5 and a half
years and made something like 55 million US dollars or whatever 13
billion yen works out to in 1980 money.
Now, I’ve been kind of writing off
Slew’s impressive win streak and a lot of that’s because that’s what I
expected out of him. I picked him up as a kind of investment vehicle
with the explicit goal of generating big cash returns. Like, yes, of
course Seattle Slew would win a bunch, he’s one of the most
successful horses of the 20th century. He was effortlessly dominant
in-game for five years here, with 34 G1 wins and a lot of them weren’t
even close. It’s more interesting when a less famously successful horse
goes on this kind of run. 
Mint Gaia
– Chigusa and Tokino Minoru’s foal – picked up wins at the Oka Sho, the
Oaks, and the Derby before falling off a bit at the end of the year,
with a second place finish in the Shuka Sho and an eighth-place finish
at the Queen Elizabeth II Cup. I also opted to retire her since her
growth rate indicated she was the sort to peak early and her E+ speed
didn’t give me any confidence she’d keep up in senior year.
One of the two year old horses picked up Hanshin JF, but she had G
speed so I didn’t like her odds of continuing to win long-term. Shadai
Dancer did okay in lower-tier graded races and opens but she was also
falling off at the end of the year.
I think 1980 was also when I was exploring the menus again and
realized I didn’t need to wait for auctions to buy mares, and I picked
up Tokai Midori and White Lunaby and I think Sweet Luna as well, who are
the dams of Tokai Teio’s dam Tokai Natural, Oguri Cap, and Symboli
Rudolf, respectively. Somewhere along the line I also picked up Seiun
Sky’s damsire Mill George as well.
During the year, the second kid decided to get pact-bonded to one of
the new generic foals, currently named Touko Elza 80, but soon to be
known as Night Alcatraz. I have to respect the kid’s impeccable taste
and plan on passing the farm down to her.
I opted to retire most of my three-year-old horses this year since
I’m positioned reasonably well with Rudolf and Teio’s and Oguri’s line
in the farm pretty much guaranteeing some big wins over the 80s, and my
good horses are getting old and falling off.
1981
1981 was another pretty empty year for h o r s e farm without any
clear standouts to pick up major wins. The three year olds were
whelming, and there wasn’t much going on until the back half of the
year. Out of the two year olds, one of Northern Taste’s foals, Quick
Zip, ended up with a good speed stat and won Futurity and Hopeful,
though his effective distance is pretty much limited to miles and short
mediums.
The other horses put up
middling records. Towards the end of the year I was given the option to
open an overseas branch in England, so I did. I think I also set up a
club, though I don’t understand how that all works yet, but at the end
of the year I opted to transfer a 1-year-old Katsuragi Ace to them in
the hopes that would help. I have no idea if that’s hurt me or how that
all works.
1982
1982 got my neurons firing again a bit. There were a few horses in
the farm that could win graded races but they weren’t good enough to win
effortlessly, which demanded a bit more thought and strategizing.
After a strong junior year where he won the Asahi Hai Futurity Stakes
and the Hopeful Stakes, Quick Zip, with a bit of effort, managed to win
the Satsuki Sho. 
His distance
potential wasn’t quite good enough for the Japan Derby or the Kikuka Sho
so I decided to try pivoting him to some of the dirt G1s, but his
performance tanked. He managed a second-place finish at the Tokyo Derby
but just kind of collapsed after that.
Going back through all this with a
bit more time under my belt, I can say I hadn’t looked too closely at or
understood all the fields or else I would’ve noticed this section here.
This translates to something like
“Growth type: Precocious”, which means the horse peaks even earlier than the 早め type horses and
explains Quick Zip’s collapse in the back half of the year.
Real Shadai put up solid second-place finishes at the Derby and
Kikuka Sho, and managed a respectable third place at the Arima
Kinen.
And that’s all pretty good, but Nasuno Chigusa’s second foal (sire:
Northern Taste), Mellow Yellow, debuted and got off to a really strong
start. After winning her maiden, she finished second in the G3 Flower
Cup, qualifying her for the Oka Sho. It took a little bit of fiddling
with different strategies and jockeys, but she managed to win it. After
that, she won the Oaks, finished third in the Takarazuka, and then
cleaned out the rest of the jewels in the Tiara with wins at the Shuka
Sho and Queen Elizabeth Cup. I explored running her in the Mile
Championship and Japan Cup but the Mile Championship would’ve put too
much strain on her and the Japan Cup was just a bit too strong with John
Henry competing, so I ran her in the Champions Cup which she won.
It’s a great start and she’s
seemingly a late bloomer with a great stat spread so she still has a lot
of room to grow. If she can get up to A speed I might try running her
abroad.
The second kid’s pact-bonded
horse, Night Alcatraz, also debuted and got off to a strong start. A
second place finish in a G2 into winning Hanshin JF and Hopeful Stakes should position her well going into next year.
I opted to retire Quick Zip since his performance had collapsed, and
also retired Real Shadai to keep in line with real life, but kept the
rest.
1983
Okay, so there’s a few lines I could go with here but to start I’ll
say I was planning on running Night Alcatraz in the Tiara to pick up
some easy G1s as I have been, but then this happened.
A
distance win at the Tulip Sho. Say, what’s her preferred distance again?
1700m to 3100m huh. That’s... solidly
within the Classics, and could be extended to Tenno Spring temporarily
with a training. You know what, forget the Tiara, I think she’s got a
shot at winning the Triple Crown. Surely I’m not forgetting anyone
important. This’ll be easy. 
hey
don’t worry about this unrelated wikipedia paragraph aha
I’ll talk about the other horses later but first, let’s try running
Night Alcatraz at the Satsuki Sho. My initial tests had Night Alcatraz
losing to Mister CB by a length, but some short-term speed training
patched that up and got her to a win.
After this I thought about having
Night Alcatraz pick up a win at the NHK Mile before taking on the Derby,
but that would have put too much strain on her and given her tendonitis,
so I opted to have her rest before trying to tackle the Derby. With
functioning legs, her first attempt at the Derby was super frustrating.
Look at this: 
It was a loss by a
neck, and I couldn’t get better than that with that setup, so I had to
go back a bit and get another horse in the race. It literally didn’t
matter who, I just needed any horse who could enter the Derby to take up
a slot. So I got a win in a listed race with one of my less good horses,
Apple Alder, so that he could be just good enough to barely qualify, and
that was the piece I needed to get a win.
Something about that messed with Mr. C.B.’s positioning enough so that
Night Alcatraz could keep the lead long enough to win.
Next, I tried skipping ahead to the Kikuka-Sho so I could see what I
needed to fix, and there, without doing any more training, I lost by
about six lengths. To fix that, I figured I’d need to slot in a couple
more races and work on improving some of the adaptable stats – the
stamina one especially – so I entered Night Alcatraz into a couple of
the Summer 2000 Meter Series races, and I ran her in front to try and
boost her speed. It worked out pretty well, and got her a grade boost to
her speed, some positive conditions, and a gold skill.
In the middle of this the American rep came around and asked for 1.5
billion yen to open a farm in America, which I gave her.
At the end of the month it was time for the Kikuka Sho. To improve my
odds I went with a speed training and got a great success. A couple
initial attempts didn’t quite bear fruit, but once I tried frontrunning
the whole way it worked out.
Night
Alcatraz successfully claimed the Classic Triple Crown, and against a
real contender, at that. Mr. C.B. was tough as iron and trying to find a
way to get past him was a heck of a challenge. Doing this with a mare,
too, will be great for reasons I’ll get into later. It’s hysterical, I’m
going to need to make her face Mr. C.B. some more. After this, Night
Alcatraz went on to win the Japan Cup and the Arima Kinen as well. She’s
up to 7 G1 wins now.
As for the rest of the horses, they did pretty well this year. Mellow
Yellow picked up another four G1 wins, bringing her up to 11, Symboli
Rudolf picked up Futurity and Hopeful, and one of my other horses, which
I’ll choose to read as Wings of Zil, won the February Stakes. I think I
meant to run Mellow Yellow in the Takamatsunomiya Kinen and then forgot
for some reason. Oh well, maybe next
year.
My overseas horses didn’t do as
well as my Japanese horses. You’ve got a bit less control over there and
I don’t think my horses are especially well-adapted for the races there
yet. Also most of my attention was on figuring out how to get Night
Alcatraz past a real heavy hitter and I might have gotten a bit lazy
with some races I could’ve won over there.
I think the game’s at its most engaging when the horses are in the
kind of B, B+ range. The races are winnable with some adjustments, but
they aren’t free, and this year I had a decent number of horses sitting
there.
The kids’ grades are– Well, the
second one’s doing well. The 11-year-old still hasn’t gotten anything
from school and the third kid could be worse.
1984
I don’t want to do another play-by-play covering the emotional
journeys as they happened right now so I’ll go with this: My goal this
year was to get Night Alcatraz the Spring and Autumn Triple Crowns, and
I succeeded, but only because of nepotism. I got her through everything
else but I kept losing to Katsuragi Ace at the Arima Kinen. The only way
I found to get Night Alcatraz the win was by using my power as owner of
the club that owned him to remove him from the race.
Here’s the overview of the major
races at the end of the year. Names in green are my horses, names in
orange are designated rivals. Rudolf picked up the Classic Triple Crown
and NHK Mile, as well as a couple of races overseas. Night Alcatraz
picked up the Spring and Autumn Triple Crowns. One of my other horses,
Spy A Manor, picked up Champions Cup and Tokyo Daishoten and three
others, and a couple of the foals from horses at the farm, Aware Myr and
Lover Joy, picked up the two-year-old races. Mellow Yellow racked up
another ten G1 wins abroad, including wins at the Prix de l’Arc de
Triomphe and The Everest, and my overseas horses lost a lot of
races.
1985
At the start of 1985 there was a scene where all the secretaries went
to the hot springs, triggered by some mechanic I don’t understand
because, I need to reiterate, I am illiterate and cannot read Japanese.
I’m working on improving it, which is why I play games like this in
Japanese, but my vocabulary is weak and I haven’t internalized how to
make the grammar make sense and while my kanji knowledge has improved
it’s still not up to par, and these all compound on each other to make
reading Japanese more difficult than it should be. A lot of this would
be easier if I could just copy the text out of the game and search the
kanji on Jisho or something, but LunaTranslator doesn’t work under Wine
and Google Lens is Android only. I should really look up an OCR program
or something. 
In 1985 Rudolf pretty effortlessly picked up the Spring and Autumn
Triple crowns, as well as King George VI and the Arc.
I thought about running Night
Alcatraz in the Hong Kong Triple Crown but that was a bit too much for
where her statline was at, so I ran her in some overseas races she could
win instead. She ended up picking up another 8 major wins, the most
notable of which seem to be Breeders’ Cup Fillies Turf and the Eclipse
Stakes. 
Mellow Yellow continued
trucking along and picked up the Hong Kong Sprint Triple Crown, another
win at The Everest, Breeders’ Cup Distaff, and five other G1s, bringing
her to a total of 31 total. 
Spy A
Manor surprised me a bit, just kind of trucking along and picking up a
lot of dirt wins. He didn’t do especially well abroad but he picked up
wins at the February Stakes, Kashiwa Kinen, Sakitama Cup, JBC Classic,
Tokyo Daishoten again, and one other one that I can’t quite make out.
Lover Joy, a generic foal by White
Narubi and Northern Taste, picked up two thirds of the Classic Triple
Crown, but lost at the Kikuka Sho because I couldn’t find a good jockey.
She might have still lost it with a good jockey, but it didn’t help that
the jockeys capped out at Long C. 
Aware Myr, or however you read that vowel soup, a generic foal by Nasuno
Chigusa and Seattle Slew, picked up the Triple Tiara and a couple of
Jpn1s.
Overseas, I started paying more attention to the schedule and started
entering the horses in races they could win. Saddler’s Wells got his act
together after a disastrous Classic year and picked up 8 G1
wins
One of my generic foals by
Northern Taste, Forest Arashi, picked up two thirds of the European Mile
Triple Crown, but I couldn’t find a line to get him winning the English
2000 Guineas and not break his leg in the Irish 2000 Guineas, so I
eventually opted to just pull him out of that race. He also won a G1 in
Canada. 
At the foal auction I spotted a familiar name, which reminded me I
should go and check the others to see if there was anyone else I could
recognize that I should pick up. From that, in addition to Super Creek
there, I ended up picking up Tamamo Cross, Yaeno Muteki, Bamboo Memory,
Soccer Boy, Sakura Chiyono O, and a couple of grandparents for some
other notable horses. 
I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of horses I had at this point
so I opted to retire a lot of them at the end of the year. I’ll still
have way too many. God, managing all of this is going to be a real pain.
I have too many good horses. How am I going to get them all the wins
they deserve?
1986
Oh well, that’s still another year out. This year, I dunno. I don’t
have any real up-and-comers so I guess I’ll just have Rudolf run the
table on the Classics again, I’ll have Night Alcatraz try the Hong Kong
Triple Crown again, and for the rest I’m going to start using the
prebaked schedules because that’s the only way I’m stopping there being
too much overlap. Last year I started using the + button to bring up the
races in spreadsheet form and started sorting them by aptitude so I
could have an easier time finding the races that would work well for a
given horse, but it was kind of a pain to find specific notable races
doing that.
Like, I don’t know the names of all the Hong Kong races so I was just
kind of flipping through these listings one at a time looking for
something in the text field that said トリプルクラウン (triple crown in
katakana) or 3冠, which is the kanji for
it.
At some point it’s easier to just put them in a pre-baked
schedule so I don’t have to do that every time.
Also, while going down the list I noticed that there’s not really a
lot going on in America or England outside of the Triple Crown races.
There are a lot of G1s there, but most of the time their rewards are way
closer to G2s or G3s in Japan or some other places and it’s hard to
justify running them. That’s a lot of extra time I’d need to set aside
to run them for not a whole lot of benefit. There’s not really anything
secondary going on in America or England like the Global Sprint
Challenge or the Stayers Million Series or the Summer 2000 series or
some of the secondary Triple Crowns meant to emphasize different major
races that places like Japan and Hong Kong have. There’s nothing to
create secondary or tertiary storylines or any real attempt to promote
competition at distances outside of medium-length races.
Anyway, 1986 was a relatively restrained year for the farm, at least
in terms of surprises or having to think, even as I picked up some more
major wins again. Rudolf cleared the spring and autumn races again,
though he started struggling a bit near the end. Night Alcatraz picked
up the Hong Kong Triple Crown, King George, the Arc, and Breeders’ Cup
Turf, along with three others, bringing her up to 31 G1 wins total.
Aware Myr picked up three G1 wins and a few top three finishes.
Overseas, a few horses picked up a few smaller G1 wins.
I opted to retire pretty much all of them because I have too many
foals lying around and a lot of the horses on the farm were on the
decline or weakened, even as the only real retirement recommendation was
Rudolf. 
When it came time to transfer horses to different farms I opted to
spread them out a bit more and sent Super Creek, Bamboo Memory, and
Soccer Boy to the club to try and improve my standing there a bit more.
1987
Back at the beginning, probably like 7000 words ago, I said I’d been
playing the game for 35 hours. I just want to check back in on that. How
long have I been playing this again?
Ah, I see. If this writeup peters out before I can get the last three
trophies I need to hit credits, please understand. I am an
ill-disciplined moron, especially when it comes to longer-form pieces
like this one, and this is already way past where I can usually get to.
Anyway.
At the start of the year I noticed I had made an error.
See, a couple years back I sent this
horse over to Europe as a foal because, I mean, I see a lot of European
flags in the pedigree, he’s probably good in European races. I think
that’s a pretty reasonable assumption to make absent anything else.
However, and this only became apparent with time, look over here:
芝 is turf and ダ is an abbreviation
for dirt. This is a horse that is more suited to dirt races. There are
no dirt races in Europe, and I can’t run him abroad until he wins some
major races. There is no option for me to transfer him to one of my
other farms. This horse is doomed.
The first half of the year went by pretty quickly. Tamamo Cross
picked up the Satsuki Sho, one of my European horses picked up a couple
G1s abroad, and then it was May and it was time to pick who to pair the
mares with for the year.
A few years back I said I’d explain why it was good that Night
Alcatraz was beating Mr. C.B. and now that I’ve retired her I can
finally get into the rivalry mechanics a little bit.
As you race against specific horses more and more, they may develop a
rivalry. Competing against them will increase their rivalry level. One
of my friends joked something to the effect of “what, is it measuring
their level of sexual tension?” to which I looked at the columns and
found that, yes, that’s exactly what’s going on there. As the rivalry
level increases, the number of sparks flying between them increases, and
they get a breeding bonus when paired.
Over the course of her career Night
Alcatraz developed an intense rivalry with Mr. C.B. and Dancing Brave,
and this is great for their compatibility.
Down in the corner there it says:
oh my god, they were rivals?
from different farms??
As mechanics go, this is hysterical. It’s enemies to lovers
formalized and codified. I think there’s an audience that would be
completely obliterated by this.
Outside of that pairing I mostly just continued focusing on pairing
horses that had a good letter and number of clovers up top there, and
also got a good excuse to talk about the star in this one
here.
Sometimes if you have a
specific mare and pair them with a specific stallion in a specific year
you get the real horse that came out of that pairing. In this case I’m
pairing Symboli Rudolf with Tokai Natural in 1987, which will produce
who even knows, it’s a mystery.
Over the rest of the year, Tamamo Cross won the rest of the Triple
Crown and the Arima Kinen, Oguri won Hopeful Stakes, and I picked up an
armful of names I recognized from the foal menu. I think I own all the
good horses of this era now. I think I could probably have Oguri pick up
the Triple Crown next year, but I might just run him in some of the dirt
races I’m missing so I can see credits.
1988
To split up my good horses so they weren’t all bunched up, I opted to
send Oguri abroad to America, Yaeno Muteki to NHK Mile and Yasuda Kinen,
and Chiyono to the Satsuki Sho and the Derby, while Tama cleaned up the
major senior year races.
For whatever reason the game started recommending Tamamo Cross for
retirement at the start of the year. 
It seems a bit baffling to me since he’s a late bloomer and nowhere near
his peak. I know he was retired at the end of the year in real life, but
that was a questionable decision there too.
The first few months were relatively uneventful. Samantha Tosho
placed pretty well in some G3s and G2s, and I managed to get her to a
third-place finish in the Oka Sho, though I forgot that her distance
aptitude caps out at 2100m and accidentally ended up entering her in the
Oaks, where she ended up in 16th place.
Otherwise, she seems pretty solid
with a 9: 4-2-2-1 record so far. I was confused by that at one point so
I should probably explain. That 9: 4-2-2-1 record is saying she has been
in nine races, of which four were first-place finishes, two were
second-place finishes, two were third-place finishes, and one was a
finish outside of the top 3. 
My other horses were varying shades of pretty good. Tamamo Cross won
the Senior Spring Triple Crown, Sakura Chiyono O won the Satsuki Sho and
the Japanese Derby, and Yaeno Muteki picked up NHK Mile and Yasuda
Kinen.
I tried getting Oguri to win the American Triple Crown but I couldn’t
find a way to get him above third in the Kentucky Derby since he was in
the middle of another training and I couldn’t use the Overseas Training
option to juice his overseas aptitude for a turn. He won the Preakness
and the Belmont though.
Most of my overseas horses were pretty bad. Pretty Otie picked up a
few more G1s in Europe, Ima Devil picked up a couple G1s in America, and
Overnote picked up a couple of top 3 finishes, which is pretty good. My
other twelve horses that raced struggled. Most of them managed to at
least win their maiden race but some of them couldn’t even get that
far.
get it together Saga Valley.