Our mission

A gentle place for a five-year-old to look after a horse — free, ad-free, and impossible to lose.

Why it exists

Most games aimed at small children are built to keep them playing: streaks to protect, timers running down, a shop one tap away. A child who loves horses deserves somewhere to just be with a horse.

So this game has no fail states. Every event finishes and every rider gets a ribbon — stars reward getting faster, but slow is never punished. There is nothing to buy, no advertising, and nothing that gets worse if you put the tablet down for a month.

What it teaches

By doing, not by quizzing. There are no tests and no scores to beat.

• Horse care — feeding, watering, grooming in the right order, mucking out
• The gaits — walk, trot, canter, gallop, and how each one feels
• Riding styles — English for show jumping and dressage, Western for the barrels and breakaway roping
• Tack — saddles, bridles, reins, and what each is for
• Getting ready for a show — plaiting a mane and tail, with ribbons and flowers, and why: so the judge can see the neck, so the tail stays clean, and why show flowers are often silk
• Handling from the ground — leading from the near side, lunging, and why a horse on box rest is not ridden by anyone
• How a horse works — why it sleeps standing up, what its ears are telling you, why a farrier comes, how you can tell its age
• Responsibility — a happy horse needs looking after every day

The farm is somewhere you keep coming back to

It is not a set of levels. It is a small stable with a routine, and most of what a child learns comes from the routine rather than from a fact appearing on the screen.

• You look after other people's horses. Nothing is bought or sold — there is no money in this game. People write and ask if you have room, each horse arrives with a story, and each one needs something different because of that story. A horse leaves because it was looked after well, the goodbye says so out loud, and it is kept forever in the yard book. Saying no to an arrival costs nothing.
• A horse can stay. When one is ready to go home its owner may offer to let it live here instead — still their horse, still no money, and they keep visiting. A child who says yes gets to keep it for as long as she likes; the owner asks again each time she sees them, so giving it back is always offered and never demanded. Saying off you go home is just as good an ending, and reaches the same page in the yard book.
• Days pass when you sleep in the farmhouse — which is also where the trophy shelf and the kitchen are. Horses wake up hungry, because that is true and because it gives the morning a point. They never wake up in a bad way, no matter how long the tablet was down.
• A foal to bring up. Pip, born on the farm, is not ridden. What a foal needs is different from a grown horse, and so are the jobs: small feeds little and often, time beside her mum, and a few minutes of handling — a scratch, a hand down each leg, a foot picked up — which is what makes a horse easy to handle for the rest of her life. When a day's jobs are done she grows a little that night, until she is a yearling. Nothing about her ever runs down: jobs left undone simply wait, and she waits to grow.
• Hens in a run of their own. Scatter grain over the gate and they come running; each morning there are eggs in the nest box to collect, and the ones brought in end up as breakfast at the kitchen table, with a reminder to wash hands. The hens have no hunger to look after and nothing about them runs down — feeding them is a nice thing to do, never a chore. Their run is fenced so no horse can tread on one.
• A kitchen garden behind the house. Water the tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and carrots, and they grow a little each night until there is something to pick. A carrot pulled from the garden can go straight to a horse. Plants that are not watered simply wait — nothing wilts or dies. The garden is fenced, because tomato plants are poisonous to horses, and the game says so.
• Friends come by, and one of them is a younger child who wants a pony ride. You lead the pony while they sit on it and ask questions — and this is the one part of the game where your child is the one who knows the answer. Every answer offered is true, so there is no wrong one.
• A wild herd to spot. Now and then a herd of wild horses runs past outside the farm's fences. They cannot be caught — they are faster than any horse on the farm and always get away — and that is on purpose: nothing is lost by not catching them, because catching them was never offered. Seeing them teaches how a wild herd lives.
• Six things to ride in, including one deliberately quiet one: a dressage test where the stars go to the child who stays at a walk or a trot, not the one who gallops. There is no clock on that screen at all.

Built for a child who cannot read yet

Every fact is read aloud. Every button carries an icon as well as a word. Touch targets are large enough for small hands, and nothing important is conveyed by colour alone. A five-year-old can play this on their own, without an adult reading the screen to them. Even the save slots work that way: each card on the menu shows the face of that child's own horse, so they find their horse by recognising it, not by reading its name.

For the grown-up, under For grown-ups: a text-size setting, a high-contrast mode, separate volume sliders — so you can quiet the music without silencing the facts the game teaches with — captions for the bits that are otherwise only spoken, and a switch that keeps the game's voice on your device or silent, never a browser's network voice.

Things we decided not to do

• No accounts, no sign-in, no email address
• No advertising, ever, of any kind
• No in-app purchases and no currency you can buy
• No analytics, no tracking, no data collection
• No leaderboards, no streaks, no pressure to come back

These are product commitments, not oversights — the game is built so that breaking them would take real work. See the privacy page for how that is enforced rather than merely promised.

It works on what you already have

It runs in a browser on a phone, tablet, laptop or a school Chromebook — nothing to install, though you can add it to a home screen if you like. It keeps working without a connection, so a car journey is fine. Your progress is saved on your own device, and a backup file can move it to another one.

Who made it

One person, for their own family, with a lot of care about what a small child's first game should feel like. It is free because it was never intended to be anything else.

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