Take-Off▶Play

Control your horse stride so the last hoofbeat lands in the take-off zone, and jump a full show jumping course clean.

How to play

Your horse gallops at a fixed speed and the only thing you control is the length of its stride, using the two buttons at the bottom. A fence is jumped from wherever the last hoofbeat lands: inside the green band the jump is clean, too close or too far and the rail comes down. The white marker on the ground shows where you would take off if you left the stride alone, so your job is to move that marker into the green before you get there. Changing the stride a little moves the take-off point by that much for every stride you have left, so corrections made early move the marker far more than corrections made late, and the stride itself can only change so fast. Each course adds fences, raises the speed, narrows the green band and slows the stride adjustment. Three rails down ends the round, and your score is the number of fences you jump clean.

Tips & strategy

Show jumping riders talk about seeing a distance, and this game is that one skill with everything else stripped away. The horse's speed is fixed. Where it takes off is decided entirely by where the last hoofbeat falls, and that is decided by the stride length you chose several strides earlier.

The arithmetic behind it is worth understanding, because it explains why the game punishes hesitation so hard. If you have n strides left before the fence and you lengthen each of them by a few centimetres, the take-off point moves by n times that amount. Three strides out, a small nudge slides the marker most of the way across the green band. One stride out, the same nudge moves it a fraction as far, and on top of that the stride can only be adjusted at a limited rate, so there is not even time to make a big change. Late corrections are weak twice over.

Measured over hundreds of courses, that is the difference between a good round and a disaster. Starting the correction the instant you land clears about nine fences in ten and completes almost every early course. Waiting until two strides out halves that to five in ten. Waiting until one stride out drops it to three in ten, and simply never touching the stride manages under two in ten — barely better than random.

So the habit to build is simple: the moment you land over a fence, look at the white marker for the next one and start moving it. Do not wait to see whether it drifts into the band on its own. If the marker sits short of the green, shorten the stride; if it sits beyond, lengthen. Then stop adjusting once it is in, because holding a button past the point of correction pushes it straight back out the other side.

One more thing worth knowing: a fence you meet on a bad distance is usually a fence you set up two fences ago. The stride you land on after a jump carries into the next approach, so when a course starts going wrong the fix is not a bigger correction, it is an earlier one.