The horses nobody else will take

You are Millie, and you are seventeen. Your grandfather’s yard has not been touched since the nineties, and the phone keeps ringing.

For now it is private. If someone gave you a code, it goes here.

Six horses out in a fenced paddock with a round bale and a water trough, the farmhouse and the red barn behind, and Millie at the rail.

What you do

Clear the yard

Cut back the brush and haul out the rock and old rails until there is room to build.

Put up a barn

The first one has sixteen stalls, and Louise knows what every board cost.

Bring them back

Feed, water and groom them every day, and school them once they let you near.

Weather off the mountains

The seasons turn, a chinook blows through, and in winter it goes to forty below.

The horses

There are forty-one of them, and each one has a name. Bridge Over Troubled Water is a bay Thoroughbred mare. In the barn she is Mistral. Pekoe, Earl, Jee and Sencha are miniatures named for tea, and too small to ride.

Each one comes in with a note about where they have been: found loose on the highway shoulder in a snowstorm, no brand, no papers. Once one of the forty-one is well, that horse is home for good. The phone keeps ringing after that, and those horses go on to new homes.

The paddock under snow, the horses out and the snow still coming down. — Winter goes to forty below. The troughs freeze.

The yard on the first morning, brush and old rails in the grass, before any of it is cleared. — Where it starts: the yard, before any of it is cleared.

The same yard at dusk, a lamp lit in the farmhouse window and the horses still out. — Dusk, with the lamp on in the house and the horses still out.

For parents

There are no ads and no chat. Nobody can message your child.
The game does not ask for a name, an email or anything else about your child.
The farm is saved in the browser and backed up to this site under a farm code. The code does not say who it belongs to.
It plays in a browser on a phone, upright or sideways, or on a computer. There is nothing to install.
Horses arrive thin, hurt or frightened, and get better with care. Their intake notes say plainly why: neglect, a barn fire, an owner who died, a racehorse sent to a feedlot, a mare bred too young and too often. Horses get sick, and the vet comes. No horse dies.
The game opens just after Millie’s grandfather has died. It is said once and the story moves on. There is no last level; the farm goes on as long as they keep playing.

What the game keeps, where, and how to delete it

The yard is waiting.