**SHMORP** *- a magical adventure about bringing water back to a desert oasis*. Play here

The Tiny Horse Game Jam is a community project that has emerged from the TMQ Discord earlier this year and took place for the second time already in November 2025. The goal? Game developers, many of them complete beginners, get together to create and finish very small horse games over the course of a month.

The Tiny Horse Game Jam is the perfect antidote to beginners’ general tendency to hopelessly overscope when making their own horse game and I seriously cannot overstate how much I love that it’s happening.

While the very first jam in May resulted in 8 tiny horse games, the November edition saw a whopping 21 submissions! The game jam even had a theme this time around, with “Darkness & Light”being used as the defining premise for some games, a vague theme or small easter egg for others. All of the so-created games can be played for free on itch.io, though some require a zip file download while others are playable directly in the browser.

The Games

Among the 21 submitted titles, the variety is big: from a horror folklore text-based choose-your-own adventure (Cheval Maléfique) to a pixel art horse trading strategy game (Horse Merchant) to a gorgeously dreamlike exploration experience (Untitled Horse Game), there’s a variety of genres and art styles to be found, and the jammers worked with just about every game engine you can imagine.

I’ve given all of the games a quick try and can only recommend you do the same, especially if you’re the kind of person lamenting how many horse games fall into the same handful of tropes and feel very similar to each other, or if you have any intention of ever making a horse game yourself. Literally all of these games have something unique and new to offer to our genre and feel fresh in their own way, even if many of them of course aren’t content-complete or perfectly polished.

I don’t really want to pick a favorite, because I genuinely think they all add value to the horse game canon, but if you only have capacity to try a couple of them, I particularly recommend these highlights:

SHMORP is a very classic role-playing adventure game with an impressive amount of content, showcasing wonderfully how a horse can be incorporated into a turn based combat system, while also featuring quite a bit of adorable horse-savvy detail.
Angry Ex-Boyfriends is a turn-based, card-based navigation game, but also an absolute masterclass in how to include equine expressions in dialogue. These two horses aggressively flirting with each other are clearly anthropomorphized in their writing, but come with highly believable horsie facial expressions. The result is incredibly cute and hilarious.
I love both Horse Merchant and Fantastic Horse Trading Simulator for being different takes on the same basic concept of reading buyers’ requests and then finding a horse for them. Fantastic Horse Trading Simulator gets an additional shout-out for how funny its contracts and prompts are, while Horse Merchant convinces with a consistently cute pixel art style.
Faeforge gets my vote for the visually most impressive entry in the jam! It may be “just” an equine character creator, but it’s an absolutely gorgeous one with a beautifully stylized horse model, lots of pretty fantasy markings and accessories, and a generally lovely soft-glowy cel-shaded prettiness that I’d absolutely want to see in a full game.
Night Ride Guide - My Light Shines Bright explores the idea of guided trail rides as a core gameplay mechanic and works wonderfully, I’d love to see something like this as a full game. Finding out and managing the different visitors’ preferences got me hooked enough that I was disappointed when encountering placeholder text later on, because hey I have to know if my trail guide trivia included any train facts for Iris!!!

I love that several of these games let you play as the horse, and I love how easily something games like Mistveil, SHMORP and Night Mares show that you can map some very well known genre archetypes (adventure, classic RPG, shoot-em-up) onto an equine main character, and include wonderful horsie details like that the enemies you face in Night Mares are those scary trash cans that a lot of real horses tend to spook at.

I love that literally all of these games try completely novel combinations of gameplay mechanics that I haven’t seen in any “finished” horse games on the market. I love how perfectly these projects demonstrate that what goes under the “horse game” term can be so much more varied and creative than what anyone might immediately think of, or what any of us played in our childhoods.

I refuse to go any of the contributions go unmentioned here, so to wrap up the ones I haven’t highlighted yet:
Luxicorn and the Lost Souls showcases a neat atmosphere and commitment to the theme.
Sugar³ Rush is kind of deviously addictive in giving you that “ok just one more try” itch.
Blackboard Ponies lets you get creative with a drawing tool and then cause mayhem as a naughty pony in a lovely chalk drawn style.
BBM Market remains work-in-progress, but gives a neat little glimpse in what a horse-focused visual novel with lovely equine art could look like.
EquiPairs is an educational memory game about matching specific horse terminology in different languages, which is neat and can genuinely be a great help in learning niche vocabulary.
Herd Brain doesn’t have a ton to do yet, but explores horse herd behavior from a top-down perspective and features much more natural pathfinding than many finished games have.
Hex-Tack-On is a hex-grid-based roguelike about finding tack items for your horse that neatly shows how easily horse equipment can replace what we think of as traditional character equipment slots.
A Tiny Pony journey features a wonderfully hand-drawn comic intro and unique star-searching mechanic.
The Lodge explores a route planning and trail riding mechanic in sidescroller format that I’d love to see as part of a bigger 2D stable management game.
Suika Stables - Coat Compendium may not be the first horsie suika game created by our community, but it incorporates some very cool ideas by making you collect individual horses and coat colors through the suika mechanic and by reframing the merge game into horse rehab.
Snow Tales is a comfortably cozy winter adventure with an interesting 2D billboard art style in a 3D world.

Please go and check out the submissions, and remember that leaving a comment about what you enjoyed on the creators’ itch pages has a solid chance of making their day and encouraging them to make more horse games, so we all win! Find all the games playable for free here!

About the THGJ

*THGJ Organizer Avicuiae created this sticker that was sent as a thank you and participation trophy to all jammers.*

The Tiny Horse Game Jam is organized by TMQ Community Members SartorialDragon, Geass, nut-pun, Curiosity, Avicuiae and Katla. The organizer team ran regular Showcase Sundays over the month-long jam, which they report has been much appreciated by the participants.

To conclude the jam, the team put together two lengthy video calls over in the TMQ Discord, giving all jammers a bit of time to introduce their project via livestream and give a bit of insight behind the scenes

“We also had great support by mentors from within the community, so jammers could ask for help any time!" say the organizers. “It was a lovely group of participants, not least because TMQ curates such a lovely atmosphere that carried over to the jam – which was TMQ members and their partners and friends.”

If you’re sad to have missed the jam, there may well be another opportunity in the future: “We plan to run the jam again next year,” says the organization team, “our priority will be to keep it small so we can keep up the videocall and the atmosphere!”

Make sure to join the TMQ Discord if you want to stay tuned for potential future THGJ iterations.

Tiny Horse Game Jam #2 – Here’s 21 (!) Brand New Innovative Little Horse Games to Try for Free

The Games

About the THGJ