Notepad

A horse's notepads: free text areas in which to note what the game does not keep. One tab per notepad, each with its own save button — so you can correct several before closing.

You only see the tabs that concern you: the window adapts to the role you hold on that horse.

The six notepads

• Owner — yours, if you are the owner. Nobody else reads it.
• Breeder — also the owner's, and separate from the previous one: it is the one for mating intentions. You find it again in the genealogy, which is where it is needed.
• Trainer — for the trainer alone.
• Jockey — for the jockey alone.
• Common — shared by the three: owner, trainer and jockey. It is the team's liaison book.
• Public — read by everybody, written by the owner alone. It is the horse's shop window.

A note belongs to whoever wrote it

That is the rule to understand, and it is invisible until you run into it. Each note is marked with its author's name, and it is read only by him — or, for the common notepad, by the three members of the team in place.

Three consequences:

• A new trainer does not read the previous one's notes. He finds an empty notepad. That is deliberate: what a trainer has observed belongs to him, and it is not sold with the horse.
• Your own notes follow you, they do not follow the horse. If you sell a horse and then buy it back, you find again what you had written in it.
• The common notepad is shared only between the teammates of the moment. Change trainer, and the note he had written there is no longer readable by anybody.

So: whatever has to survive a change of team goes in the public notepad, the only one that is really attached to the horse.

What it is for, in practice

The game keeps the results, not the reasons. The notes that really serve are those that carry a conclusion rather than a fact:

• Trainer: “suppleness blocked for three courses, do not insist”, “better on medium effort”.
• Jockey: “starts badly if boxed in”, “holds 2,700 m, not 3,000”.
• Owner: the price paid, the objective, the date on which to resell.
• Breeder: the stallions already tried and what they gave.
• Public: what you want a buyer to read.

A horse whose trainer notepad says “do not insist on suppleness” saves you, six months later, the three courses you would have paid for again.

The notepads are also found as a filter criterion in the lists of horses, which lets you isolate every horse carrying a given mention. And they disappear on the horse's final retirement.