You’ve seen the hype, you’ve read the articles, you’ve probably seen your favorite content creators playing the game nonstop since it came out less than two weeks ago. Perhaps you’ve even heard people talking about it that you never thought you’d hear about it from; your opponent and friends at the tables at GHO suddenly talking about it: The Horse Girl Game. But what exactly does the game ask for you to do, and how do you actually play it? Worry no longer, dear reader, because your friendly pal Marcy is here to help get you on track to be the best Umamusume: Pretty Derby trainer you can possibly be, starting with the first and most daunting part of the game: How, exactly, do you play Career mode, and what are you supposed to do to start understanding the play loop?

Once you’re finished reading our guide on Career Mode, we have other guides that go into further depth:

Need help with Support Decks? Read our Getting Started: Support Decks!

Need help with Inheritance Sparks? Read our Getting Started: Sparks! 

Need help with PVP or the Taurus Cup? Read our PVP Guide!

If you’re confused about Leveling your Trainee’s Potential or Stars, check this guide!

The URA Scenario and You

One of the most misunderstood parts of Umamusume: Pretty Derby is the idea that the game is just about cute horse girls racing and singing. There’s a lot of that, but once the game actually starts asking you to play it, it becomes far more about stat management, scheduling, goals management, and dealing with consequences. While there are a few people that will occasionally refer to Umamusume: Pretty Derby as a “roguelike” (I have occasionally done this, in honesty), the game is actually closer to management simulators like Princess Maker, Tokimeki Memorial, or even Football Manager. The reason that the game is sometimes called a roguelike is that the “end” goal of Career mode is not just beating the scenario goals, but creating new resources that will allow future runs to go smoother and smoother as you improve your legacies and move closer to challenging seemingly impossible goals, such as the vaulted Arima Kinen win with Haru Urara.

But how do you even get to that point? While the starting tutorial in the game does a fairly good job of introducing players to the loop of the game and how things work, career runs can often end before they even begin because there are so many systems at work that can overwhelm players. This sharp learning curve is part of the experience, but it can also be particularly frustrating to navigate, and so demystifying the game goes a long way to getting further into the Career mode, grasping the playloop, and beginning to appreciate the game for the depth and challenge that it provides.

The first step is to understand what Career mode actually is: Players are given a set amount of time to meet a list of increasingly challenging goals that have different “checks” to overcome. Some Umamusume need to place at a certain level in a race, or take first place, while others require certain amounts of fans; regardless of the goal, Career mode works mostly the same across the cast, with their unique narratives fleshing out the game and giving it character and personality. If players clear the initial set of goals, the Scenario goal becomes challengeable, which in this case is to race in the URA finale, three back to back high level races with little, if any, time in-between to train for.

If you are familiar with games like Slay the Spire or Balatro, these challenges can be viewed in this way, with the final three races seen as how “far” can you get in your given run, with the end goal being to clear the URA Finale race. Whether you win or lose (either in your Career or clearing the Scenario), your trained racer is given a score and a list of “Sparks”, becoming a Veteran Umamusume you can use in PVP modes like Team Races, Daily Races, and most importantly, to be used as parents for your next Career mode run, passing on statistics, skills, and proficiencies. After that point, your Career run is over, and you can attempt a new run with a different Umamusume, or try the same one again to see how far you can get or what you could do differently this time.

Selecting Your Horse is a Matter of Taste

When starting Umamusume: Pretty Derby for the first time, all players run through a tutorial scenario that gives you the same starting racers and support cards. These Umamusume are as follows: Daiwa Scarlet, Vodka, Sakura Bakushin O, Goldship, and Haru Urara. Just from these five alone, players are offered multiple different scenarios not just in terms of plotlines, but also playstyle and challenge. Whichever Umamusume you want to play as is mostly a matter of your own tastes, and there is no “wrong” way to play the game, nor is there a “correct” or “incorrect” starting point for Career. Instead, it’s important to know what each Umamusume does, and understand that some of the Careers are “easier” while others are somewhat “harder”.

Each Umamusume has three specific categories that are important to understand aside from basic stats: Track preference (Turf or Dirt), Distance (Sprint, Mile, Medium, Long), and Style (Front Runner, Pace Chaser, Late Surger, or End Closer), with each of these rated from the letter G (The worst possible proficiency) to S (the highest), although the highest you will naturally see from these is A as a starting point. There are specific numerical values to understand about these letter grades, but for a starting point, you’ll want to focus on the Turf, Distance, and Style that your Umamusume prefers when it comes to racing them, and what that means towards training them.

General stats also work in the same way, starting at G and going to SS (and even higher, but in the current state of the game, this is pretty impossible). Each Umamusume has unique starting stats spread across the same categories: Speed, Stamina, Power, Guts, and Wit. The final bit of information that players need is that each Umamusume has a unique skill (Ultimate, or Special, however you prefer to refer to it), often tied to their preferred running style. It is always, always important to read the Unique Skill so that you aren’t left wondering why it doesn’t activate. As an example, Symboli Rudolf’s skill won’t activate unless she passes three racers before the final spurt of the race, meaning that if she’s running too far forward, her Unique Skill will never activate!

As a little advice for people wanting to dip their toes into the game and try it out for the first time, Daiwa Scarlet and Sakura Bakushin O have more “approachable” Scenarios, where Haru Urara and Goldship have the more difficult ones due to their unique Career goals, or to the unique nature of the Umamusume herself; however, this really doesn’t matter, so just go for whoever you want to play and try it out.

Understanding Stats: A Beginner’s Intro

There is quite a lot of complicated math and knowledge to understand, but in this getting started guide, let’s just focus on explaining things to help get into the Career mode and expanding from there. First, the stats do more or less exactly what they say they do: Speed is your Umamusume’s top speed, Stamina is how much stamina they have, Power is their strength, Guts is… well, sort of also stamina, and Wit is their intelligence. However, what the game doesn’t quite explain and what can be difficult to understand when you continue to lose races is that these stats all interact in unique ways and also interact with the style and preferences of each racer.

Speed is the top speed your Umamusume reaches at the end of a race, and what determines if they are able to pull away with a victory or fall behind. The speed of your racer is not particularly important at any other part of the race, but it is important to know that it is the stat you always want the most of regardless of racer.

Stamina is perhaps the least (initially) understood stat, because what it actually stands for is “Health Points” or “HP”. For shorter races, like Sprints, Stamina almost doesn’t matter at all (which is why Sakura Bakushin O is so “easy”, because all she runs is Sprints and you can just build Speed and Wit and clear her Scenario easily). Stamina becomes more difficult as the race lengths expand, because if your Umamusume runs out of Stamina, you will lose speed, and there is no “visible” health bar. Also, something the game never tells you is that Pace Chasers suffer an 11% Stamina penalty, meaning that they ALWAYS need slightly more Stamina than other racing styles.

Power is linked to acceleration: the more power you have, the more you can accelerate, which is incredibly important for getting the most out of your Speed stat. Power can sometimes matter in shorter distances races than longer, as your racer will have more time to accelerate in long races, but also matters for positions such as Late Surger and End Closer, who need to catch up from the back of the pack. It has some other impacts, but generally you need to know that it accelerates your Umamusume and helps them reach top speed; the longer the race, the less important that can be, but it still matters.

Guts is an odd stat. The basic way to understand it right now is that “it doesn’t matter” in the current Scenario, but it is a number you often want to reach somewhere between 300-400, and that’s it. Guts is sort of like a secondary Stamina; as the game evolves, this stat will matter a lot more than it does right now.

Wit is the final stat, and one of the aspects of how the game’s use of RNG comes into play: Wit governs Skill Usage, and if an Umamusume’s wit is not high enough, they have lower chances to activate their skills at key points in a race. At 200 Wit, Skills have a 55% chance, whereas 300 is 70%, and 500 is 80%; the important note here is that you can never reach 100%. Wit also impacts if your racer becomes Rushed (loses their cool) or starts Late, both of which can have big negative impacts.

You’ve Got a Friend in Me: Support Cards

Edit 7/21: We have a Guide for Support Cards now! Check the link to read all about them in more detail.

One of the most deceptive parts about Umamusume: Pretty Derby is the importance of Support Cards over actual Umamusume. Since the game is a gacha game, there is often a misunderstanding that the thing you “want” are more, rarer Umamusume, and in actuality, the important thing you need and want are Support Cards. Each Support Card is assigned to a specific Stat, and provides bonuses that can take the form of boosts to stat raising, energy levels, skills, and other things that can occur during your Career. Each card is different and provides different things, and you often want to focus on Support Cards that are linked to stats you want to focus on (Speed, primarily) or cards that pass on skills that you want your Umamusume to be able to learn.

If you’ve followed the game in some level, you may have seen a few specific cards spoken about. I don’t want to spend too much time on individual cards here, but I will try and briefly explain those cards here: Super Creek, the upcoming Kitasan Black on July 16th, and Fine Motion. These three cards get a lot of press because of what they do, and thus why they are so ubiquitous to have in your deck or borrow from friends. Super Creek is a Stamina Card that allows your Umamusume to learn the skill Swinging Maestro, a skill that restores Stamina; Kitasan Black is a Speed Card that provides amazing speed stat bonuses, mood bonuses, and specialty priority (meaning Kitasan Black will appear more often in Speed, thus making your Speed training more effective). Finally, Fine Motion is a Wit card (which is a stat you want) and teaches Practice Perfect, making training more effective and less likely to fail.

Regardless of what cards you have or if you care about chasing the meta, you need to select 6 cards to build a deck, and this deck has a huge impact on the events you see during campaign, the stats you can train most effectively, and the skills you have chances to learn. Building a poor deck will often result in a poor Career, so it requires forethought; a fairly good ratio is to go for 3 or 4 Speed cards, and then supplement the remaining cards with stats you are worried about or think you need, such as Stamina, Power, or Wit.

Not Getting Left Out of the Will: Legacies

Edit 7/28: We now have a Spark guide! Read it here!

One of the final pieces of understanding Career mode is the selection of legacies for your Umamusume before you begin the campaign itself. On the surface this is as simple as picking two Umamusume to be “Parents” to the one you are going to train, with one of those able to be a Guest borrowed from people you follow/friend in game. Guest or not, each Umamusume needs 2 parents, and each of those parents has two grandparents that influence it as well. There are a few things to look for with legacies, and the selection can seem overwhelming at first.

First, legacies bestow starting stat bonuses, and can also impact your Umamusume’s proficiency in Track, Distance, or Style (always positively), and finally can allow your Umamusume to learn skills that the parent knew, including weaker versions of their Unique Skills. It’s often best to look for bonuses to stats you want to focus on, or want to try and spend less time training and offset with a starting bonus, and then see what types of proficiencies can be improved. Skill inheritance is often the least important part of the equation, but it can’t hurt to have more skills in your pool as things to aim for.

The “easiest” way to help yourself with this system is to use the filter feature and set it to “Sparks”. Sparks are the levels of inheritance bonuses offered by parents and grandparents, from one to three stars; this is why you will sometimes see guides or players refer to “9*” legacies, implying that the parent and grandparents are imparting 9 stars worth of bonuses to a stat. There isn’t always a lot more to the system than this, and it is a fairly good and simple way to approach your starting bonuses. As you play more and become more involved in the game, managing and manipulating inheritances to try and achieve seemingly impossible goals, such as Haru Urara’s dream of winning the Arima Kinen race, are possible, but this is something that might occur months or even a year into playing, so don’t worry too much; focus on stats you want to train or boost, and then what type of racer your Umamusume is, and go from there.

The Training Cycle: Training, Races, and Resting

The Career mode’s actual gameplay loop tasks you with figuring out the best possible option available to you on each “day” of the three year cycle you work with your trainee. Although three years sounds like a lot of time, you only a set number of days that cover the span of that time, with different lengths between goals, sometimes ranging from as long as 15 days to 0(!) between goals.

Each day of a training cycle gives you access to the same options: Rest, Training, Skills (which lets you learn skills but does not use time), Infirmary (only available when your Umamusume has a negative status), Recreation (which improves mood), and Race (in which you can understake optional races aside from those in your set goals). Rest, Training, Infirmary, Recreation and Races all “use” a day, and can affect your trainee’s energy level, either increasing or decreasing it accordingly.

That’s right, the actual gameplay of Umamusume: Pretty Derby is time management and balancing your objectives. Nothing is guaranteed, either; when energy is below a certain threshold, failure rates increase, meaning that your trainee can fail the training and not only gain no stats, but also lower their mood and potentially injure themselves; clearing negative conditions may also not take on the first try, and even the amount of energy restored from training is variable, meaning that every choice you make has variable levels of success or failure that can impact your overall career. I will speak from experience that this does allow each career run to be different, but it can also be frustrating when you tell your trainee to rest and instead they get depressed! Just manage your expectations accordingly and remember this is a game, and randomness is a part of gaming systems.

Training stats can have extra bonuses attached through a system called Friend Training. Based on the Support Cards you selected, other Umamusume can appear during your training sessions that increase stat gains, affect mood and energy, offer extra stats, and give hints towards learning skills. As these friendship gauges increase, you can start getting “rainbow” trainings, which offer huge spikes in training gains and are the main target of consistently training effectively to raise friendships and stats.

A fairly good training flow to follow is the following: Stat with Rainbow Training > Stat with Most Friends that you want to train and raise bonds with > Wit (which also recovers energy passively) > Something Else (Resting, Races, Recreation). Energy is your main “currency” along with time: if you waste energy on things that you don’t need, you’ll have less of it to do things you need to do, and miss out on opportunities that you needed to get a better overall run.

An aspect early players don’t often understand is optional races. After the initial Maiden race at the start of every Career, optional races will be made available that you can pursue. These have important impacts on Career runs, but not in overly obvious ways initially. The first is that running extra races imparts the highest amount of Skill Points you can get, meaning you can learn more skills. Winning races also gains your Umamusume more fans, which in some scenarios is a requirement, but in all cases impacts how your Umamusume’s Unique Skill levels itself up; if your Umamusume has a certain number of fans by various checkpoints, their Unique Skill will level up. These checkpoints are all in the Third Year of a Career, and require 60,000 fans, 70,000, and finally 120,000 fans, and are a very important set of checkpoints to aim for in order to help you clear the Career and overall Scenario.

Of course, no two career runs will be the same, and you’ll need to adjust based on what the game throws at you; if you are not getting the training results you want, or your race results aren’t going well, instead of quitting, it can still be worth playing the Career out until you end it; you get a few retries using Alarm Clocks if you can’t meet a goal, and at the end of a Career you’ll still generate Sparks and Inspirations, meaning you can still sometimes get something useful out of a run that didn’t quite work out the way you wanted.

Final Note for New Players: To Reroll or Not?

As a final Beginner tip to help you get started, this isn’t exactly about Career mode, but is instead about the game itself. Since Umamusume is a Gacha Game, after the tutorial is over, the only way to increase the Umamusume or Support Cards you have are through rolling for them from the recruitment banners. Often, Gacha games will have what people call “Rerolling”, which is that you continually delete your account after doing the pulls you’re given for starting a new account if you don’t get results you wanted. This is often harder to do than not in many games, often taking 20 or 40 minutes in a lot of cases; however, Umamusume has a very easy reroll process, taking less than 5 minutes from deleting an account to rolling through a new one and making a decision. You can even save your account by making a trainer ID and password to “save” results you like but still trying for more.

Often, this is a choice you only make once: will you bother trying to reroll, or will you simply pull what you get and move on? I am not the biggest fan of Rerolling in most games, but for Umamusume, the amount of time it takes to reroll an account is so low that you can often get a result you want within 40~60 minutes, if not sooner. The strategy for this is to roll for Support Cards (as those are more important than Umamusume) and trying to get the results mentioned above: A copy of Super Creek OR Fine Motion (if possible, 2 copies of either card), and at least 1 other SSR card that is not Air Shakur (the worst card in the game). Doing so really makes the gameplay loop more stable and rewarding, and having at least Super Creek (probably preferably of the two cards) gives you more freedom in what cards you can borrow from other people.

Going for the Gold

Hopefully, this getting started guide will help demystify the Career mode of Umamusume: Pretty Derby and allow you to get started experiencing the “horse girl racing game” you’ve been hearing and seeing all over the place. The game is a lot of fun, and I mentioned in my review, and I think it is realistically one of the best management games on the market, and certainly one of the best mobile games as well. There is so, so much more to the game than what we’ve covered here today, and perhaps in the future we can go into more specific detail about certain parts of the game (so, if you have questions or things you’d like to see, let us know in the comments!), but for now, go get your Career mode started and start working on creating your Legacy Umamusume so you can keep your Career loop evolving!

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