Owning and taking care of horses is no easy thing. It requires a lot of commitment and a lot of enthusiasm on your part because there are many tasks associated with stable management. That’s why stable management games have been developed: to give people from all walks of life a try at being a stable manager.

Here are some tips that you might want to bear in mind when you’re playing games that let you manage stables.

First, you have to watch what your horses are eating most of the time. Horses need a lot of calories to sustain their energy needs, and the sheer size of their bodies. Thus, you need to feed them a balance of protein and carbohydrates. That’s why a typical horse diet could include wheat, but feeding a horse too much wheat without any exercise could also lead to the equine being overweight.

That leads us to the next tip – exercise the horse often! Exercise, just like it does for us humans, sheds off that excess weight by consuming the calories from the wheat and the other foods that you’re feeding your horse. Spend some time, maybe an hour a day or even half an hour a day, to take your horse out for a walk.

If you’ve been training your horse for some time, you might want to take it out for some gallops and jumps, or even a dash through the racetrack if it’s being trained for racing. Running tracks in preparation for racing is one of the daily tasks you’ll face when you play Sport of Kings, a Facebook-based virtual horse training game.

Another task that is essential to stable management is grooming. Grooming keeps your horses clean and free from parasites, which could lead to diseases. Grooming horses can also be a time for trainers and horses to bond together, which, in games like Howrse, could also improve a horse’s mood and its corresponding stats.

Hygiene is important to horses’ health and well-being, just like with humans. With a mere click of a mouse button, you can easily clean your virtual stable in games like My Dream Stable. Text-based stable managers like this one make it easy for you to take care of your horses, without having to navigate through a sea of interfaces and tutorials.

Last but not the least, make sure to enter your horses into competitions. Unless your sole goal is to breed and sell off foals, you can earn in-game cash in various games when your horse competes in events and wins. Plenty of games in the genre give you the chance to compete in various events, including racing, dressage, trotting and even horse beauty pageants!

Handling stables is an expensive affair but, with the help of these virtual horse training and stable management games, everyone has a chance to experience what it’s like being stable managers. Best of all, most of these games are free to play so you don’t have to dish out extra cash just to sign up for an account.