Hi,

While seaching for 'Thoroughbred Tycoon' on Google, I came across this forum. I bought this game in the Netherlands as 'Paarden Tycoon' as a gift for a little girl (Joyce) who likes horses. I installed the game for her, but then I discovered the game is in English. A bit strange I think, especially when the box is stamped with 3+ (For ages above 3 years old).
Although I'm not a big horse lover, I played the game a few hours with her to get Joyce started. I'm a software developer myself and I only played I few hours, but I'll give some remarks:

We liked the choices one has to make in the beginning: selecting male/female and color, buying a horse (She wanted a horse that resembles her own horse, and there was one), selecting where to train...

After all selections where made, we just started to play. After a speed training we put the horse to rest in the stables. While resting, Joyce wanted to walk around to see what's available. When the resting was done, the horse was suddenly in front of the character. Joyce did not understand how a horse could come out of closed stables by itself.

The interface could be improved a bit, I think. When I'm browsing through the menus and thinking about what to do next, a dialog may appear saying a race is due. After closing the pop-up, you return to the game, but not to the menu you were previously browsing. This happened to me a quite a few times (a race each 3 or 4 days, two (or so) reminders if you do not enroll), so it started to irritate.
Also I think the 'inventory' menuitem is in a strange place. It's in the same menu as the 'save' and 'options' menu, while you should expect this the other menu with the training, resting, etc menuitems.

While playing your game, the computer crashed after about 1.5 hours of play. All progress made was lost. Ofcourse, we should have saved it regulary. But I think an autosave feature is a simple and very usefull addition. Autosave after each day in the game?

That's it for now. I hope it's usefull.