Workhorses No More is an Uma Musume with a bit (a lot!) more intentionality behind what it wants to say. Uma has some thoughts about loneliness, friendship, competition, the meaning of success, etc, meanwhile Workhorses is screaming, firing an uzi, and doing donuts on your lawn. If you've ever thought for more than a minute about that throwaway line about how an uma's body is basically a lethal weapon, you are in the right headspace to begin reading Workhorses.
If not, other plausible touchstones are Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica. No I'm not kidding.
The PDF is 20 pages, with a banger cover and a plain but entirely readable interior layout. This has a side effect of highlighting how (positive connotation) batshit the text is willing to get. There's a surreal, hotblooded dreaminess that runs through Workhorses like a spinal column. It's a *fantastic* read, but you'll also be kinda clinging by your fingernails to where you think the setting is going---and I think to vibe with it at all, you've gotta be able to understand destruction as an act of transformation.
"This horsegirl game examines hegemony" is a thing you can say about Workhorses and it will be true. It's also implicit and deft in how it talks about the topic. Your character has traits like Yoke (your primary obstacle) and Truth (a thing you believe unquestioningly) and you are a student at the Sisters Of Mount Sinai Academy For Young Girls which forces you to race---and also you rebel from it by racing in secret. There is a lot you could unpack about this.
There's also a good light crunch to character creation. Everything is small numbers, but there's a lot of unilateral powers and bonuses that create a complex game environment. Workhorses' dice are simple but also weird and smart in a way I haven't seen before---2d6, drop highest, add stat, and one die is negative while the other is positive. This means you'll usually get a stat modified by a low amount. Even a total of 1 is a success, but higher numbers translate into more effect. Plus you have a spendable resource called boons, which come back on high rolls, so you can kinda combo high roll into high roll or rescue yourself from bad failures.
Added to this light crunch are some good, quick rules for contests, combat, and a thematic mechanic about speaking in red that is heavily intertwined with the lore and allows you to reverse bad failures into heroic successes. Essentially, red is the color of absolute reality, and if you speak in it, your words are truths stronger than your environment.
For GMs, there's some story seeds and NPCs, but I think the real secret sauce is the writing. Workhorses is a game you have to feel, and reading it does a great job of putting you in the right headspace.
Overall, if you like hotblooded indie ttrpgs and have an even passing interest in umas, this is a strong recommend. This is a stellar game to read and I think will be even more memorable at the table. 10/10 I enjoyed it immensely.
Minor Issues:
-p 8, Social Studies, "a breast" should be "abreast"
-p 8--9, Abilities, the Favorite Subject and Club and Lineage subheadings blend into the rest of the list. It could be worth centering / underlining the text to make the subheadings pop a bit more.
-p 10, I think you can just freely boon every roll that's 0 or better and get the boon back. This might not be intended play. Restoring boons on sufficiently negative rolls instead of positive ones might add some more dynamism.
-p 11, this talks about "rolling on an appropriate stat" such as "Might" but I couldn't find either of these things in the book. Are these holdovers from the core system?