Board Game: Dog Lover

It's a little late for Wolfenoot, but still.

The Game: Dog Lover
The Publisher: Alderac Entertainment
Time: 20 minutes or so
Players: Me, Michelle, Kai, Oli

Game Play: Not dissimilar to its sister game and predecessor Cat Lady in many way, Dog Lover is mostly centered around adopting doggos and then making sure you can feed them. Cards get laid out in a 3x3 grid, and on your turn you get to pick up some of the cards, but unlike Cat Lady where you picked up a row or column and that's the option, in Dog Lover you do a "trick."

Trick cards present a pattern - the basic one, "sit", is just three in a row, but then there are more complicated tricks you can get during the game that let you take cards in diagonal, L-shaped, or even cross-shaped patterns. The only hitch is that there's a "watchdog" (represented with an adorable Frenchie meeple) and you can take more than one card from the row or column he's "watching." 

He's on the right side of the grid if you look carefully

Cards include toys (get a set, get more points), training (which allows you to buy tricks), walks (tuck them under a dog for points at the end of the game), adoption papers (used to adopt shelter dogs, which are the purple-colored cards in the picture), traits (which are weird; see below), bones (more points at the end of the game), and food cubes. Dogs each have types of food they want to eat - scraps, canned, dried - and if you don't feed a dog at the end of the game, you don't get points for it. 

OH NO SOMEONE SPILLED THE FOOD

I mentioned traits; they get attached to dogs of a particular size and modify them, usually allowing you to tuck specific types of cards under them for more points. The wrinkle is that if you can't immediately attached them, you discard them and other types of cards, which means that you have to be careful which configuration of cards you pick up to make sure you don't get unusable traits. 

A dog and a trick

Opinions: I mean, it's a little on the nose to say that it's a better game than Cat Lady because I'm more of a dog person. Truthfully, I think it's better because there's more going on, which is because it's a refinement of the game play in Cat Lady, but I don't think it makes that game obsolete or anything. It's just got more moving parts, but the game play is still simple enough that it's easy to pick up and play. 

Keep? Yep