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Invite puppers from the local dog park to your yard for a proper pupper party! Dig holes, perform tricks and be the player to have to most bones collected by the end of the game! Good Puppers is a beautifully illustrated, cute card game that is a quick and fun game that can be picked up at any time and enjoyed by all.
The game comes in a small compact box that catches your eye and the cards within are a great quality that make it easy and nice to handle. The game is suitable for ages 9+ and is designed to be played with 2-5 players.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that the game comes with free stickers? Free, adorable, dog stickers people!!
Gameplay
The gameplay for Good Puppers is a mix of deck building and card drafting but your deck in this scenario is instead a collection of dogs. The game is played in a number of rounds until the deck has been used up. Each round consists of, playing cards from the deck into the “dog park”, playing a card and doing the respective cards’ tricks, collecting a pupper card from the “dog park” and adding it to you yard/game area in turn, and finally the last player collecting the last pupper card left in the “dog park”.
One of the really interesting strategies that’s included within these rounds is during the playing a card stage as you can base your pick off multiple different aspects. What I mean by this is that with each card there is a number on the top left which can be anything from ‘00’ all the way to ‘99’ and this number states who gets to pick from the “dog yard” first depending on whoever draws the highest number. However, this isn’t the only thing to consider because you have to think about the cards trick (the ability that is used when the card is played) and the dogs breed as one may be better than another as these also have an impact on the game and scoring points. So, you’ll need to try and collect specific cards at certain points to make sure you’re getting the most out of each round.
The players yard has their pupper cards separated by breed and each breed has their own stack. Keeping track of these stacks throughout the game can be important to winning bones as the amount of puppers in each stack can change the impact of a cards trick as well as effecting the game-end bonus that’s each breed has.
The tricks that I’ve mentioned are the abilities that each pupper has, shown at the top of the card. Each of these tricks has a different action which could either help collect bones, move bones, or upgrade bones and all tricks can be ignored when the card is played if the players so chooses. Upgrading bones is one of the main ways in how a player will increase the amount of bones they have as a simple upgrade can make a bone pile go from 1 to 2, 2 to 5, and 5-10 so you can see how this can massively impact the game and the final scores. This is yet another great thing about this game as it makes it so you’re always thinking about how to upgrade the bone piles whilst also making sure you expand more than just one breed, so you have a good range of bones going at all times.
Final Thoughts
No matter if you love dogs or not I believe that this game is a great small game to pass the time or get you into board games in general. This being said, it does take some brain power to keep up with all the different strategies and trying to keep ahead on bones so some people may not agree with this game, and I can understand why it may be misleading on that fact given the loveable look of the box and components as a whole. I also wouldn’t consider this a game suitable for young children because of this, and that the age range shown should be slightly higher. I think this game works great at both sides of the player count as its fun with both 2 players and 5 alike.
Overall, I think Good Puppers is great for people who want a quick, cutesy game that tickles their brains need to think a little and can be played on the go or at home.
