Dog… It’s a Board Game Alright
A deceptively frustrating simple board game
One night, a couple friends and I decided to play some Tabletop Simulator, and after playing some classic games we decided to browse the Steam Workshop. After some digging, we stumbled upon “Dog,” and at a first glance, it looks like a pretty simple board game.
A lot of the tiles end up being funny/simple prompts, such as “neat,” “roll again but only if you feel like it,” or “Roll a die, if you roll an even number you lose.”
It was all going really well until we reached the bottom left corner of the board, which had a few of the most frustrating set of tiles imaginable. The biggest offender was “When you roll to move, go back that many spaces.” A few of the tiles you can land on after hitting this space are “go forward 2 spaces” (which takes you right back to the reverse move tile), “If anyone rolls a 3, everyone goes back 3 spaces” which can send you back to “Skip your next turn.” Guess what? it doesn’t get much better after the fabled “When you roll to move, go back that many spaces.” tile. 3 spaces ahead you will land on “Go forward 2 spaces,” sounds great right? NO! you will then land on “go back 5 spaces” WHICH TAKES YOU BACK TO THE “go back that many spaces” TILE. When we were playing, we were stuck in this purgatory for probably about 15 minutes, it was a huge mess.
The rest of the board was pretty tame, and the tiles ended up being pretty funny again, and the winning tile was pretty interesting, to reach it at all you needed to roll a 5 or a 6, but then every player needed to roll, and if anyone tied or got higher than you, you’d go back 20 spaces, which wasn’t in a bad spot honestly.
I ended up winning but I gotta say, despite the game being super damn frustrating, I think we all had a lot of fun. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for something that’ll get you a biiiit frustrated
