Game Review – A Dog’s Life

A Dog's Life
Number of Players	2 - 6
Play Time	90 minutes
Ages	8 years and up

I wanted to do a review on a older game that is not a major award winning game but can be fun to play.  I chose A Dog’s Life also known as Dogville as that game because it is a game where you can see the evolution from the games of the highly complex games of the 1980s to the games that are the favorites of many due to their simplicity and variability.

The theme of A Dog’s Life is that that the players are stray dogs that lead a fantasy life similar to the Tramp from Disney’s Lady and the Tramp.  They wander around town scrounging for food, drinking water, delivering newspapers, and searching for bones to bury in their home yards.  All the while they are trying to avoid being captured by the dog catcher.

Game play can be a bit of a challenge as there are a number of moving parts that need to be addressed during a players turn.  Each player starts the game with a dog.  Each dog has specific strengths and weaknesses including the number of action points it has, and the odds of success that it will have doing a specific task.  A game turn starts out with the player doing maintenance to their dog in the form of moving the marker on their dog’s hunger chart one space.  If it ever reaches zero then the dog ends up in the dog pound.

Then the action phase occurs.  What a dog can do during the action phase is governed by action points.  Each thing that a dog does costs an action point once the dog uses all of their action point the main part of their turn is done.  The action points are used on the following actions during the turn:  moving a space, searching a trash can, dropping a bone or newspaper, collecting a bone or newspaper, burying a bone, begging for food, drinking from a fountain, piddling on a lamppost, taking a newspaper from the kiosk, delivering a newspaper, attacking another dog, and sniffing a lamppost.

Results for actions such as searching a trash can and begging for food are determined by flipping over a card on in the deck of cards that is specifically assigned to each dog.  Sometimes the dog is awarded food or a bone for doing an action.  Other times it gets nothing.  Each dog’s chance for having a certain thing happen is not the same.  For example, the poodle has a better chance for success when begging for food than the boxer.  This makes it important to come up with different strategies for the different dogs you may play.

The last phase of the player’s turn is to move the dog catcher.  The player rolls a six-sided dice and moves dog catcher that amount of spaces.  If the dog catcher ends its movement on the same space as a dog, the dog s placed in the pound.  If there are dogs in adjacent hexes, then those dogs turn over a card to see if they are captured by the dog catcher.

If the player ends up in the dog pound they may turn over cards to see if they escape the pound.  If they a not successful by the end of their 3^rd round in the pound, they are freed at start of the 4^th round and may start their turn as normal.

The learning curve in the game is higher than most games produced today.  It is that sort of thing that can turn a player off of trying a game.  However once the player get the hang of the rules turns can go by fairly quickly.

Each of the dogs has a different number of action points to use during a turn, which I believe can be an unfair advantage to the players who get more action points in their turn.  To make matters worse there is no way to increase the number of action points you get.  The abilities of the dog you start the game with are the abilities of the dog you end the game with.

Another feature of the game I do not care for is the piddling on the lamppost and the requiring of a dog that enters the space where the piddle is to lose the rest of their turn sniffing at that lamppost.  It slows done play and can frustrate players who get caught in a piddle trap.

Beyond those issues A Dog’s Life can be a fun game if you are looking for game that the player’s ability to reach the victory is not just prevented by the game but if also hindered by the other players.  I recommend it for people who want to play games from the past and do not mind games that have a certain level of screwing with the other players in it.  If that is not the case then A Dog’s Life is not the game for you.