Finding a decent dog-themed game, maybe Dog Game?

I am still looking for a good app with a dog/puppy theme for Anne to play, but it is surprisingly a lot harder than finding well-done cat games.  

I looked at Dog Hotel but it starts off with dogs in little pens (which is depressing), and up close they look like they might be part zombie, they are just not likeable.  They also started out with sad stories and health issues.  

Other apps had art styles that were too childish or too sparkly, or were clearly targeted at young kids.  A bunch of them were too focused on rescue stories that don't sound relaxing at all.  Starting out with bruised or sick or injured animals is not relaxing.  Maybe there are feel-good points after they are nursed back to health, but it's not what we want to see in our limited spare time.

I wasn't expecting our expectations to be so specific, I just know from an intro video whether it's the kind of thing we would enjoy.  I guess the same is true of the cat/kitten apps, but we lucked out finding Kitten Match with its home repair theme and endless dialog/story and almost daily new activities to step through.

One Dog Sim app I saw was literally just walking through a town checking a radar for targets to attack -- which is as far as possible from what we want.  

This one might be a good match of elements: Dog Town.  You start with a healthy young dog, and the goals are to grow them, breed them (into comically random other breeds), feed & groom them, and play with them.  There are plenty of upgrade options for the dogs, the rooms, and I suppose the whole house will be upgraded somewhere down the pathway.

Well, it turns out that Dog Town got a bit dull.  They tried too hard to model things, and didn't see that it took so much swiping to get the dogs to react to anything, it was tedious.  A pretty good try, but it turns out that the more cartoony "Dog Town - Dog Collecting Game" was what kept us amused.  

Each level unlocks a new floor, and each floor has about 8 dogs and 8 decorations.  Simple enough.  The tutorial steps were very well thought out, with a funny/neurotic doggie host introducing one UI button at a time.  In the end, you have different foods and crafting materials, two mini games on the Bank page, and a series of premiere levels and pups.  It was currently running a themed event based on D&D (well, generic "Roleplaying") where you get pups dressed as the main classes, even an orc-dog who looks fierce until his scotch-taped battle axe falls apart in its hands.

What makes Dog Game work is that each dog has a great character animation, and it's fun to see what wacky thing each new dog does.  Maybe that's pretty shallow, but there is enough of a mix here to keep it fun for a half hour here and there. 

    

Now I want to extend the challenge to finding good dog-themed card games or board games.  Cat card games have been easy.  So far I have written about Dog Lady, Wizard Kittens, Scram and others, but I don't recall seeing the same types of games featuring canines.  Surely they exist?

11/15 - Dog Game started to get a bit tired, since it has a very tedious "crafting" system that keeps you always needing more coins.  You can get those coins by playing the mini-games like the head-merging game shown above on the right.  And it gets demoralizing to open 10 packages in a row and get rocks instead of dogs every time.  But there are weekly events and you do still get new dogs (fun dogs, hilarious dogs, kooky dogs) every few tries.

11/27 - Yup, I don't bother with this one much anymore, though Anne really enjoys it.  The doggie characters and animations are still totally amusing, but the pop ups are too much.  And the "crafting" is just dumb.  To make a bookshelf, you need needles, sparkles and a piece of metal?