Space Puppies

"Space Puppies": They sold us on the cute box and title.  Our collection is heavily geared toward games with cats and dogs.  And space.  So yeah, Space Puppies. 

The game comes with a nice mat to put the draw pile, discard pile and planet cards on.  You start with 5 cards, and then the rules tell you ... pretty much nothing.  One spot says you "play one or two cards" in your turn, the other spot says you "take one or two of the moves listed here."  The tiny rule sheet says nothing about whether you play cards face up in front of you for any reason.  It actually says to study the cards to learn what they do.  Really?

Here are the rules cards, which are not that helpful. 

We figured there would be a website on the box with a helpful video -- that is almost the standard these days.  But the site was non-existent.


What does "add dogs to your collection mean?"

You can "play action cards on an opponent" but some cards must obviously be played in front of you for protection.

Reading the action cards and reverse engineering this thing, you must have cards in your hands AND cards on the table to swap or steal.

With some tinkering, and the brief notes added on BoardGameGeek, here is my outline of the moves that make sense:

Your available moves are:
1. play dog cards face up in front of you (it does not say there's a limit here, but probably the max of two)
2. make a match and grab a planet
3. play action cards either on another player or in front of you if they are supposed to protect you. One card was supposed to be played on top of a planet to prevent anyone from taking it for two turns. For each of these "two turns" action cards, we would play if upright, rotate it sideways next turn, then remove it.
4. discard cards
Then draw back up to five cards in your hand. 

It became quite playable with these basics spelled out properly.  Here is the first time I won with 3 planets after a sensible set of turns:

From their Facebook page, it sounds like this was a Kickstarter project from 2021.  But its links all went to blank pages on a site over in Indonesia.  That's about all I could find out about it.  I'm not trying to pick on them -- getting a game to market is difficult, and I'm trying to gather the info needed to help people enjoy it.  The copyright was 2021, Toy Around Games, in Singapore.

Since nobody had any info or picture on BGG, I posted some of the shots of our first games.  Always nice to be the first person to add content there.  ;-)

It turns out to be a cute little game, though the winning goals are pretty dull.  Either grab 3 planets or 40 points, or for a longer game try to score 4 planets or 50 points.  I suppose that gives a basic, playable game.  It was just odd to see something already on the market with such big gaps.  Maybe there was a real rulebook but it just wasn't in the box?

We figured it out, and it was not bad.  The art was enjoyable, with some good sight gags and character details, like the wiener dog that was eating a hot dog (wiener).  The authors could really clear up the gameplay with a basic PDF file somewhere.