Dog Lover by AEG

I was excited when I saw that the makers of Cat Lady put out a game for dog lovers.  I got it using recognition points at work.

I really looked forward to having it show up on my front step, then showing it to Anne, then setting it up and getting into it.

Except ... it took all the annoying little details we did not like about Cat Lady and multiplied them into a crazy matrix of on-card gobbledygook.

It added a new column of cards to represent "Tricks", which are actually patterns of which cards you can pick from the 3x3 grid at the heart of the game.  In Cat Lady, you just pick a row or column of 3 (except for the row or column marked with the cat token), then move the cat token to mark that column so the next players can't pull the same row or column.  In Dog Lover, the explanation of the Trick cards was weak, so we spent most of the game arguing every time about whether you can shift the dog up or down one, and which cards you could actually take.

I think the actual rule is: always orient your Trick pattern over the central card, but you can rotate it any way you like.  It does not look like it can be shifted up or down (unless there is an empty row on the card), as that would suggest taking cards that are outsde of the 3x3 grid.  Then, you can only take one card from the row or column watched by the Watch Dog token.  After three tries, we were already tired of this.  I guess they felt it was a clever expansion, but no, EVERY facet of the game was more complicated for unknowable reasons.  The Trick cards have a * on then to show where to move the Guard Dog to, which was a nice touch, but it's just highlighting the unneccessary extra hoops to jump through in every turn.

You can get new Tricks (card drawing patterns) by spending 2 or 3 Training cards.  Each trick shows a cost on the card.  Then it gets more confusing getting the card you need with multiple patterns to choose from, rotated different ways, with the Watch Dog doing whatever it was supposed to be doing.  I had a Trait card I couldn't use, which told me discard my only Trick card -- then what?  With no tricks, I couldn't take cards ever again?  The manual had 16 pages of nitpicky notes and had nothing to say about that.

We were sorely tempted to throw the Tricks back in the box and just pick rows or columns of 3 like we were used to.  We also ignored the Fetch card.

Ugh.  Then the Traits showed up: cards you can play under your dogs, but only if the dog is the right size, otherwise you get stuck discarding important cards before you even figured out how all this stuff works.  The Traits add more rules and gotchas, and things you will forget as your play area gets more cluttered, and there isn't room to read them all (again) every turn.

Scoring was incomprehensible.  Most of the adoptable dogs have no point value on their own, they are all weird formulas about how many big dogs you have or how many food cards some other dog is sitting on.  This card gives you two points for each Walk card placed under a dog unless some other card is played, or it's a big dog, and your bones may or may not count if one of your dogs has the extra Digger Trait.  Come on.  That's crazy.  There are about 6 parallel scoring mechanics.  Anyone who can run that matrix constantly is going to end up with a migraine.

Only the number of different toys still worked the way it did in Cat Lady.  Unless some other card tells you it doesn't, or you use some of those toy cards some other way.  You will end up doubting what little you thought you knew.  And we're not going to spend hours and hours loading these formulas into our heads.  Where is the fun?

Finally the "Game is Ending" card came up.  We looked at it.  Does that mean I have to page through the book again and find more rules for whether it's over now, or over next turn?  We just said, "Good.  It's over."  We scored just the dogs, skipped all the crazy mumbo jumbo stacked underneath them, and Anne had about triple my score.

I have no idea why they couldn't make a Dog Lover game that was fun to play.  The art on the cards was cute.  But who is this game made for?  Do we have to run spreadsheets to figure out how to max the food vs the Traits and score extra for some bones and toys without not seeing that this other dog had a better Trait and got +2 points for going on a walk?  Do we need to keep a scorepad full of circles and arrows and numbers explaining what we were thinking when we placed each card?  Because it sure made no sense when we tried to add up all that junk: reading and rereading every card only to see that we should have put some spare toys under that other dog instead.  It did come with a tiny scorepad, but it felt like we needed thirty more little boxes and a flowchart to work it out.

OMG. 

Why can't a few of the cards just be worth 2 points, and not be packed with disclaimers?

I was relieved to see that Tom at Dice Tower had a hard time after the 8-minute mark trying to explain the mish-mash.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufJVyHUyhSM

Meeple Mountain also did a good job of comparing the complexity of the two games.
https://www.meeplemountain.com/reviews/dog-lover/

Sorry.  Complications alone are not enough to improve a game.  I get that some players live for these games where every card is packed with rules.  We are not those people.

This is what we ended up with: total clutter.