Should you buy Dog Park? – Review

Dog Park* is a competitive game for 1-4 players all about hugging all the best dogs and taking them for walks. They are all good dogs, and honestly that’s all that matters.

In this article we’re going to help you to decide whether it’s worth buying the game, and share some quick links to buy it. Full disclosure: If you do buy the game using our links, we will get a small fee from our partners to help keep the site running, but it won’t cost you anything!

In Dog Park, you take turns drafting a kennel from a selection of beautifully illustrated dog cards by secretly bidding using your score. Once you’ve purchased your dogs, you take them for walks, gaining resources and triggering abilities to build a small, dog-based engine. For example, you might decide to bring a dog with you who will generate one resource when you gain a different resource, and a second dog that gains you additional points when you gain that second resource. The game plays out over 4 rounds, with each round sporting new random modifiers that keep the rounds fresh and interesting, and each round being split into 4 standard phases. This means that it’s easy to know exactly how long you’re going to be playing Dog Park, and it almost always takes around an hour per game once you’ve learned to play.

Dog Park is pretty easy to learn and play, and we’d recommend it for anyone over the age of about 10 or so. The pieces are small, and the game is just heavy enough on strategy that we’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone with small children, though more advanced board gamer kids would probably be fine from around 8 or so. This is absolutely one of those games that’s easy to pick up, but trickier to master due to the hidden depths of strategy that are possible.

At the time of writing, Dog Park costs £36.95 (about $46) from our UK partner Zatu*, and $59.95 from our US partner Noble Knight Games. If you love dogs, Dog Park is absolutely worth that price! The production quality is excellent, and there’s tons of replay value in the game thanks to the randomised aspects and huge pool of different dogs that impact the game in different ways.

Dog Park* is fun to play, and works great 2-player, with an automated “Auto-Walker” serving as a common enemy to stop super competitive players (not naming any names here…Ina…) from getting too upset. There’s also a fantastic solo mode, so if you’re the sort of person who enjoys playing board games solo, Dog Park is definitely worth considering.

If you or your loved ones are big dog fans, then Dog Park is a no-brainer, and you should absolutely buy the game. It’s good for families, and for people who enjoy a little indirect competition. That being said, I honestly would not recommend Dog Park to people who own and enjoy playing Wingspan regularly, unless you just want more of the same thing you like. Wingspan* is extremely similar, and is honestly a bit better for more advanced players. Dog Park does make a great alternative for people who are a little less strategically-minded, though, as it has fewer decisions to make each turn than Wingspan. So whether you should buy Dog Park is, as always, up to you to decide.

If you found this quick review useful, please consider supporting us by using one of our affiliate links, or by donating or subscribing over on Ko-Fi using one of the many fancy buttons that Ina made. We’re not a massive, faceless company that AI-generates their articles, we’re just a couple who wants to help people find games they love, so every penny we can spend on board games instead of site hosting is deeply appreciated.