Is there anything better than having a dog?
No. Unless my family is reading this, in which case my wedding day and the birth of our kid definitely top that. Having a dog is very much like having a kid, except they listen occasionally and are often easier to train. But they’re both messy and don’t respect concepts like “personal space.”
Treat, Please! is a game designed by Courtney Shernan and illustrated by Kiem Hollis. It’s for two to four players and plays in about an hour, about dogs trying to be spoiled by their humans. This game was funded on Kickstarter but seems like it flew under the radar. Is this one you should go fetch? Read on to find out.
Gameplay Overview:
The game is played over 7 rounds representing one week of time. Each player starts with two unique cards based on their dog and cards for taking a nap and searching for kibble.
In the center of the table, there’s a tableau of four face-up behavior cards that can be purchased, as well as five categories of objectives that you’re trying to earn to win the game.
A round begins with flipping over one of the Today cards, which slightly alters the requirements for objectives or gives each player a benefit on their turn.
A player’s turn consists of doing the following activities in any order, including performing a different action between playing behaviors:
- Play up to two behaviors – Play cards from your hand, spending or gaining bones, energy, and attention and gaining a benefit.
- Learn a new behavior – Pay the cost in bones to purchase this card and add it to your hand.
- Complete one objective – Spend the required energy and attention to complete the objective. Place the card face up next to your board.
At the end of your turn, collect two bones and move your active behaviors to the discard pile.
Several behaviors and objectives provide special actions like taking a card from your discard pile into your hand or giving you bones or energy. End game points are scored for objectives, both for the points on them and for completing sets or having multiple of each color.
Two standard action cards that all players start with are “Searching for Kibble” and “Taking a Nap.” These cards allow you to gather more bones and return your spent cards back to your hand, respectively. Unlike all the other behavior cards, the Taking a nap card always returns to your hand at the end of your turn when played.
On the weekend, players can play three behaviors and gain two objectives.
Players score points for completing sets of objectives, having multiples of a single type, and leftover bones and attention. The highest score at the end of the game is the winner.
Game Experience:
Who’s a good boy/girl? All the dogs, even the ones that lose the game, are the best.
Treat, Please! is an accessible resource management game that has you constantly trying to gain bones, energy, and your hand of cards to gain attention and complete objectives. You’re also spending those same resources to build your hand of behaviors, making this a bit of a deck/hand builder while also collecting sets of objective cards to score points.
You need to spend bones and often energy to gain attention. All objectives need attention, while others also require energy to complete. Each dog has its own starting energy (which can be exceeded) that gets reset with taking a nap. Over the game, your hand of four cards will grow as you add behavior cards, giving you more options and the ability to customize your hand of cards to your playstyle.
On every turn, I felt like I had options to do things, including taking a nap first and then playing one of the cards that I just got back. Even being able to learn a behavior and then play it the same round allows for a nice amount of tactical choice. Treat, Please! is not an overly deep game, but it does reward thoughtful activations and planning.
On the flip side, if your wholesome plan is relying on getting a specific card to complete an objective, you may be disappointed when you wind up like my dog chasing squirrels in the backyard (empty-handed) as another player takes the card you’ve been eyeing. At smaller player counts, there are also times when the behavior cards just get stale, as no one wants the Big Stretch card (which must be discarded into another player’s discard pile), and it just clogs up the pool unless someone spends a bone during their search for kibble action to refresh one card.
But other than taking cards another player wants, there’s not a lot of negative interactions. And I don’t consider players taking cards that are beneficial to them as well as another player “hate drafting”; it’s just strategy. There are also several cards that give you and other players benefits and, for a cute game about dogs and their owners, that’s a good thing. One of the reasons Hair of the Dog was a miss for me was that it could often devolve into a mean-spirited game.
I liked how you can do more on the weekend as you play three behaviors and complete two objectives. As a friendly reminder, your character card leaves your player board opening a third slot to play cards. This gives the game a nice sense of escalation as the end game approaches. It can also sometimes slow the game down as players really try to squeeze every possibility out of the weekend (this tracks with my weekends).
There’s not a lot of iconography, but it’s pretty intuitive with energy (lightning bolts), dog bones (as themselves), and attention (dog head with an exclamation point over it) to go along with the objective symbols (no real gameplay mechanic).
Overall, I don’t have a lot of heavy criticism about the game, but I could see this not being a hit for the gamers who complain that Wingspan is too light. For me, this is a perfect game to introduce dog lovers to hobby board games or for more casual gamers who love dogs. But with deckbuilding, set collection, and resource management, it is what I’d call gateway plus.
Final Thoughts:
I think what surprised me the most about Treat, Please! was that I missed it on Kickstarter. This is an accessible resource management and light deck-building game about dogs and their humans. The art and overall theme are cute, and if you like dogs and board games, this one is worth playing.
Final Score: 4 Stars – Treat, Please! is an accessible resource management and light hand-building game about dogs being the bestest boys and girls.
Hits:
• Accessible, easy to teach, and relatively quick to play
• It’s about dogs being awesome
• Clean iconography and graphic design
Misses:
• Might be too light for “hardcore” gamers
• Players may be bummed when the cards they want get taken
• No way to clear out unwanted objectives and behaviors
