SPOTS (2022)

PLAYERS	TIME	DESIGNER	PUBLISHER
1-4	25-30 mins	Alex Hague Jon Perry Justin Vickers	CMYK

We may be cat people, but if anything has a chance of turning us to the dog side, it’s SPOTS.

The art from John Bond is too cute and gives each of the named dogs a personality. You’ll easily begin to have favourites from your first play.

In SPOTS you are rolling dice and placing the matching numbers on the ‘spots’ of the dog cards in front of you.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on here.

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First off, this is a push your luck game. Each player has a little dog house that can hold no more than 7 pips across the dice held in it (from not being able to place them on your turn).

If you are forced to bust, you not only lose those dice, but every single dice you’ve placed on a dog card.

How do you save those dice? Well you will have to use a turn to flip completed ones, making them safe for the rest of the game.

First person to flip 6 dogs is the winner.

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But wait! What decides how many dice you can roll?

Well, that’s the best part. Each game will have six available ‘tricks’ in play. They range from “reroll your buried dice” to “roll 8 dice and keep all of one number”.

And each time you use one, you flip the trick over so that no one else can use it until they get refreshed.

This means that sometimes it’s not just about what trick you want, but stopping an opponent having a useful choice.

And the game comes with a whole bunch of Tricks, so every game can be different. We’ve not used them all yet.

Now, this is luck based through and through. You can have a bad game just because you’re not rolling well. But the game constantly reminds you that it’s all about the fun with its adorable depiction of the dogs and the silliness of the tricks in play.

Easy to teach and fun to play, SPOTS is that perfect filler game. Players will care more about the dogs in front of them instead of how well they’re doing, and the push your luck element will have everyone cheering when someone gets too brave and succeeds.