After playing the incredibly easy Dog Man The Flip-O-Rama Game, Robin was very excited to dive into some more challenging Dog Man games. The next on our pile was Dog Man Attack of the Fleas Board Game, which to my understanding, is from a specific chapter of the book, around Dog Man and the crew attacking a FLEAS Robot character. Robin was pretty excited to try out the story in her book, on a table, together.
The game starts off with you selecting a character from the team of characters from the book. There are six to choose from, as the game is played with two to six players. Once we all had our characters at our starting posts, we set up the rest of the board. Tool tokens came in two colors, randomly placed on the tool spots, with a specific color as the bottom tool and the other as the top. The Robot baddie was built, by putting three different panels into a little box that could stand up, and the spinner was pulled out of the box. Much like the previous Dog Man game, the instructions were actually printed on the inside of the box, so no little hands could rip or lose them.
All of our characters and the big Robot started at different points, which was a little strange, until we figured out that we don’t want to go to the “end game” tile, but instead want to travel around the board grabbing tools and attacking the Robot. Essentially, these tools randomly revealed showing something that could help you. This could be a helicopter to move to any space or a shrink ray to attack the robot. There are other tools that allow you to move up to double the number you spin and one that allows you to spin a spinner and move the Robot Monster backwards. Gaining these tools allows you to better take your next turn. On your turn, you can either use any of your tools then spin the spinner, or just spin. When you spin the spinner you then move along either the yellow or red path, to wherever you can reach. The Robot monster also gets a turn once everyone else has gone, which allows them to move on specifically the red path.
You are looking to destroy the monster by using the shrink laser three times on them before they make it to the end tile. Dog Man Attack of the Fleas is quite challenging in that you need to be on the same tile as the robot in order to use the shrink way, which means you need to often make it ahead of them and they end up on your tile or you need to teleport to them. Each time you attack, you can take a piece of the robot out of it’s case. Once the robot is destroyed, you can flip the box over to the Kaboom side.
You all must then make it back to Dog Man’s house within three rounds to win the game. Though there was some confusion over the rules of the game itself and when it was the robot’s turn, otherwise it’s a very decent game that requires a bit of luck to get through! If you’ve got a fan of Dog Man, this board game is for you.