[Ad- gifted products] When it comes to the old excuse that your dog ate your homework, there is already a silly picture in your head. The toy – or rather board game? – The Dog Ate My Homework takes the general silly idea and makes it into a quick to learn, easy to play tabletop game where your child can feed a toy dog drawings and watch them get all scrambled up. The game comes with a bunch of papers with different drawings, a dog that you put together, treat tokens, and instructions. We played this game at our local Geek Retreat on one of our board game nights after school.
Aimed at ages five and above, this game is pretty easy to explain and learn. There are sort of two phases to your turn. You can be the person in charge of secretly showing and then shredding the picture within the dog toy, using a crank handle to shred it. Once it’s been processed through the dog, the next person uncovers their eyes, you flip the timer, and they try to put together the picture and guess what it is. That person then gets to put in the picture and the next person around the table closes their eyes and has a go at guessing.
The Dog Ate My Homework then goes on for three rounds, with the guesser getting a treat token if they guess correctly before the timer runs out. After the end of the rounds, whoever has the most treats is the winner. When it comes to the shredding of the pictures, they sort of shred the same way, becoming a bunch of long strips. There are tons of bits of paper within the game, with more that can be printed from their website, but we did find it to be a bit wasteful!
It’s a very fun concept, but the other issue we tended to have was with the images themselves. The vast majority of these images were extremely simple, which made them easy to guess within the first second of seeing it, even for the youngest Robin. With that in mind, we found it’s more fun to play it in a way that we are drawing our own notes and then shredding them, so we have a deck of ones we’ve chosen and drawn!
The Dog Ate My Homework is a fun idea and we do like the little shredder on it. It’s also extremely easy to explain and start playing, which is always a plus with children’s toys, especially if you are looking for a game children can play on their own without needing an adult.
This sounds like a fun family game, I will have to get this for my grandchildren as nothing nicer than spending that time playing a family game