[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
That is the coolest game ever…It is so fun..I know we would enjoy playing it with the kids, super cool.
That’s a fun idea for a game. While it wasn’t what was intended, I love that it actually fostered the family’s creativity to make their own drawings.
This sounds like a fun game. I’m not even concerned about the simplicity of the images.
This sounds like an excellent game for family night. I love the concept, and I actually think the best part would be going your route and making our own pictures.
This sounds like a really nice and fun family game. Its so interactive.
Such an interesting concept to have a game around. I’d love to try this out with family and friends, it looks like tons of fun!
That does sound like a fun game for the whole family. We loved playing board games when my son was younger.
Might be a fun and easy game for kids. The pictures seem a bit too simple, so it may be easy to guess the answers right away.
This is so cute! What a fun idea for a game. Such a great way to get the family having fun together.
This boardgame sounds super fun and I love how it brings in creativity into the game as well, I know my boys would love this – we also love Geek retreat for trying out new games before buying them
Laura x