Set in Manhattan, you'll each take on your own dog walking business, picking up dogs, making them happy, taking photos for their owners and gaining extra tips for getting the dogs to poop! With a variety of goals and review points up for grabs, you'll need to carefully plan your routes to maximise your profits and earn the most reputation.
As a household of dog lovers, we can't resist a game all about dogs! When we heard about Bark Avenue, we knew this would be another one to add to our collection.
First Impressions
The artwork on the outside of the box is fun and playful, with the beautiful designs continuing onto the components which are a made of a decent carstock and punchboards. However, I did feel that the player boards were a little thin in comparison to the quality of the other components. The rules are well written, one read through and I'd pretty much got the basics in my head.
Game Play Overview
Bark Avenue is a pick up and deliver game, played over 17 rounds, representing different time periods throughout the day. Each round (besides the first) begins by moving the sun down a space on the round tracker. Some of the sun spaces require an event card to be put into play, others incite a competition and as you reach closer to the end of the game, you'll come across some special rounds with extra rules. Once the sun has been moved, each player takes 1 turn. A players turn is made up of 4 phases: Roll (if you have any dogs on your board), move, action and track. At the start of your turn, you'll roll a die based on your current location, providing you are currently walking at least one dog. You'll then resolve the die result gaining a poop token, an extra movement space, a forced direction for your move or simply do nothing if you roll a pee puddle! You'll then move a number of spaces equal to your slowest dog (or your base movement of 4 if you're not currently walking a dog) before carrying out 1 action (unless you've achieved your 4th review star, in which case you get 2 actions). Actions are based upon the district that you end your movement in. Each district has a set of actions that can be taken from carrying out an activity, attending the dog park, buying a coffee or treats and taking a photo. In addition to these district actions, you can also pick up a dog from that district or drop off a dog to that district. If your dogs have had their photo taken during the walk, pooped or taken part in their favourite activity when you drop them off, you'll be rewarded with a $2 tip for each token you've collected. You can then earn a review if you've met the criteria, moving a star from your player board to the reviews part of the main board and receiving the revealed bonus. You will only earn an income from dogs that are successfully walked and returned home by the end of the game. Once the last space on the sun track is completed, the game ends and all players add up their income to see who was the most profitable dog walker!
Pros and Cons
Bark avenue is full of gorgeous artwork and numerous dogs, so if you're a dog lover like us, you'll love seeing all the different breeds depicted in this game. The mechanics of the game run really smoothly with each turn being relatively quick, however in the last 3 rounds of the game, you cannot pick up any new dogs and therefore a new action of advertising your services is brought in to ensure any player who returns all their dogs before then, still has something to do. I was really unsure about this at first, however advertising is worth $4 for each coffee shop you've advertised in and actually makes quite a difference to final scoring. By the end of the game, I was pleasantly surprised at how useful advertising was to my gameplay.
Final Verdict
Overall, I really enjoyed the depth of Bark Avenue and working out how to maximise my walks to get the most out of the dogs I picked up and dropped off. I am looking forward to play this game with more players and sharing it with friends and family.
In conclusion, we would rate this game an 8.6/10
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