Spots Rulebook

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Setup
• How to Play Spots
  • Do a Trick
    • Rolling and placing dice
    • Spending treats
    • Busting
  • A few more rules about doing tricks...
  • Resetting the trick tiles
• Score Your Dogs
  • Slow and steady
  • Fast and risky
  • Six dog card limit
• Winning the Game
• Other Things to Know
  • Running out of dice or treats
  • Adding variety to future plays
  • Off leash hours variant
• Solo mode
• Quick Reference
  • Do a trick
  • Score your dogs
  • When rolling dice
  • Other really important rules

Setup

1. Take these 6 trick tiles out of the box:

   • HOWL
   • WALK
   • RUN
   • ROLL OVER
   • FETCH
   • BEG

   Put them faceup in the middle of the table, like above. Don’t worry about the other tiles yet—they’re for adding variety in future games.

2. Take out the deck of dog cards, shuffle it, and deal 2 dog cards to every player, gray side up. This is your dog pack! Put all the remaining dog cards in the middle of the table, gray side up.

3. Put all the dice and treats in piles where everyone can reach them. It can be messy. You’re dogs.

4. Each player takes 1 yard, 1 treat, and 1 die. Everyone rolls their die and buries it in their yard. Here’s what each player will have in front of them:

   • YARD
   • BURIED DIE (goes in your yard)
   • STARTING DOG CARDS
     • PAWPRINT ICON (these make some actions stronger)
     • EMPTY DICE SPACES
   • TREAT TOKEN (used for rerolls)

5. Whoever has the highest buried die goes first. If there’s a tie for highest, those players reroll. Now you’re ready to play!

How to Play Spots

In Spots, players take turns in clockwise order. On your turn, you can choose to either (1) do a trick or (2) score your dogs. On most turns, you’ll be doing a trick:

Do a Trick

Choose any of the faceup trick tiles (at the beginning of the game, they all start faceup).

After you choose a faceup tile, flip it facedown and follow all steps on it in the order they are listed.

Rolling and placing dice

Most tricks involve rolling dice and then placing them on your dogs. Whenever you need to roll dice, take them from the common pile, unless the trick tile says otherwise.

After you roll, you may place those dice on matching spaces on any of your dogs, i.e. a die showing 4 spots can go on any space that also shows 4 spots. Any rolled dice that you can’t (or don’t want to) place, must be buried in your yard instead.

Spending treats

Treats are great, because they let you reroll your dice!

Immediately after rolling—but before placing or burying them—you can always choose to reroll all of the dice you just rolled by spending 1 treat. Here’s how it works:

• You must reroll ALL the dice in the roll, not just the dice you don’t like.
• There’s no limit to the number of treats you can spend in a turn. As long as you have enough treats to spend, you can keep rerolling until you get a result you like.
• You can only spend treats to reroll your most recent roll.

Busting

If you can’t (or don’t want to) place a die on a dog, you must bury it in your yard instead. And if the total number of spots on your buried dice is more than 7, you bust!

When you bust, this happens:

• Your turn ends immediately, even if you haven’t finished performing all the steps on the trick tile.
• Discard all dice placed on your dogs.
• Discard all of your buried dice.

Of course, you can use treats to try to prevent this—rerolling happens before burying dice—but if you can’t or don’t want to spend treats to prevent a bust, then you’re out of luck.

A few more rules about doing tricks...

• Steps are mandatory unless they say you “may” do it.
• If you can’t perform a step for some reason, e.g. you choose Roll Over but have no buried dice, then simply skip it.
• If you can’t perform the first step, that does not prevent you from still performing the second step.
• Some steps on tiles say you can repeat them (such as Run, pictured earlier). That means you can do that step of the trick as many times as you want (or until you bust)!
• Some trick tiles become stronger based on how many are on your dog cards.
• If a step tells you to place or bury multiple dice, you can do a mix of both, placing some and burying others.
• After you roll dice, place or bury all of those dice before moving on to any other roll. See examples below for two in-game situations that this applies to.

Resetting the trick tiles

Eventually, only one trick tile will be faceup. If you start your turn and only have 1 trick to choose from:

1. Place 1 treat from the supply on the only faceup trick tile (the treat will go to the next player who chooses this trick).
2. Flip all of the trick tiles faceup. You can now choose from any of them!

Score Your Dogs

Scoring your dogs is how you win the game! And since scored dogs are never at risk when you bust, it helps you steadily make progress.

There are two ways to score your dogs:

Slow and steady

On your turn—instead of doing a trick—you can score your dogs! When you do:

1. Discard ALL dice on your completed dog cards (cards that have all their spaces filled with dice) and flip them over to show that they’ve been scored.
2. For each dog card you scored this turn, draw the top card of the dog deck and add it your pack, gray side up.

• You must have at least one completed dog card to score. You can’t just score to avoid doing a trick.
• When you score, you must score ALL completed dogs cards, not just certain ones.

Fast and risky

If you ever complete ALL of your faceup dog cards while doing a trick, score them instantly!

This is a reward for being brave...or just lucky.

When you score this way, do it the exact same as “slow and steady” above (discard the dice, flip the dogs, draw new dogs). The only difference is, unlike slow scoring, you don’t have to spend a whole turn doing it!

• To do Fast and Risky scoring, you must first place or bury all the dice from your most recent roll. If that roll causes you to bust, you will not get to score!
• After Fast and Risky scoring, be sure to finish your current trick. If you still have a second step of a trick tile to perform, or are in the middle of a repeatable step (like the second step of Run), draw your new dogs and keep going!

Six dog card limit

You can never have more than 6 dog cards, counting both scored and unscored cards. If you ever should draw above that amount, stop drawing once you’ve reached that limit of 6.

Winning the Game

The first player to have 6 scored dog cards wins immediately!

Other Things to Know

Running out of dice or treats

If you need to take dice or treats but not enough are available, simply take what you can, even if that number is less than what the trick requires.

In the extremely rare case that zero dice are available at the start of your turn, all players immediately bust and lose all of their dice! Afterwards, continue your turn as normal.

Adding variety to future plays

After you’ve played with the first set of trick tiles, go ahead and mix things up by using some of the other tiles provided.

• Always include Howl and Roll Over.
• Include 1 additional tile from each of the 4 color categories (each color also has a different rosette style). They can be selected randomly, or you can use one of these recommended sets:
• Adoption Event: Walk, Run, Fetch, Beg
• Dog Park: Dig, Chase, Guard, Chew
• Agility Course: Trot, Bolt, Fetch, Gobble
• Hunting Grounds: Retrieve, Sprint, Hunt, Stay
• Kennel Club: Track, Dogpile, Search, Beg
• Puppy Pen: Retrieve, Bolt, Scavenge, Play Dead

Off leash hours variant

This is a variant for people who don’t mind a slightly more chaotic game. Use ALL the trick tiles! Trick tiles of the same color should be stacked on top of each other in a random order. When you use a tile, flip the top trick tile of the stack. When it comes time to reset the tiles, any facedown tiles are not only flipped faceup but also moved to the bottom of the stack. Note that this does not apply to Howl and Roll Over, which are always in play.

Solo mode

You will play against an AI opponent named d0g. d0g starts with 1 treat, no yard, and no dogs. You go first. On d0g’s turn, roll a die. Imagine the trick tiles are labeled 1-6.

The die result indicates a specific tile. If the tile is faceup, d0g flips it facedown, taking any treats on it. If the tile is facedown, d0g scores the top card of the dog deck instead.

If d0g starts its turn with only 1 faceup tile, first reset the tiles like you would for your own turn. If d0g ever has at least 2 treats, it returns 2 and scores the top card of the dog deck.

You win if you score 6 dogs. You lose if d0g scores 6. Adjust difficulty by starting d0g with more or less treats.

Quick Reference

On your turn, choose one of these two actions:

Do a trick

• Select a faceup trick tile, flip it, and perform all steps on it in order.
• If a step says “may” you don’t have to do it.
• Some steps say you may repeat it until you decide to stop (or bust).

or

Score your dogs

• Discard all dice on completed dogs and turn those dogs facedown.
• Draw 1 new dog for each dog scored, but stop once you have 6 total scored and unscored dog cards.

When rolling dice

• Take them from the common pile, unless the tile says otherwise.
• If you spend a treat, you have to reroll ALL the dice you just rolled. You can’t just choose the ones you don’t want.
• After you finish rolling (and spending treats), place or bury all dice before continuing to any other rolls.

Other really important rules

• When there’s only 1 faceup trick tile left, put 1 treat on the last faceup tile and then flip all trick tiles faceup.
• If all the spaces on all of your dogs are filled, score them all immediately without spending a turn!
• You bust if your buried dice add up to more than 7. When this happens, end your turn and discard all buried dice and dice on your dogs.