Pocket-sized and incredibly quick to learn, Scrungo Games’ Hoddog is all about racing to build the longest hot dog before cards run out.
With a box that’s only a couple of inches wide, deep and long, Hoddog’s portability definitely isn’t in question. Much like many of its micro-pals this not only makes it great for a quick warm up before a larger game, but also means that it’s easy enough to sling into the luggage while packing for a holiday.
Hoddog is, as you might imagine, incredibly easy to set up and play. You’ll shuffle the deck of 82 cards, deal seven cards out to each player, create a face up pool of five cards and then create a face-down pile with the rest. Gameplay is as simple: You choose to draw two from the face ups, or three from the face-downs, and place a set of cards if you’ve got enough to complete it.
Sets are a case of matching the quantities to the values on the card: Three threes, four fours, seven sevens. The only exception is that if you have five cards showing the one value then you can place them as a set – a sneaky catch-up move that adds a little bit of strategy to an otherwise simple set collecting game.
Now, while it’s a set collecting game, Hoddog’s theming changes up how you display your current wins. Rather than simply putting them into a completed pile you instead get to snake all of your pieces together into one giant hot dog, with each of the included cards counting for a point come the end of the game.
There’s an extra mechanic at play, which I think is to a detriment when you have more players. There are ketchup splat cards that you are instructed to mix into the deck, they’re a kind of ‘speed up’ mechanic, wherein when the last one is drawn the game ends. It means that you should always be keeping smaller sets in mind, because the game can rapidly come to an end.
Of the 82-card deck, five of them are splats, so that leaves 77 hoddog cards, minus the 35 for the starting hands of five players and the five ‘pool’ cards leaves you with only 37 cards, which gives just 21 draws from the face up piles in a game where the splat rests at the bottom. In my opinion, those five cards would have been better used by adding multipliers and modifiers rather than a speed up mechanic. So, we’ll probably play with them removed in future.
All of that said, Hoddog is perfectly portable and easy to pick up and play. It’s a keeper.
Hoddog is available now from Amazon.
