Beware of the Dog

Beware of the Dog is a very rare and little-known gameplay of a board game, created, in turn, based on the popular in England series of children's books about the adventures of The Jolly Postman - and at the same time comic stories and "jokes" about the eternal confrontation of the postman and the domestic dog. The plot of the game, if you can call it that at all, actually boils down to this: the postman needs to deliver a letter, and the dog does not like that an alien has come to the site of its owners.

You can play for both heroes: and for the brave employee of the postal department, and - finally !!! - for the no less brave four-legged watchman. The game screen is a pseudo-isometric small courtyard with a door to the house and a dog kennel, dotted with winding and intersecting paths along which characters can move. The goal of the postman is to reach the door of the house without meeting the dog, the goal of the dog, respectively, is to meet the postman (and apparently bite him). Since the game is originally a board game, the outcome of the “game” is largely determined by the case: the characters make the moves sequentially, and before each move a virtual cube is thrown, the number of points on one of the faces of which determines how many steps an active character can take. And what direction of these steps to choose is up to the player to decide.

There are three types of playing field areas for the characters to move around: “ordinary”, “pits” (there are always two of them at the beginning of the game; if the postman or dog caters for it, it falls and appears next to the second hole) and “heaps” land "(also always in the amount of two). The last object, when the protagonist stops on the cell with him, turns into another pit, and the hero who fell there then appears next to one of the existing ones. In the case of a dog, the above is accompanied by a small animation of "digging".

The game’s graphics are very nice - in the style of an English children's illustration of the last century and with great attention to minor details, which gives what is happening amazingly good, despite the formal cruelty of the action, the atmosphere. There is a sound design, and before the start of the game there will be an introductory screensaver in which the girl will tell you in detail in a pleasant voice (though without subtitles) the rules of the game for each of the characters. In general - a very original game, almost the only one on a similar topic, moderately smart and moderately funny, perfectly suitable for both children and adults as an intellectual rest.