🎰📓🚂 Review: Dog Detective
Jan. 6th, 2026 03:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightPlaythrough/Review: Dog Detectives
What is it?
A short (10 pages) solo journalling game about finding a missing person. You are a dog.
Is it playable out of the box?
Yes. Bring your imagination.
Amendments:
None. Other than speedrunning the game instead of lovingly crafting responses.
Tools
A coin (or d2), a set of polyhedral dice (d4-d12), a deck of playing cards.
Price:
Name your own price
Verdict
🚂 Honourably Retired
I have a keen intrest in running mysteries, so this one intrigued me: you go to multiple locations, roll on a theme table, then roll to see whether you find a clue. When you’ve visited all locations, you try and assemble a possible explanation from your clues. The more clues you use, the better your chances of rolling a success on the deduction table.
This is an interesting approach. In the end, it depends partly on dice luck (you can get 0 clue and a setback, 0 clue and a minor setback, 1 clue, or 2 clues in each of the 9 stops). The two failure conditions also mean you reduce your investigation dice by one step. Since you start with d10/d12 (one for friendlyness the other for ferocity, you decide what kind of dog you aren and what's appropriate in that moment) that quickly takes you down to precious few clues and little option to succeed, so you might need to reset your dice and forego one location.
The themes are all over the place - adventure, abundance, jealousy, trust – and sometimes completely baffling. What does ‘payment’ mean at a school when you’re a dog?
I’m also not a fan of the resolution table. The odds are not in favour of finding your missing human, and I struggled to weave the clues into a coherent tale.
A medical worker, a deity, a token of affection, some of my favourite treats, a thief, and a piece of clothing. Put them all together and you find your missing human (or not).
I concocted a wild tale, rolled lucky, and wrote ‘the end’.
This game has taught me something about mysteries, I guess. It falls into the gap between ‘using randomisers to determine success’ and ‘using your imagination to reach your goal’. Overall, I was lucky that I managed to gain enough clues and that I could build a narrative out of those clues, and that I was successful in my roll.
Failing to reach my objective would have sucked and I kinda feel I cheated by bending narrative reality in my favour.
I don’t think I fully understand how you are meant to play this, and all in all, it was much less fun than I had hoped to find. I wanted to go to different locations based on the clues I found/the story so far, but a church/temple wasn’t available, and I’d visited the health centre before gaining clues that should have led me there.
So neither the tables nor the mechanism fully worked for me. Maybe I was just unlucky in my rolls/draws, but this does not fascinate me enough to try again under the exact same rules.
Not tagged with single session though it would certainly be possible, because I had to make myself come back and finish it – my playthrough started with setbacks and I wasn’t getting enough inspiration from the game to build more story.
What is it?
A short (10 pages) solo journalling game about finding a missing person. You are a dog.
Is it playable out of the box?
Yes. Bring your imagination.
Amendments:
None. Other than speedrunning the game instead of lovingly crafting responses.
Tools
A coin (or d2), a set of polyhedral dice (d4-d12), a deck of playing cards.
Price:
Name your own price
Verdict
🚂 Honourably Retired
I have a keen intrest in running mysteries, so this one intrigued me: you go to multiple locations, roll on a theme table, then roll to see whether you find a clue. When you’ve visited all locations, you try and assemble a possible explanation from your clues. The more clues you use, the better your chances of rolling a success on the deduction table.
This is an interesting approach. In the end, it depends partly on dice luck (you can get 0 clue and a setback, 0 clue and a minor setback, 1 clue, or 2 clues in each of the 9 stops). The two failure conditions also mean you reduce your investigation dice by one step. Since you start with d10/d12 (one for friendlyness the other for ferocity, you decide what kind of dog you aren and what's appropriate in that moment) that quickly takes you down to precious few clues and little option to succeed, so you might need to reset your dice and forego one location.
The themes are all over the place - adventure, abundance, jealousy, trust – and sometimes completely baffling. What does ‘payment’ mean at a school when you’re a dog?
I’m also not a fan of the resolution table. The odds are not in favour of finding your missing human, and I struggled to weave the clues into a coherent tale.
A medical worker, a deity, a token of affection, some of my favourite treats, a thief, and a piece of clothing. Put them all together and you find your missing human (or not).
I concocted a wild tale, rolled lucky, and wrote ‘the end’.
This game has taught me something about mysteries, I guess. It falls into the gap between ‘using randomisers to determine success’ and ‘using your imagination to reach your goal’. Overall, I was lucky that I managed to gain enough clues and that I could build a narrative out of those clues, and that I was successful in my roll.
Failing to reach my objective would have sucked and I kinda feel I cheated by bending narrative reality in my favour.
I don’t think I fully understand how you are meant to play this, and all in all, it was much less fun than I had hoped to find. I wanted to go to different locations based on the clues I found/the story so far, but a church/temple wasn’t available, and I’d visited the health centre before gaining clues that should have led me there.
So neither the tables nor the mechanism fully worked for me. Maybe I was just unlucky in my rolls/draws, but this does not fascinate me enough to try again under the exact same rules.
Not tagged with single session though it would certainly be possible, because I had to make myself come back and finish it – my playthrough started with setbacks and I wasn’t getting enough inspiration from the game to build more story.
