Dungeons & ... Dogs?

Tales of Tails is a quick-playing mini dungeon crawl game of dogs. 🐶 Not just any dogs, we are talking about 4-legged, 2-armed centaur dogs with human torsos here. 😄 With some matching punny names like Joan of Bark. But let's look at the gameplay now! 

The bulk of the game is a deck of dungeon cards that depict the corridors of the dungeon you have to escape, with monsters 👹, traps 🧨 and treasure 💎 on them. Players draw cards from this deck and place them starting from a central card, connecting pathways. The shared map grows and grows until players decide to leave, marking cards they visited and interacted with.

Cards marked by other players will become impassable for others, so it's all kind of a chicken game of deciding when it's worth it to leave. 🧐 So the more players leave before you, the more pathways blocked, but you also have the possibility to draw a few more cards before you must leave too.

You only have 5 to 7 tokens to use so even if the map is huge you can only get so much stuff. Monsters and traps also show icons you need to have so again not every path will be a viable escape route. Every hero has a special ability too, which changes up their strategy a bit. You can also get potions 🧪 and barter with stray raccoon 🦝 merchants, but your goal is to have the most coins at the end.

Escaping once doesn't end the game though. ☝️ You actually gather the defeated monsters and tuck their cards behind your hero-sheet as additional skill icons and start the dungeon building phase again for a second time (this time slightly stronger 💪), then finally for a third time before doing the end game scoring.

💬 Basically that's it. I'd say Tales of Tails is definitely at a family level of complexity. If you like dogs then the theme could be a real hit (enemies are fittingly themed around cats 😼). We did find that 2p games aren't that exciting as there is less dungeon building and less blocking of paths, so I'd say 3 or 4 players are probably a must. If you want a light hearted cutesy adventure, then check the game out. 😉