Like Cats and Dogs Family Board Game
Like Cats and Dogs Family Board Game
Like Cats and Dogs is a family board game brought to you by Under The Sun Publishing.
In Like Cats & Dogs, each player runs his or her own pet shelter. The objective of the game is to get all the pets in your shelter ready to be adopted and paired with the perfect family. The first player to empty their shelter wins!
Each Pet card has a list of Needs that you need to meet before they can be adopted. Meet these needs by traveling around the game board and collecting the corresponding service cards. Once a Pet’s Needs have been met, search for their perfect Fur-ever Home at an Adoption Event by comparing potential families to the Pets’ Home Requirements listed on the Pet card.
A Quick Look at Like Cats and Dogs
Like Cats and Dogs is a classic family-style board game that is fun for all ages and perfect for teaching your children responsibility, pet care, and critical thinking skills – all while having a great time and strengthening your bond as a family!
Like Cats and Dogs is for 2 – 6 players and is 60 – 90 minutes of family fun. While playing this roll and move game, you will pick up service cards, read them, and match them to your pet’s needs, as indicated on your pet cards. Reading, counting, association, and critical thinking skills can be taught and honed while playing this game – as well as learning about necessary pet care responsibilities.
Inspiration: Family Game Nights and Creative Thinking
I so enjoyed the process of making Like Cats and Dogs. I have always wanted to design a board game. I have a lot of great memories of family game nights – of my crazy family playing board and card games late into the night, laughing, joking, and generally being silly and ridiculous. I believe that playing games together strengthened our familial relationships and made us better friends as well. As my siblings and I grew older and found mates, our game nights just got bigger, better, and yes, even sillier and more ridiculous.
Eventually, after playing the same games over and over again, I began coming up with some alternative ways to play. I would change a couple of rules and add some new challenges to keep things fresh. I enjoyed trying new things and seeing what ideas worked and made the game more fun, and which ideas didn’t work and detracted from the flow of the game. After doing this for a while, I started to wonder what it would be like to design a game from scratch. I love to create things, and I love board games, so naturally, I thought creating a board game would be a fun new project. And it was!
Inspiration: Pet Lover
If there’s anything more valuable to a family than crazy family game night, it’s the crazy family pet. For us, that pet was a neurotic Australian Shepherd named Maddie. Maddie was my dog first, but she was certainly and always will be the family dog.
As you can see, Maddie was impossibly beautiful. She had a smile (yes, Aussies do smile!) that could light up a square block, a heart for her family that would put mama bears to shame, and a fighting spirit that lives on to this day. She was adventurous, cuddly, protective, and a sworn enemy of the vacuum cleaner. And she was never happier than when her whole family was sitting together in one room. If she could account for all the people she lived to love and protect, her nervous energy mellowed into calm, easy contentment. She was most at peace when we were all together being crazy.
Maddie passed the year before I started creating Like Cats and Dogs. I knew that I wanted the game to have a theme that was interesting to me and others, and the importance of a family pet was weighing heavily on my mind. Making the game about matching families with their perfect family pet was an almost instantaneous decision when I first started brain-storming the design of my first board game.
Inspiration: Homeschooling and Creative Learning Styles
My favorite part about being homeschooled as a kid was the fun and different ways we got to learn and apply our lessons. Playing games and doing hands-on lessons always interested me – a very hyperactive child – much more than textbooks and lectures. I think it’s a shame that there isn’t more of an effort in public education to provide some of these unconventional, but highly effective, manners of teaching to children who may not have the most success learning in the typical classroom environment. That’s the beauty of homeschooling – the ability of parents to implement the best learning techniques for their own children. There is a whole movement out there today known as “gameschooling,” in which board games are heavily involved in the homeschool curriculum, allowing them to learn through play.
I wanted my game to have an educational element to it: to be something that homeschool families could use during their school day and use to enhance their curriculum. But I didn’t want it to feel like schoolwork, nor did I want it to be something that wasn’t enjoyable for adults. I designed Like Cats and Dogs to be a game that you could play day or night, with kids or adults, and have a good time doing so, never the wiser that you’re simultaneously learning and enhancing valuable life skills. In this way, it is like many classic family board games, such as Monopoly, Parcheesi, Life, or Clue.
Bring Family-Building and Brain-Building Education to Your Home
As you have seen, I think highly of the value that playing games can add to your home – relationally and educationally. Playing games on a regular basis with your children will strengthen your relationship, enhance their learning experience, teach valuable social skills, and make memories that you and they will remember for a lifetime.
Don’t wait – start a family game night ritual in your home. There may be some tumultuous times at first, but there will also be much growth and a lot of happy memories.
Get your copy of Like Cats and Dogs a www.underthesunpublishing.com today!
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