July 21, 2020

Chasing Dog Crimes

After releasing our who’s-to-blame logic game Cat Crimes™ in 2017, ThinkFun fans immediately began asking, “Will you be making a dog version?” We at ThinkFun knew it would be criminal not to create Dog Crimes™, so our Product Development team got to work.

While one might think the hardest part about developing the game would be its 40 challenges, it turned out that it was deciding which dogs to feature! Many of us at ThinkFun love dogs and bring them into the office from time-to-time. We published a blog post called Meet the Dogs of ThinkFun, which introduced many of our beloved pups to our followers (and for those who also like cats: Meet the Cats of ThinkFun). We even got a giant cake and invited all of our dogs to the office to celebrate the dog-inspired holiday Wolfenoot!

With so many pups to choose from, we started with one our team knew well – Cider the border collie! Our Product Designer and Cider’s human, Kathy, attested that Cider is a mischievous canine indeed. Playing a supporting role in a butter-stealing heist among other criminal activities made Cider the first established character in Dog Crimes line-up.

In addition to Cider, we created another Dog Crimes character after a real dog. Pepper from the game happens to be a real corgi! Jess, Pepper’s human was kind enough to let us feature her. Don’t let that adorable mug fool you though, Pepper is a full blown pupertraitor. She’s been caught red-handed eating and rolling in rabbit poop on more than one occasion! Her human also has to keep the bathroom closed at all times, because she can’t resist attacking the toilet paper.

Soon after we established Cider and Pepper in the line-up, the rest of the canines were cast. To promote the game at New York Toy Fair, we decided to bring it to life. We printed a giant version of the gameboard, crime tokens, and had life-sized plushies of dogs from the game. While this was a hit with attendees who wanted to play, Dog Crimes really came to life when Gleason the K9 came to visit our booth! Being a very good police dog, Gleason decided to monitor the situation, making himself comfortable in the middle of the crime scene.

Dog Crimes was such a fun game to develop and market, we hope you have as much fun playing it as we did making it!

Did you know…
That some of the characters weren’t so easy to name? Ace the German shepherd was originally named Marley and Suzette the poodle started off as Gigi!

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