Treat, Please! Design Blog: How to Play

Today, we’re going to dive into the rules of Treat, Please!. During the game, each player (a different dog) plays behavior cards to gain attention from “the human”. Once they've gotten enough attention, players can spend it to complete objectives like Get Belly Rubs or Go to the Park. Each objective is worth affection points, and the dog with the most points at the end of the game wins! Additional bonuses are awarded at the end of the game based on the types of objectives that each dog completed.

During your turn, you can play 2 behaviors from your hand to gain attention from the human. For example, you could play Sploot and move your attention and energy resource trackers the corresponding amounts. You could choose to play a second behavior immediately after the first or wait until later during your turn.

On your turn, you also have the option to learn a new behavior to add to your hand by spending dog bones - a currency in the game. This is really the core hand building mechanic of the game. When you learn a new behavior, it goes directly into your hand for immediate or future use.

Lastly, you can complete an objective by spending attention. Attention accumulates over rounds, so you could also choose to save up your attention and go for a more expensive card in a later turn.

At the end of your turn, your played behavior cards go into your discard pile. You will have to strategically choose when to recollect all of the cards from your discard pile by spending one of your two behaviors on a future turn to "Take a Nap".

The game is played over the course of 7 rounds, with each round representing one day of the week. At the beginning of each round, players flip a Weekday or Weekend card to find out what the human is up to that day and how that impacts you as a dog! The first five rounds are weekdays where you may see cards like “The human is doing laundry” or “The human is on a video call”…all complete with dog inner monologues! The final 2 rounds represent the weekend, which bring much more time and opportunities for fun activities with the human! — Courtney Shernan