If you get food at a nice French restaurant and ask for hot sauce or salt, you’re committing a culinary sin. If you sit down for a nice bowl of phở, you’re automatically given a plethora of sauces and garnishes that would be a waste not to add. It’s the fundamental divide in food service: either the chef knows what’s best or the customer does. Obviously, there’s no universally “correct” take on that debate. It boils down to who you’re catering to. A diner serving the masses needs options for picky guests, whereas a gastropub serving a tasting menu is trying to provide a precise experience. This same dynamic is found in board games. How much flexibility should a game give its players? Is it better to deliver a singular, targeted experience or a collection of experiences that the group tailors to its own needs?
This flexibility question is something we’re always experimenting with at Cherry Picked Games. We started in the role-playing game world where it’s basically a given that players are going to add and drop rules. That level of interpretation persisted through to Far Away’s ROLEPLAY creature system. However, whether you loved or not-loved that system, it was still a core part of the game and the only official option presented (at the time). With Hair of the Dog, we wanted to step away from having flexible rules to deliver a quicker game for larger crowds. That said, we didn’t want to have one way to play. We’re leaning into a modular design.
Crack open the Hair of the Dog PNP and you’ll see two books: a rule book containing the necessary rules to play and a module book that has all the ways you can change that base game. Our first modules were designed to help the game at low player counts. While the base game works with 2 or 3 players, we felt it didn’t have quite the same vibe as with the higher player counts. Without the chaos of 4+ people, things felt more cutthroat. That said, we didn’t want to force small groups to learn a different game. I often play a new game with my wife before trying to teach and play it with a bigger group, so I understand the importance of parity. A game can have adjusted card counts or numbers for different sized groups, but different core rules hinder learning. By making those differing rules into modules, we’re able to preserve the learning experience while adding options for groups that want to primarily play Hair of the Dog as 1-3 people. As a bonus, this leaves the option for a cutthroat game for small groups that want that.
With the initial addition of those player-count modules, we felt empowered to add more. The other batch is designed for groups with more experience. Once you’ve played a few times, you may want to add Cats or Puppies to your game. It’s more rules, but each module gives your group more strategic options. At the core of game design is this struggle between complexity and depth. The ratio of the two is critical to a game’s continued play, but the initial complexity also creates a barrier to entry, regardless of the depth to be found. A Feast for Odin has a ton of strategy to offer, but only if you can sit through a slog of a rules explanation. Hair of the Dog’s modules let players manage the complexity in stages. When everyone is feeling good about how to pet dogs, you can toss a cat in the pub. If that doesn’t end up being the right move for your group, you can omit the module next time and not feel like you’re missing out on a complete game.
Our Hair of the Dog module design gives you two menu options in our restaurant analogy. First, you can make substitutions: you can swap out the base-game burger patty for a vegetarian solo mode. Second, you can add condiments to your heart’s desire: toss a spicy Puppy module on your burger but hold the Chameleons. We want you to keep coming back to the pub. After you’ve worked your way through the menu, go wild and experiment; our chefs are happy to accommodate.
--Alex