There’s a common misconception that “light” means “good for non-gamers,” with the flawed corollary that the lighter a game, the better it is for newcomers.

Forever Home, designed by Lottie and Jack Hazell, has exactly the right setting for drawing in the curious. As the operator of a dog shelter, it’s your task to train your doggos for placement into welcoming homes. It’s a lovely concept. The trouble is that it’s so light as to be insubstantial.

Trying to complete these dog training regimens.

On paper, there’s a pleasing simplicity to the whole thing. Forever Home crosses three overlapping spheres. First, there are the dogs and training regimens. This constitutes a drafting pool from which you can nab either dog tokens, spread across seven colors, or the cards you’ll use to train them. Second is your shelter, where dogs are arranged into patterns. Once those patterns match one of your cards, you’ll tuck it away and move some or all of those dogs into the third area, the various homes that are ready to welcome a good boy into their lives. The objectives for these forever homes vary from game to game, but they fall into a spread of reliable templates. Homes in the city, for example, are all about rehoming as many different breeds as possible, suburbs and the countryside are about building specific sets, while foster homes are an all-purpose destination for dogs that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

It sounds nice enough. And in practice, it doesn’t do anything wrong. It doesn’t do anything at all. Each step is undertaken with so few hitches that there’s hardly any reason to switch on one’s brain.

Drafting.

Should you switch on your brain, it swiftly proves the worst course of action. The entire thing is on a timer. Once somebody completes seven training cards, that’s the game. But there’s a disparity between cards. The easiest regimens might only require two matching dogs, maybe three. More difficult cards can require four dogs in harder patterns. These are simultaneously tougher to arrange and reliant on the drafting bag coughing up the desired tokens when your turn rolls around.

You would think that tougher cards might offer commensurate rewards, but those rewards don’t keep pace with the easier ones, let alone award any sort of bonus. It’s better, then, to crank out the simplest possible patterns as quickly as possible. Examined too appraisingly, the game might give the impression of a puppy mill rather than that of a responsible dog shelter. It doesn’t help that each dog type is assigned a random scoring criterion when the game begins, two of which are awarded for dog breeds being kept in your shelter in perpetuity. Um. What.

Of course, there’s no such statement being made in these errant mechanisms. Forever Home is too airy for that. Even played with folks who prefer lighter fare, we found that it was so light that the principal emotion it produced was a thousand-yard stare. There was nothing to sink our teeth into, no hooks for keeping us involved. Each of the game’s spheres is so featherweight that they float away.

Good dogs. Bad game.

Which is a shame. Forever Home could have been a worthwhile gateway game. As it stands, it’s forgettable even while it’s still on the table.

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A complimentary copy was provided.