The Michigan Dogman Lurks on the Tabletop

By Cameron Kunzelman | October 23, 2025 | 2:01pm

Images courtesy of World Champ Game Co.

Tabletop Features michigan dogman

The Michigan Dogman Lurks on the Tabletop

The Michigan Dogman is out there. Teeth red, eyes wild, it travels the roadways and scrub forests of the great northern reach searching for blood. Human? Animal? No one knows. It is the beginning and ending of all things, the grand Nature, something so hideous and foul that you’d rather die than encounter it. Of course, if you encountered it you’d likely die, so you’d better be careful out there. Oh, and you can play a tabletop game about it.

Michigan Dogman, remastered earlier this year by World Champ Game Co., is a pretty simple experience. You are someone who wants to know more about the Michigan Dogman, a cryptid that has a presence in that region of the United States. You crawl over a hex map in order to plot a journey of discovery around the Dogman, and the point of the game is to tell an interesting story about it.

This is done with a sheet of paper, something to write with, and a six-sided die. Play can proceed either solo or with a small group, and the rulebook has some specifics about how to manage each of those gameplay modes. I played it solo and it worked great, and that’s because I made my character, Herbert, an Accursed. There are a few different classes that you can choose between in the game, and each of them has some basic differences in how they move around the map and how they interact with the major systems. Being Accursed was important to me because it gave Herbert a twitch at the bottom of his tail, a toothy smile, and a profound sense of smell. Sure, he might be a Dogman. He might just be notionally excited by the Dogman. Who can tell?

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Michigan Dogman game

When I guided my character through his hunt for the Dogman, it was really centered around a couple of easy to understand mechanics. First, there’s description. When you enter a hex, you have to describe what is there, and you get some details of that through a d66 chart that gives you prompts for describing these locations.The woods and fields of the north are strange, so you’re encouraged to lean into a horror theme, and prompts that tell you that you found evidence of “not quite a fingernail, not quite a claw” makes it pretty easy to spin up a short tale about what you think happened in a specific place.

Second, there’s a “clues and evidence” system that keeps things moving. If you land in a square and your chart tells you that there’s a clue there, you’re encouraged to follow that clue. It can turn into evidence, or it can produce a sighting. Evidence is relatively simple; they’re things you can pick up, described either by the game or the player, depending on how you encounter it. These pieces of evidence don’t all cohere into something specific. It’s not like you’re going to Sherlock Holmes a Dogman here, eliminating all that it cannot be to finally determine its exact shape. Instead, they’re hints and notions, and the task of the player/storyteller is making it all coherent.

Finally, a lot of these systems (including the exploration) feed into the thing we all want: the sighting. We’re looking for that damn Dogman, and here it is! There are two ways for the game to end around these sightings. One is that you, somehow, have five sightings and things end via the Dogman route. The other is that you collect three forms of evidence and return to the local Tavern to tell the tale you’ve learned out in the wilds with the Dogman. Either is strongly encouraged to be narrative-heavy, weaving into the psychedelic horror that the Dogman demands. Both are very cool, I think.

Michigan Dogman is a perfect little Halloween party game. If you want to sit and jam it out by yourself, you’ll take something like an hour to write a self-directed horror story that should leave you appropriately afraid of the woods. The prompts in the game are excellent, and they have a flair for the dark and dramatic, meaning that you’re never left flailing to make something scary. I imagine that the game would also work great for a few people who want to go Dogman mode at each other, telling dueling stories of Dogman investigation to see who can come out on top. I strongly encourage you to check the game out this October. Please, be aware of the Dogman. And also: beware the Dogman!

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.