Over the last few months, I’ve played a lot of Telegram tap-to-earn games. From Hamster Kombat through to Catizen and X Empire, I’ve tried them all—and almost always come away disappointed at how little there is to actually do in them. Now, amazingly, a game about pooping dogs is keeping my interest. 

Dog Pooper, which is its actual name, has a similar swipe-to-combine mechanic as Catizen. But instead of combining cats, you drop piles of dog poop on top of each other to generate even better (or bigger?) piles of dog poop. 

On paper, it sounds even worse than the most cynical of Telegram games, even the many half-baked Hamster Kombat clones flooding the messaging app. But once you get past the unusual subject matter, it turns out to be one of the most demanding Telegram games out there, requiring attention and some light strategy.

You have a kennel filled with dogs of different levels, and they obviously need to poop. (After all, everyone poops.) The higher their level, the higher-level poops they subsequently drop. Poops will fill up your board, and then you’ll need to drag poops of the same level into each other to increase their level by one. The goal is to yield a level-30 poop, but getting there isn’t easy. 

Initially, you have very limited space, and often your board is filled with poop that can’t be combined—so you’ll have to sell one and hope the next poop that drops can be combined. This is where the challenge comes in. You can use the poop timers to figure out which poop will drop next, but given the speed at which these dogs poop, you’ll need to think quickly if you want to maximize your efficiency. 

Even unlocking more space on the board doesn’t make this much easier, and with the rapid poop cadence, it becomes a challenge to analyze all of it and make sure you combine everything. I regularly find myself with two poops that could be combined, just sitting there taking up valuable space. 

It’s as absurd as it sounds, but it’s the first game on Telegram that I’ve really had to pay attention to. I can’t just blindly tap while watching something else, and the speed and variety of arriving poops means you can’t have your next 10 moves planned out like in Catizen.

To be efficient, you have to be quick, always keeping an eye on what’s dropping. It’s not intense in the way that a game like Counter-Strike or Dota 2 requires every inch of your brain power, but you’d struggle to focus on something else and still perform well in Dog Pooper. It’s not made for multitasking.

Granted, in its current state, there isn’t much more to Dog Pooper than that. There are new features on the horizon, such as being able to do something with the top-level poops and the ability to buy and sell dogs, but when those will arrive is unclear.

Airdrop plans are similarly vague, though the game’s official Twitter account does mention a PP token and notes that it’s being built on The Open Network (TON). At least for now, Dog Pooper doesn’t have the same kind of naked airdrop farming appeal as many other Telegram crypto games, though that does appear to be part of the plan.

But if you want to try a Telegram game that actually feels like a strategic experience and offers some challenge, Dog Pooper is truly the best I’ve found so far. Look, this isn’t going to be game of the year—but in a field of tap-to-earn games that are mostly mind-numbing and rarely go beyond dead-simple distraction, this is the only one that’s managed to keep my attention for more than a couple minutes.

That might be more of a damning criticism of the other games in the nascent Telegram market than a wholehearted celebration of Dog Pooper, but sometimes innovation comes from the strangest of places.

Edited by Andrew Hayward