by Mackenzie Jungck

Picture this: It's March 2020. (You see where this is going.) It's the dead of winter, and you're living in New York City as a musical theater performer. The COVID-19 shutdown is now in full swing, and you've just found out that you'll be trapped inside your apartment for who knows how long. Rough.

However, your sweet, nerdy husband sees this as a glass-half-full situation, finally convincing you to sit down and play through that stack of board games that has been slowly growing in the corner. You didn't think anything of it at the time. Board games? Just a way to pass the time, right? Wrong.

While everything at the time seemed hopeless and bleak, it turned out a brand new amazing chapter of my life was just beginning, and our lives would never be the same.

Hi, my name is Mackenzie Jungck, and I am the co-designer of the dog-walking board game Bark Avenue, as well as half of the publisher/board game content creation channel, TerreDice Games.

So how did this happen? And why dog walking? What's that about?

Mackenzie dog-walking for Wag! in the Upper East Side...
Well, while I was in between performance gigs and auditions in the city, I also dabbled in dog walking, working with the company Wag! (basically Uber for dogs) to earn extra cash — and let me tell you, dog walking is anything but predictable.

Navigating the bustling streets of Manhattan with a leash in each hand, while juggling clients' schedules, quirky canine personalities, and the ever-unpredictable urban landscape became part of my daily routine. Now what does all of that sound like...? Hmm, strategy, problem-solving, cute animals, and a little bit of luck? Sounds like a board game to me!

...and in the Upper West Side
Each walk came with new challenges and stories that we would eventually end up incorporating into the game, from posing dogs to capturing the perfect photo in hope of a better tip to tracking walk lengths to keeping tabs on where the dogs did their "business". Yes, that was a real thing — so naturally, we had to put it in the game. We would eventually make our way to Panda Game Manufacturing to ask them whether they could make rubber poop tokens that were squisher then the Everdell berries — and they would succeed.

Squishy poops in Bark Avenue: Deluxe Edition
There Was Nothing More Important than Thematic Experience

Theme has always been my favorite part of playing a game. With each aspect we designed, I wanted it to "make sense".

Trotting around with adorable Manhattan pups was chaotic, hilarious, and rewarding — and they left me with countless stories. From being locked out by rusty old doorknobs to chauffeuring a dog between divorced dog-parents (on numerous occasions) to the enormous underbites and powerful hind legs, every building, owner, and dog had their charm. We had to find a way to weave in this unpredictability in a fun way. I thought I'd break down a couple of the mechanisms by their origin stories.

Pigeons
New York City has four million pigeons, which is one pigeon for every two people you pass on the street — and the New York dog's favorite pastime is chasing off flocks of pigeons!

At the beginning of each turn, you roll a city or park die (depending on where you start from), which triggers a little mini event. Often it's nothing (just a little puddle) or a good thing (this is how you get dogs to poop!), but you might also roll a pigeon (in the city) or squirrel (in the park). Whichever direction the pigeon is facing on the die, your first movement must be in that direction. With only 3-5 movement points each turn, this can introduce exciting chaos to your turn. Don't like that? Bring treats with you to cancel the effect!

Pigeon on the city die and event card
Favorite Activities
Every dog has a favorite activity: Will they play fetch, splash in water, or sniff everything under the sun? (Trust me when I say New York is a very smelly city.)

Activities can be done only in proper areas, such as fetching in the park (or the Natural History Museum's dog park), whereas splashing can be done in parks and at the Lincoln Center's fountain. If you have multiple dogs on your leash at the same time who like the same activity, you can knock them all out at once! I left balancing distances between activities in the mathematical sense to the nerdy husband I mentioned earlier!

Carly likes to sniff, Lady Bum likes to fetch, Pickle likes to splash!
Events
Every other round, events toss things up on the streets of New York. If you've ever tried to enter or leave Central Park during the New York Marathon (or any of the other 100+ running events that the New York Road Runners put on in Central Park each year), you know it's no easy feat. There's an event card that makes you take one extra movement to enter or leave the park for the next two rounds!

Another New York archetype that inspired an event card was the classic doorman. Not every doorman is as welcoming as Hundley from Curious George. Some take the "All Visitors Must Be Announced" creed seriously. You may be muddying up the lobby of an Upper East Side elevator building, but unless the owner of that well-groomed Afghan Hound waiting for her stroll made the effort to announce your presence, you'll be in the doghouse until they confirm you are indeed there to serve sweet Rita. The "Doorman Building" event card causes pick-up actions to slow down your other existing walks for two rounds.

Event cards change things up!
Of all the parts of New York City that we strove to capture in Bark Avenue, I would say the city itself was possibly the hardest. The game board represents the Upper West Side and Upper East Side of Manhattan, which is by and large an endless grid of numbered streets and numbered avenues that was difficult to make decipherable. For someone who lives here, this is easy to navigate — but for somebody playing Bark Avenue who isn't familiar with our city streets, the numbers could blend together, making it difficult to locate exactly where you're supposed to pick up and drop off your dogs.

First game board, May 2020
Playtesting at home, November 2020
Playtesting at Gen Con, August 2021
We experimented with a lot of ways to represent the city. The grid came early, first as two axes (A-H, 1-8), but later came iconography, then colors, then a colorblind-friendly layout with unique names for neighborhoods to help quickly identify where dogs lived.

Once we had the wireframe, we worked hard with an NYC-based artist (that my husband met at jury duty) to represent each neighborhood by sampling buildings and structures and famous locations (such as the Natural History Museum and the Met) and weaving together a cohesive blown-up larger-than-life city aerial view. It was a daunting task, but ultimately delivered on what we'd hoped to achieve.

Final board (released at Gen Con, August 2022)
No One Said It Would Be Easy!

With the board done and the print files ready to go, we prepared for our Kickstarter campaign.

Anyone making games in the early 2020s knows how crazy the state of the supply chain was. When we went to print prototype boxes for the Bark Avenue Kickstarter campaign, we discovered that our prototype manufacturer had run out of glue due to supply chain issues. We ended up ordering ten copies of Battleship on Amazon because it was the cheapest game with the same size box, and we spray-glued Bark Avenue art onto them. Being pregnant at the time, I'm still surprised our daughter didn't come out with a third eye.

Pregnant Mackenzie spray-gluing Bark Avenue art onto Battleship boxes
The saying "If there's a will, there's a way" was truly at the heart of this project as each day brought obstacles to overcome, and "Faking it till you make it" became my everyday motto.

We studied games, discussed what we liked and didn't like about them, made a YouTube channel (which was originally just to keep us committed to the study of games, but we fell in love with it), read design books (The Board Game Designer's Guide by Joe Slack was a great resource, as are Jamey Stegmaier's bountiful blog posts), reached out to other designers, and engaged with — and fell in love with — the board game community as a whole.

We began this incredible journey that led us to make everlasting friends from around the world — a journey that eventually brought us to running our own Kickstarter campaign in May 2022, partnering with Good Games Publishing for a large print-run retail release of the game, and now launching the Bark Avenue: Kings and Queens expansion on Kickstarter in mid-February 2025.


Our goal when creating Bark Avenue was to capture the spirit of dog walking in New York City: the hustle, the charm, the occasional absurdity. We both feel that Kings and Queens (and Concrete Jungle, a new mini-expansion) continue this spirit. Kings and Queens allows you to explore the rest of the boroughs of NYC while upgrading abilities to grow your dog-walking empire. Concrete Jungle adds a hilarious twist, letting players walk other creatures of the city — something drawn from real experiences, like when we saw a pig on a leash, or a young girl walking her hamster in a ball.

I can't wait to see where this journey takes us next. If Bark Avenue has taught me anything, it's that you never know what's around the corner — but with a little creativity, a lot of teamwork, and maybe a few good dogs by your side, the possibilities are endless.

Happy playing,

Mackenzie Jungck
TerreDice Games

Bark Avenue, Mackenzie, and Jonathan at Gen Con 2024