Make training fun with these simple games that help mentally stimulate your dog, strengthen your bond, and reinforce important training skills. They’re perfect for rainy days or adding more enrichment into your dog’s routine. Don’t forget to keep plenty of training treats nearby to reward engagement and keep the games exciting.
Hide & Seek
Want to practice recall in a fun way? Hide & seek is a great game for building reliability while making coming back to you rewarding.
Ask your dog to ‘stay’, then go into another room and hide somewhere – behind a door, sofa, or curtain. Call their name once and encourage them to find you. When they do, reward them enthusiastically with a praise and a treat. This helps reinforce recall while building confidence and engagement with you.
The Scent Game
Dogs naturally love to sniff, so scent games are a brilliant way to provide mental stimulation and tap into their natural instincts.
Ask your dog to stay in one room while you hide treats or small pieces of their food around another room, or area of the house. Once hidden, release them to sniff out the rewards.
This fun game encourages natural foraging behaviours, builds confidence, provides mental enrichment, and helps tire them out without physical exercise.
Using highly aromatic, meaty treats can make them game even more motivating and rewarding.
Where’s the Treat?
This simple game helps improve focus, patience, and problem-solving skills.
Take three cups and place a treat under one of them while your dog watches. Shuffle the cups around and encourage your dog to choose the correct one by nudging it or pawing at it.
Once they pick the right cup, reward them with the hidden treat and plenty of praise.
As they improve, you can make the game more challenging by shuffling faster or adding more cups.
Enrichment toys
There’s a huge range of puzzle games and enrichment toys available, but you can easily make your own at home too.
A simple DIY enrichment game uses:
- A cupcake/muffin tin
- Tennis balls
- Training treats
Place treats into the muffin tin holes and cover each one with a tennis ball. Your dog then has to nudge or pick up the balls to find their reward.
For beginners, place treats in every hole to help them understand the game. For more experienced dogs, hide treats in random sections so they have to sniff them out.
This type of enrichment helps reduce boredom, encourages problem-solving, builds confidence, and slows down fast eaters.
DIY Obstacle / Agility Course
Create your own mini agility course at home using everyday household items to encourage movement, coordination, and focus. You can use: Chairs to crawl under, blankets to create tunnels, cushions to weave around, brushes balanced on books or boxes for small jumps.
Guide your dog through the course using treats and praise to encourage them. Keep it fun, positive, and pressure free.
This type of game helps improve coordination, confidence, focus, and obedience. It’s also a brilliant way to burn energy indoors while strengthening your bond together.
Training doesn’t have to feel like hard work; it can be fun which helps build the bond the between you both. Keep sessions short, positive, and rewarding with high-value training treats to help maintain focus and make it something your dog enjoys.
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