👗 Grooming

What grooming is for

Grooming adds style value to a dog. Style value is added directly to the coin payout when you deliver that dog to a regular Court client — and it also lifts the price you can ask when you sell a styled dog at the Market.

It's also the most visible thing on the board. A dog with a Little Crown and a Royal Cut looks like a dog someone cared about.

🛁 Wash — the only grooming ritual

Wash is incremental — each click adds 25% cleanliness, so it takes four clicks to go from dirty to clean. Cosmetic for Court — but a dog must be 100% bathed before it can be sold at the Market, so cleanliness is not purely decorative.

💇 Haircuts

Haircuts are only available from the 👗 Groom tab (Player Level 7+). Each dog can wear one haircut at a time, and buying a new one replaces the old — they don't stack. Removing a haircut is free but also loses the style value it was contributing.

Not every breed can wear every cut

A short-coated breed — Labrador, Rottweiler, Boxer, Pitbull, Beagle, Greyhound, Mastiff, Dogo Argentino, Cane Corso — can't take the Fluffy Cut or the Show Cut. Those cuts need medium or long coats to work. In the Groom tab, the unavailable cuts simply don't appear for that dog.

👔 Outfits

Outfits are chosen in the 👗 Groom tab, in the same row as haircuts. Like haircuts, they replace each other rather than stacking — one outfit, one haircut at a time.

👑 The Court connection

Every regular Court client pays 400 🪙 plus the dog's style value. So maximum style — Little Crown + Royal Cut — turns a 400-coin delivery into a 970-coin delivery. The Wolfkeeper is different: he pays 650–1,100 🪙 (escalating across repeat visits) and ignores style entirely. Don't style wolves — you can't, anyway.

🛒 Grooming and the Market

The Market's 🐾 Companions tab opens at Player Level 7, the same gate as the Groom tab.

Selling a styled dog

A styled dog sells for base + 1.2× style value — so a dog worth 200 🪙 bare with a Crown (+350) and Royal Cut (+220) sells for roughly 884 🪙 before the trend multiplier. A trending dog (up to ×1.5) with the same style can break 1,300 🪙.

Styled dogs are also requested by name: some buyer requests specifically ask for a particular haircut or outfit, and won't accept the dog without it. Those requests pay a bonus (typically +70 🪙 per style required). The request card's 📋 Needs line tells you exactly what's wanted.

Every dog sold at the Market must be 100% trained and 100% bathed and healthy. Wolves cannot be sold — they go to the Wolfkeeper in the Court. Watch the news feed too: a Pitbull ban runs for a few minutes every so often, during which Pitbulls can't be sold at all.

The Shop's Grooming Package

The Shop sells Grooming Packages as a service — a customer books a 3-visit or 5-visit grooming bundle, you pay the groomer's fee upfront (45 🪙 per visit), and the customer pays the full package price when the last visit completes (110 🪙 per visit). That's a package profit of 195 🪙 (3 visits) or 325 🪙 (5 visits). This is separate from the styling you do on your own dogs — it's a service you run as a business.

📜 The real history

The most famous "fancy" haircut in dog history is the poodle clip. It looks decorative, but it was originally a working cut: poodles were water retrievers, and the traditional clip left the chest and joints covered (for warmth) while shaving the rest (for swimming). The pompoms on the legs and tail weren't decoration — they were insulation.

Show grooming as a serious pursuit began with the Victorian dog-show boom. The first organised dog show was held at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1859, and the Kennel Club was founded in 1873. Breed standards were written in that era, and the practice of "presenting" a dog to a judge — bath, trim, chalk, coat — is a Victorian invention that never went away.

🎯 Quick tips

• Style before delivering or selling, never after. The outfit and haircut leave with the dog.
• Don't style breeding dogs. A crown on a dog you're keeping is coins spent for nothing.
• Wash is mandatory for the Market, cosmetic for Court. A dog needs 100% cleanliness to sell at all.
• Check the coat before buying a haircut. Short-haired dogs can only take Short Trim and Royal Cut — the others won't appear in the menu.
• Little Crown is the best value — 2.33 style per coin, ahead of the Royal Coat (2.0) and Royal Cut (1.83).
• One haircut + one outfit — that's the max. You get the best haircut and the best outfit, and that's the whole style stack.
• Style is ignored by packs and merging. Don't waste it on working dogs.
• Plan for the 20% return. Keep a coin buffer after a styled delivery — if the client sends the dog back, you're refunding half the styled payout.