Meeting the Basenji at Crufts — one game at a time

The challenge

The Basenji is one of the world’s oldest breeds — and one of the most misunderstood. Most visitors walking past a breed ring at Crufts have never met one, and a leaflet on a table rarely changes that.

The Great Britain Basenji Club wanted something different for Crufts 2025: a way to stop passing visitors, hold their attention, and send them away actually knowing something about the breed. Not a form, not a flyer — something people would choose to do.

The idea

Catuma built a memory card game with three levels, each themed around a side of the breed: History, Behaviour and Habits. Every matched pair revealed an interesting fact about the Basenji — so simply playing the game meant learning about the breed, one match at a time.

Visitors scanned a QR code displayed next to the ring during breed judging, and at the Great Britain Basenji Club stand for the full four days of Crufts. No app, no form to fill in first — scan and play.

Real dogs, not stock photos

Every card in the game featured a real Basenji, photographed and contributed by breeders from across Europe. That mattered. For visitors, the dogs on their screen were the same breed they could see in the ring metres away.

For the breed community, the game became a shared project rather than a piece of marketing — their dogs, their breed, their story.

A first for the breed ring

As far as we know, this was the first time an interactive game had been used alongside a breed ring at Crufts. That meant no benchmark to beat — and it means the results below now form the baseline for anything that follows.

What happened

What this shows

A simple memory game did what leaflets can’t: it made strangers stop, play, and leave knowing more about a rare breed than they did minutes earlier.

And because it was the first of its kind at the breed ring, every result it produced is new data — a starting point the club, and any breed club after it, can build on.