Nina Ottosson Dog Brick vs Outward Hound Dog Tornado: Which One Earns Its Shelf Space

The short answer: I would buy the Nina Ottosson Dog Brick again. It asks a dog to do three different things instead of one, it has survived two years in a house with a hard chewer in it, and it buys me about ten quiet minutes every time it comes off the shelf. The Outward Hound Dog Tornado is not a badly made puzzle. It just did not survive my house, and I will tell you exactly what happened so you can judge whether your dog is the same kind of dog as mine.

Both of these puzzles come out of the same Outward Hound family, so this is not one company against another. It is two designs from the same shelf, and the real difference is in the kind of work a dog has to do to get a piece of kibble. I look after other people's dogs in my own home in Tehachapi, California, and I have been doing that for nine years. Pepper is mine, a six year old cattle dog mix, forty two pounds, and she is the reason there is a shelf in my hall closet with puzzle toys on it. She gets bored fast. She shreds anything flimsy. A toy has to earn its place here, and most of them do not.

	Nina Ottosson Dog Brick	Outward Hound Dog Tornado
What the dog has to work out	Lift out the bone pieces, flip open the lids, slide the compartments	Turn the stacked layers until the treat openings line up
Sits still on a tile floor	12.75 inches long, 8.75 wide, 1.75 tall, and it stayed put through every session	Pepper flipped it and worked a layer loose in the first month
Holds up to a hard chewer	Two years in, every piece accounted for and no chewed edges, because it only comes out with me sitting beside it	Lost a layer to chewing and was given away after about a month
A dog that has already solved it	Nothing new left to learn, Pepper finishes it in about ten minutes	A different motion to work out, which buys you fresh weeks
Reloading it	Three kinds of hiding place to refill, and the bone pieces have to seat properly	One kind of hiding place, refilled with one repeated motion
Getting started with a first puzzle	Level 2, and it still took Pepper three sessions to stop pawing at it	Same family of puzzle, no easier a start
Best for	A dog that wants several different problems in front of it	A calm dog that has already beaten the Brick

How These Two Ended Up Side by Side

I bought them in the same month, two years ago, because I could not decide. That is the honest version. Pepper had already worked out that a plain bowl of kibble takes her under a minute, and I wanted something that would slow her down on the mornings when it was too hot to walk before the pavement warmed up. Tehachapi gets like that in July. The tile in my kitchen holds the heat by noon. So I ordered both, filled both, and put the Dog Brick down first.

Pepper pawed at it. Not in a bad way. She shoved it a few inches across the tile, barked at it once, and then sat and stared at me, which is her way of saying this is your fault. It took three sessions before she stopped pawing and started using her nose. It took about two weeks before she was quick at it. That is the shape of a good puzzle, I think. Not so hard that the dog quits on you, not so easy that it is a bowl with extra steps.

The Tornado went differently. She flipped it and chewed a layer loose inside that first month. I gave it away to a household with a calmer dog, and I have not replaced it. I want to be fair to the thing, because a dog flipping a puzzle says as much about the dog as it does about the puzzle, and Pepper is a dog who flips. She has knocked a water bowl over on purpose to watch me get the towel. But I bought these puzzles for a dog like her, so that is the comparison I can honestly write.

Where the Nina Ottosson Dog Brick Wins

The first thing it wins on is variety. The listing calls it a Level 2 intermediate puzzle and a 3-in-1, and that matches what I see on the floor. There are bone pieces the dog lifts out, lids that flip open, and compartments that slide. Three different movements. A dog cannot get good at one motion and coast, which is exactly what happened with my old slow feeder bowl. Pepper got quick at the sliders before she worked out the lids, and for about a week she would do the sliders and then sit and glare at the lids like they had personally offended her.

The second thing is that it sits still. It is 12.75 inches long, 8.75 inches wide and 1.75 inches tall, and it weighs 8.82 ounces, so it is a flat, wide, light piece of plastic that stays where I set it down on the tile. Light matters in both directions. It is easy to carry out and easy to put away, and it is not so tall that a determined dog can get a corner up underneath it. The Tornado is built as a stack of layers, and Pepper found the edge of that stack in one go.

The third thing is that it is still here. Two years, one dog, and a rotating cast of guest dogs, and every piece is accounted for. No chewed corners, no split lids, no missing bone. That is not because the plastic is magic. It is because the thing lives on the top shelf of the hall closet and comes down only when I am sitting on the kitchen floor beside it. A puzzle like this is not a chew toy, and the listing does not pretend otherwise. Treated like a puzzle, it lasts. Treated like a chew, it will not.

The last point in its favor is range. It works for a guest dog who has never seen a puzzle and for Pepper, who has seen this one a few hundred times. A young lab who stayed with us for a week got the bone pieces out on his second try and never did figure out the sliders, and he was perfectly happy with half a job. Pepper does the whole thing in ten minutes. Same puzzle, two different dogs, both occupied. That is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Where the Outward Hound Dog Tornado Wins

Here is the case for the Tornado, and it is a real one. If your dog has already beaten the Dog Brick, the Brick has nothing left to teach. Pepper solves it in about ten minutes now and she does it the same way every time. That is fine on a rainy morning, but it is not a challenge anymore. The Tornado asks for a different motion, and a different motion is worth something to a dog who has memorized the first puzzle. If your dog is quicker than mine, the second puzzle may buy you more weeks than it bought me.

The second honest point is reloading. The Brick has three kinds of hiding place, and putting kibble back into all three, with the bone pieces seated properly, is a small job that takes a moment. The Tornado has one kind of hiding place and you refill it with one repeated motion. On a morning when I am already late and a guest dog is barking at the back door, that difference is real. I noticed it every single time I refilled both of them that month.

And I will say the fair thing out loud. The Tornado is not cheaply made and it did not fall apart in my house. It came apart because a strong dog flipped it and then chewed, which is a thing dogs do. I have had guest dogs here who nosed at a puzzle for twenty minutes and never once put a paw on it. That dog would still have a Tornado and would never have given me a reason to write this. Mine is not that dog.

Two years, one hard chewing cattle dog, a rotating cast of guest dogs, and every piece still accounted for.

What Neither Listing Tells You

The Dog Brick listing says Level 2 intermediate, and it says that fifteen minutes of brain engaging play equals thirty minutes of physical activity. I have no way to measure the second one and I would take it with a grain of salt. But I will tell you what I actually see. After ten minutes with the Brick, Pepper is flatter than she is after ten minutes in the back yard. Not tired the way she is after a walk. Settled. There is a difference between those two things, and the settled version is what I am buying when I put a puzzle on the floor at nine in the morning.

The other thing no listing tells you is that the dog has to want the food. If your dog walks away from kibble, a puzzle is a paperweight. Every one of these works on the same principle: the dog smells food, the dog cannot get at it easily, the dog works. A dog who is indifferent to food will not be moved by a slider or a stack of layers. I use Pepper's regular kibble and it is plenty. A guest beagle we had for a week would have solved either puzzle for a single piece of anything.

What Living With the Dog Brick Is Actually Like

It is a mid morning thing in our house, not an evening thing. Pepper gets her KONG Extreme at seven, when I sit down to read, because that is a chew and it takes her about twenty minutes and then she is finished for the night. The Brick comes out in the morning, on the days when it is too hot or too wet for the late afternoon walk, and it comes out for one dog at a time. In a house with two or three guest dogs, one puzzle and one dog per spot is the only way this works. Nobody guards, nobody steals, nobody gets snappy over a piece of kibble.

You do not need special treats. Her regular food works, and there is a side benefit to that: the puzzle becomes part of a meal instead of a bonus on top of one. The compartments are small enough that a dog has to use tongue and nose as well as paw, which is the point. Ten minutes in, she is flat on the tile with her back legs out behind her and the kitchen has gone quiet, and I get to drink my coffee while it is still hot. On a rainy morning that is worth more to me than the puzzle itself.

Cleaning is a wipe with a damp cloth. The listing says not water resistant and I believe it, so I do not hold it under the tap, and I do not put it in the dishwasher. Crumbs collect in the slider tracks and a cloth plus a fingernail gets them out. It is not a job I dread, which is more than I can say for the snuffle mat sitting in the porch bucket.

Storage is the top shelf of the hall closet, next to a stack of folded towels, and it slides in flat because it is only 1.75 inches tall. That is a small thing that turns out to matter. A puzzle that has to be stacked on top of other things is a puzzle that gets left on the floor, and a puzzle left on the floor is how you end up with a chewed one.

The one thing I would tell you plainly is that this is plastic and it is not for chewing. Pepper is a hard chewer and she does not get it without me. If you are the sort of person who leaves a puzzle down and walks away, this is not the toy for that. In my house the rule is not a hardship, because the whole point of the thing is that I am sitting there watching her work at it.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the Nina Ottosson Dog Brick if this is your dog's first real puzzle, or if your dog likes several different problems in front of them at once. It suits a dog who noses and paws and thinks, and an owner who will sit on the floor for ten minutes. It also suits a house like mine, where there is already a hard chewer and an established rule about supervision. And it suits a house with more than one dog in it, because it can be handed to a slow guest dog and a quick one on the same morning and both of them get something out of it.

Buy the Outward Hound Dog Tornado if your dog has already beaten the Brick and you want to hand them a new motion, or if your dog is gentle with toys and you want something quick to reload. Be honest with yourself about the flipping. If your dog has ever picked up a food bowl and dropped it to watch it land, that is the dog I would not buy this for.

And if your dog destroys plastic, buy neither. That dog needs a KONG Extreme stuffed with kibble and a little peanut butter, or a frozen Toppl, and neither of those is a puzzle. They are just a longer chew, and there is no shame in that. It took me a chewed Nylabone and a flipped Tornado to work out which kind of dog I had, and I could have saved myself the trouble by watching her for five minutes.