Dachshund Rain has been hammering the windows since dawn, and the small brown creature at your feet has already unearthed one sock, shredded a napkin, and stared at the front door with the intensity of a dog plotting a jailbreak. You had plans. Those plans did not involve entertaining a bored dachshund for nine straight hours.
Here’s the thing about badger dogs: they were built to think their way through tunnels, and a brain wired for underground problem solving does not switch off just because it’s raining.
That’s actually good news.
A dachshund who gets twenty minutes of mental work often behaves like a dachshund who got an hour-long walk. Their nose and their stubborn little brain do most of the heavy lifting.
Below are ten indoor games that give that brain a job. No fancy equipment required for most of them, and several use things already sitting in your recycling bin.
1. The Muffin Tin Shuffle
Grab a standard muffin tin, drop a treat into a few of the cups, then cover every cup with a tennis ball.
Your dog has to figure out which balls hide the goods and nudge them out of the way.
What makes this one brilliant for dachshunds specifically is the low profile. There’s no jumping, no twisting, no leaping onto furniture. Everything happens at floor level, which matters a lot for a breed carrying that famously long spine.
Start with treats under most of the balls. Once your dog gets cocky, bait only two cups out of twelve and watch the confusion set in.
Making It Harder
Swap tennis balls for something lighter, like crumpled paper. Lighter covers move unpredictably, so your dog can’t just muscle through with brute force.
2. Snuffle Mat Foraging
Snuffle mats are basically fabric shag rugs designed to hide kibble in their fibers. Dachshunds go feral for them, in the best possible way.
Scatter their entire breakfast across the mat and let them work.
A dachshund’s nose contains roughly 125 million scent receptors. Asking that nose to sit idle all day is like handing a concert pianist a broom.
Meals become a fifteen minute project instead of a nine second inhale. Slower eating, tired dog, quieter house. Everyone wins.
No mat at hand? A folded bath towel with kibble tucked into the creases does an honest job for free.
3. Which Hand?
The simplest game on this list and somehow one of the most popular with the dachshunds I’ve watched play it.
Hide a treat in one closed fist. Present both hands. Let your dog sniff, paw, or boop the correct one.
Reward immediately when they choose right.
The magic here is that it costs nothing, takes ninety seconds, and can happen while you’re sitting on the couch pretending to watch something. Doggy sudoku, essentially.
4. The Cardboard Box Dig
Dachshunds were bred to go into things. Tunnels, burrows, dens, anywhere dark and slightly inappropriate.
So give them a legal outlet.
Fill a large cardboard box with crumpled newspaper, old towels, empty toilet paper tubes, and a scattering of treats buried throughout. Then step back, because things are about to get loud.
This is destruction with a purpose, which is exactly the sort of compromise a dachshund respects.
A Quick Word on Supervision
Stay in the room. Some dogs decide the cardboard itself is the prize, and swallowed cardboard is a vet visit nobody budgeted for.
5. Name That Toy
Pick one toy. Say its name every single time your dog interacts with it. "Duck. Get the duck. Good duck!"
Repeat for a week.
Then introduce a second toy with a different name, and eventually ask your dog to pick the duck out of a lineup.
Some dachshunds learn a dozen toy names. Others learn two and decide that’s plenty, thank you. Both outcomes are fine, and the learning process itself is the workout.
Teaching vocabulary isn’t about the words. It’s about the twenty minutes your dog spends concentrating hard enough to earn them.
6. Stair-Free Treat Trails
Lay a winding path of small treats through your living room, around chair legs, behind the couch, under a side table.
Your dog follows the scent trail nose down, tail up, fully absorbed.
The catch for this breed: keep the entire route on one level. Stairs and dachshund backs have a complicated relationship, and there’s no reason to invite trouble when a flat course works just as well.
Make the trail longer each time. Eventually you can hide the final prize in another room entirely and let them track it.
7. The Towel Roll Puzzle
Lay a hand towel flat. Sprinkle treats across it. Roll it into a loose cigar shape.
Hand it over.
Your dog now has to unroll, nose, paw, and shake the thing apart to get paid. Most dachshunds solve their first towel roll in about four minutes, then get faster with every attempt.
Roll it tighter as they improve. Tie a loose knot in the middle when they’ve mastered the basic version.
Why This Beats Most Store-Bought Puzzles
It’s free, it’s washable, and you can adjust the difficulty by a hair instead of jumping between preset levels. Also, if it gets shredded, you’ve lost a towel, not forty dollars.
8. Cup Shuffle Con Game
Three opaque cups, one treat, one very suspicious dog.
Show your dachshund which cup hides the treat. Shuffle slowly. Let them pick.
Go slowly at first, and I mean genuinely slowly, because a dog who guesses wrong five times in a row will simply quit and go nap on your laundry.
Speed up gradually. Their tracking ability improves faster than you’d expect, and there’s something deeply satisfying about watching a dachshund stare down three cups with the focus of a poker professional.
9. Frozen Puzzle Toys
Stuff a rubber puzzle toy with wet food, plain yogurt, mashed banana, or soaked kibble, then freeze it overnight.
A frozen toy takes three or four times longer to empty than a room temperature one.
This is your secret weapon for the days when you actually need to work. Hand it over, and you’ve bought yourself a genuine block of quiet time.
The best mental enrichment tools are the ones that keep working after you’ve stopped paying attention.
Rotate the fillings so it stays interesting. Dogs get bored of the same flavor, and a dachshund who’s bored of a toy will let you know by ignoring it dramatically.
10. The Find It Game
Have your dog sit and stay (or have someone hold them) while you hide a favorite toy somewhere in the room. Then release them with an enthusiastic "find it!"
Start with hiding spots that are barely hidden at all. Behind a pillow. Half under a blanket.
As they catch on, get sneaky: inside a shoe, under an overturned laundry basket, tucked behind a stack of books.
This one taps into every instinct the breed was built around, which is why so many dachshunds get almost comically intense about it. Ears forward, body low, absolutely locked in.
Building a Real Search Routine
Once your dog reliably finds a toy in one room, hide it in a different room. Then hide it before they enter the house after a walk.
Ten minutes of serious searching will drain a dachshund more thoroughly than most people believe possible.
Fitting Games Into an Actual Day
Nobody has ninety minutes of free time to run a canine enrichment program. That’s not the ask here.
Two short sessions, one in the morning and one in the early evening, will noticeably change your dog’s behavior within a week.
Morning can be as simple as feeding breakfast out of a snuffle mat instead of a bowl. That’s a swap, not an addition to your schedule.
Evening is when the harder puzzles earn their keep, because a mentally worked dachshund settles down instead of patrolling the hallway looking for something to bark at.
Reading the Signs of Boredom
Excessive digging at the couch cushions. Barking at nothing. Zoomies at 10pm. Sudden fascination with your shoes.
These aren’t behavior problems so much as unemployment problems.
A dachshund without a job invents one, and their inventions are rarely convenient.
Rotate, Don’t Repeat
Keep three or four games in circulation and retire the rest for a couple weeks at a time.
Novelty is a huge part of what makes a puzzle mentally taxing. The tenth time your dog solves the muffin tin, they’re not thinking anymore, they’re just executing.
Put it away for ten days and it becomes fresh again.