Chicken! Review

When it comes to push-your-luck games, I’m usually not a fan. The balance between risk and reward is something that can stress me out, especially in fast-paced games. But when I came across Chicken!, a little push-your-luck game from Scott Almes (of Tiny Epic fame), I decided I’d give it a chance. It didn’t look too stressful, and the theming was cute. So now that I’ve had it in my collection for a while, was it worth the investment? Or is this one egg that failed to hatch? (I couldn’t help myself with that pun.)

Chicken! is a push-your-luck dice-rolling game in which players are farmers trying to raise chickens. It’s your job to raise them from eggs to full-grown chickens, while avoiding the foxes that lurk around the farm! Over a series of turns, players will be rolling dice, pushing their luck, and either reaping the rewards or busting with no points. The player who reaches 25 points first is the winner! To setup for a game, place the cloth board in the center of the table. All players choose a player token and place it on the starting space of the board. Take all the Yellow and Orange dice and place them in the center of the board, called the Coop. Randomly choose a starting player, and give them the 4 White dice. The game is now ready to begin! Pictured below is the starting setup for a 3-player game.

To start your turn, you will have two choices: Go For It, or Chicken Out. If you decide to Go For It, you take all the dice that were passed to you, and all of them will be used this turn. The game begins with only the 4 White dice, but as turns progress, the Yellow and Orange dice may be added from the Coop as well. If you choose to Chicken Out, return all Yellow and Orange dice back to the Coop, so you are left with only the 4 White dice, and lose 1 point. Regardless of which choice you make, the next step of your turn is to roll the dice.

Roll all of the dice in your pool and resolve their faces. Any Chickens and Foxes are set off to the side – Chickens will earn you points, but getting 3 Foxes means you will Bust! Blank faces mean nothing, and Eggs will ‘hatch’ new dice. For each Egg you roll, add a die from the Coop to the pool – Yellow dice are added first, and when all Yellows are gone, add Orange dice. After your initial roll, you then have the choice to Reroll or Count Your Chickens. Here’s where the push-your-luck comes into play. If you choose to Reroll, take all Blank and Egg dice from your initial roll, as well as any dice that were just ‘hatched’ and reroll them one time. Resolve the new roll as described above. If you choose to Count Your Chickens, you do not reroll the dice, and instead score 1 point for every Chicken you rolled on your initial roll. You then pass all of the dice on to the next player.

If at any point in your turn, you have a total of 3 Foxes on any of your dice, you Bust! Your turn ends immediately – return all Yellow and Orange dice to the Coop, and you score zero points. The remaining White dice are passed to the next player to take their turn. Play continues in this fashion until one player has earned 25 points. The game immediately ends, and they are declared the winner!

As you can tell from our rating graphic at the top, Travis and I weren’t super impressed with this game. Let me start with the things I do like about it, though. I really like that it is easy to teach, learn, and play. The gameplay time is listed as 10-20 minutes, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a game last more than 10 minutes. Maybe with more players (as this does play up to 8), it could take longer. But even then, it’s a fast game that doesn’t eat up your entire game night. The simplicity of the game also makes it accessible to younger gamers. Not really a whole lot of strategy needed for this game, and all you really need to do is roll dice. So those are some positives!

Now onto the stuff I don’t necessarily like. I know this will seem like a contradiction, based on my intro about not really liking push-your-luck games, but I feel like that mechanic in Chicken! is kind of lacking. You only get 1 reroll each turn, so you are basically forced to stop your turn after 2 rolls total. So that takes away some of that push-your-luck element as you cannot choose to keep rerolling a few more times, risking a Bust or scoring major points. When it comes to Busting, the push-your-luck is a little more present. When you Bust, all Yellow and Orange dice are returned to the pool, and you don’t score this turn. Do you risk a reroll in hopes of rolling more Chickens, knowing that a Bust will score you nothing? But at the same time, you don’t lose any points at all for Busting. So yes, you may not score, but you also really aren’t penalized at all for Busting. If anything, Busting is more detrimental for the next player, as for their turn they will now only have the 4 White dice instead of the extra dice.

Along those lines, at the start of your turn, it really doesn’t seem worth it to me to Chicken Out. You have to lose a point to do so, and in some cases may end up Busting anyway – so why sacrifice the point? If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of strategy, then choosing to Chicken Out makes sense – Yellow and Orange dice have greater rewards, but they also have more Foxes, so rolling those dice is riskier. But I would rather roll more dice, for potentially higher reward (or a Bust for no penalty) than lose a point needlessly. The idea of Chickening Out is trying to bring strategy into a game that really doesn’t require any – it’s a race to 25 points, and everyone is going as fast at they can. The strategy here is to roll lots of dice and score big.

I’ll touch on components for a minute. The cloth board is neat, and the artwork on it is unique. The dice are nice and chunky, and the faces are easy to differentiate between. The player tokens are cute little wooden tokens that are farm-themed. I did back this game on Kickstarter and opted to receive the extra wooden scenery, which are little fences, tractors, etc. to make the game feel more immersive. And it’s cute, although absolutely not necessary for the gameplay at all. No complaints about production quality from me.

I really wanted to like this game a lot more than I do, and that kind of bums me out. In theory, it’s a cool game, but the execution of the gameplay is bland. I’m not sure I’ll pull this game out at too many future game nights. If anything, I’m more likely to bring it out when playing with kids – as mentioned above, the simplicity and no real need for strategy makes it accessible to younger gamers, even younger than the 8+ it is listed as. If you’re in the market for a quick push-your-luck game, I would probably encourage you to look elsewhere. Chicken! isn’t terrible by any means, it’s just not what I was hoping it would be. Purple Phoenix Games gives this one a melancholy 6 / 12.