SNAP Review – Chicken Chicken

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Game

This is a SNAP review for Chicken Chicken.

Chicken Chicken is a fast-moving memory game for 2-8 players, ages 6 and up. It was designed by Charles Bossart and it’s published by Gamewright, under license from Oka Luda Editions.

Art

The illustrations by Pauline Berdal are clever and welcoming. It’s easy to believe that the foxes here only “scare off” the chickens! The illustrations strike just the right balance in this memory and pattern recognition game: they’re clear but there are a few you could mistake for each other if you’re flipping the cards too quickly.

Mechanics

One person gets to be the “Head Farmer”. The “Head Farmer” in the group is controlling the deck. They’re slowly flipping out cards from the deck, one at a time, and stacking them in a face-up pile so that the most recent card is the only one visible.

All the players silently count to themselves how many eggs there are; but there’s a catch. If a hen comes out, the hen “sits on” an egg and covers it up, and so the number (of available eggs) goes down. When a fox shows up, it scares off the most recent hen, bringing an egg back into play.

When a player thinks egg-sactly 5 eggs are in play in the pile, they slap the pile! Whoever slaps first, gets a colored egg fragment – but other players can challenge them to get a fragment instead. Then the Head Farmer does a slow walk through of the pile to see what “really happened” and who is right.

The first player to get 3 fragments wins!

This is simple enough, but there’s a few catches. There are all kinds of additional types of cards that you can add and make the game more difficult – and egg-ceedingly silly.

Aspen the dog sticks around and chases off the next fox who appears.

Vanessa, the disguised fox, looks just enough like a hen to sneak by the DOG, and chase off a hen.

Tiger the worm distracts the next hen and stops them from sitting on an egg.

Roger the farmer collects all the eggs in play, resetting the count to zero – but he won’t take any that are currently under hens.

There’s also things like an ostrich egg that counts for double, the rooster, and don’t forget the ducks! The ducks do absolutely nothing, except you all need to say “Quack!” when you see them.

Expectations

Slapping games generally don’t go over well in our family, even ones that are supposed to be silly. There tend to be a lot of hurt feelings, because a small difference in pattern recognition makes a huge difference, especially with age differences. It’s disheartening to always come in second or third place because your arms aren’t as long so you have to try harder.

But the tagline for Chicken Chicken told us it was an “egg-cellent memory game” so we wondered – what makes this different?

Surprises

We had a blast slapping the pile and challenging each other. We tried adding in all kinds of combinations of the special cards to mess up our memories, and we also tried flipping out at different speeds, too.

Two-player games felt less interesting, because the competition was not as intense.

We did still have some hurt feelings when the slapping got too enthusiastic (and hurt fingers). But most of the time we were laughing, because it’s so silly.

Recommended?

Chicken Chicken is compact, silly, and takes less than 20 minutes to play – even with 8 players! There’s no reading required, and you may find your kids beat you unless you can pay really close attention to the pile.

We recommend it for family gatherings with a wide range of ages and a lot of players.

We rate it 4 eggs out of 5.

Find it on Amazon or at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Chicken Chicken from Gamewright for this review.

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