In the United States, around four percent of all packaged chicken is contaminated with salmonella.

Just thought you might want to know that.

Anyway, Chicken! by the ever-prolific Scott Almes is all about backing out of a bad bet. You know, playing chicken. Supposedly.

The dice are nice!

It goes like this. On your turn, you roll some dice. Chickens are good; each is worth one point. Foxes are bad; if three appear, that means they’ve feasted on your poultry. Eggs are… somewhere in between. They add new dice to your pool. As you roll more eggs, you graduate from white dice to yellow dice to fancy-pants orange dice. This also means you’re more likely to roll those turn-dashing foxes. You get two rolls per turn. Foxes and chickens are locked in between rolls. Eggs are mandatory.

There are exactly two decisions in Chicken! First, whether to roll at all. When the previous player’s turn ends, they pass you all of their dice. If you feel that there are too many to roll safely, you can back out of the roll. This resets the pool back to the original four white dice. You also lose a point. Otherwise you’re rolling everything. After your first roll, you choose to either make a second roll or call chicken and pass the dice along. At this point, there’s no lost point to passing.

As you can probably tell, Chicken! is not a game burdened with interesting decisions. It’s passive in the extreme. There’s rarely any reason to chicken out on a handful of dice. I say “rarely,” but I really mean “very close to never.” The bigger decision is whether to pass on your second roll, but more numerate players than I have pointed out that these choices tend to adhere to a fairly reliable rubric. Hence, not a decision so much as a decision tree.

And it’s a shame, because as a process Chicken! is entirely pleasant to handle. The dice are nice and chunky, the mat has a welcoming smoothness to it, even the tube is only a little bit larger than your average soda can. One of the player tokens is a pile of poop; there’s also a pig and a tractor and a windmill, and hey, I dig this thing’s aesthetic through and through.

But it doesn’t work. Perhaps if there had been an actual penalty to busting, one might reconsider. As it stands, your principal decision is to lose a point, and in the process lower your point ceiling — while still risking a bust! — or roll the dice and stand to win big, apart from maybe busting and losing your turn. I’m hardly a mathlete and I can still tell you which half of that equation is more favorable.

More chicken.

Sadly, that’s Chicken! in a cracked shell. It’s all the thrill of gambling, but without a finger on the scale to make a big win more exciting or a loss more dire. It’s like playing chicken on the railroad tracks, except no train is barreling toward you. By jumping off too soon, all you stand to lose is face. By sticking around too long, there’s no risk of getting pulped. In order for a game of chicken to work, there must be stakes. And Chicken! loses at its own game because it doesn’t have the nerve to provide them.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.