Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

The phrase “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner” has enjoyed something of a fashionable resurgence of late. Once confined to the neon gambling halls of Las Vegas as the victory cry of some lucky roulette patron who had just won himself the price of a tasty plate of casino food, it has returned in force as a signature catchphrase of the online survival phenomenon PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Those who have stumbled here, over designer Chad Elkins’ (Christmas Lights: A Card Game, Robots Love Ice Cream) latest board game, expecting the ability to savage a man with a frying pan for their glorious poultry supper may therefore be disappointed… but hold on there! Don’t run off just yet! You’ll be missing out on 2 – 4 player family fun, that’s just as wildly competitive as PUBG and a great deal more wholesome! Unless you’re a chicken, of course. But then why would you be reading this review? Return to your coop immediately, chicken! Zatu does not accept feathers as payment!

Climb Inside This Sack For Me…

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner casts you and your opponents in the ever-popular roles of a roguish band of foxes who have staked out Farmer Bob’s hen house as a prime spot for some chicken larceny. Each round, you’ll both compete against each other and attempt to avoid the attention of Farmer Bob’s loyal guard dog, Toby. You’ll plunder the coop for as many delicious birds as you can stuff in your sack. However, foxes are notoriously sneaky by nature! There will be a constant stream of opportunities to steal chickens from your rivals and thwart their progress. The winner is the fox with the fullest pantry by the end of the game!

Chick, Chick, Chick, Chick, Chicken…

Before we go any further, I have to hand it to publisher 25^th Century Games; aesthetically speaking, Winner Winner Chicken Dinner might just be the best put together family game I’ve ever seen. The components are exceptional, especially for the price you’re paying here. We’re talking two full colour neoprene game mats, four quality cloth sacks with printed logos on the front, two decks of nicely sized action and character cards, seven custom dice, SIXTY double-sided cardboard tokens, a dog meeple… and a rubber chicken. A literal functional rubber chicken that honks and everything. It doesn’t even serve any real purpose in the game; it says right there at the end of the rulebook to make up your own use for it! I personally utilised it to repeatedly put off my opponents while they were trying to tally their scores up at the end of the game. It worked marvellously. Truly amazing, isn’t it, how easy it is to completely forget basic arithmetic while an overexcited fool is blasting a rubber chicken’s war cry into your ear canal? Incredible.

I Want You For My Tea…

With such a generous stack of playing pieces to its name, you’d maybe expect Winner Winner Chicken Dinner to be a touch more complex than it actually is. After selecting your fox, each of whom have their own unique character ability, a typical turn will have you rolling the six standard hunting dice (plus a seventh bonus die on the rare occasion that you meet the right requirements). On the dice are four different symbols: a guard dog, a fox, a chicken and a roasted drumstick. For every chicken you roll, you can steal one out of the coop and pop it into your sack for safekeeping. For every two drumsticks you roll, you can cook one chicken from your sack. This is the most important part of the game; come the end, roasted chickens will score you two points while any live ones left in your sack will only score you one.

Rolling Toby the Guard Dog will move the dog meeple along his own special track. If he gets too far ahead, he’ll immediately trigger the end of the game! He’ll also allow you to steal chickens from other players. In classic Yahtzee style, you can choose to re-roll any of the dice besides Toby up to twice per round which grants Winner Winner Chicken Dinner a soft push-your-luck edge…

What Does the Fox Say…

The final die face is the fox which will allow you to buy action cards from a small market. Three at a time are laid out, each costing from one to three fox symbols. The cards do everything from allowing you to automatically capture and roast a chicken in one swift move to forcing another player to switch sacks with you. There’s even a Chicken Dance Party, an ordeal that I have already grown to despise, in which the holder can coerce their opponents into performing their best impression of a dancing chicken. I assure you, I make the maddest of grabs to obtain this damnable card whenever it rears its ugly head, lest one of my children forces me to humiliate myself for cardboard tokens. If my wife is playing, I secretly conspire with them so that it is she who must perform the dread ritual of flapping arms and idiot squawking. Mercy, I hate that card.

I Haven’t Had a Wing Since Easter…

Grumpy old man grumblings aside, Winner Winner Chicken Dinner is messy family fun… with an emphasis on “messy”. You can sum up the negative points of this game easily with the word “overstuffed”. There is definitely more going on here than there really needs to be. There’s the low risk “push your luck” mechanic with Toby the Dog that doesn’t actually punish you if rolling more of him allows you to pinch chickens from your opponents. Then there’s the character abilities, most of which are actually usable once in a blue moon.  Also. there’s a good deal of what I’d call moderate “take that” driving the game… which, surprisingly for me, I didn’t really mind here. Sure, it’s a pain if somebody swaps your full sack of chickens for their virtually empty one but you’re given every opportunity to mitigate any potential loss by cooking your poultry which protects them from any opponents. If I was really moaning, I’d say the sacks are bit small too but they’re clearly made for smaller fingers than the ones on the flesh shovels I call hands so I’ll let that one go.

Or a Bargain Bucket Since Last Week, So…

It’s important to note that, despite feeling a little overproduced, Winner Winner Chicken Dinner does work and it’s great fun. The surplus of oddly-fitting moving parts here may well work for people that like a little extra chaos in their family gaming and I think the younger market, who this is squarely aimed at, will have an absolute riot with it. Let those rubber chickens roar… and then, uh… quickly put them away before the dog tries to jump on the table and grab it off you. Me? Speak from personal experience? No, gosh. Never.