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Players: 3-6 (ages 6+)
Playing Time: About 5-10 minutes
As the old saying goes, laughter is the best medicine. And you’ll certainly get a little bit of that all-important medicine from the silly animals you’ll discover when you play Tastes Like Chicken.
To begin, each player is dealt seven cards. In your hand, you could have a Lobster-Cow. Or an Alligator-Shark. Or a Chicken-Frog. Or maybe a Pig-Snake. Whatever the case, you’ll have hand full of goofy drawings of silly-looking, mixed-up animals. You might also have a Wild Rooster or two.
The game’s rules are pretty straightforward—and they’re similar to most basic card games. When it’s your turn, just play a card that matches one of the two animals on the last card played. For instance, if someone else just played a Cow-Snake, you can play a Snake-Shark or an Alligator-Cow. When you play your card, you say the animal’s name. Then play moves on to your left.
There are also a few special cards. If you play a card that’s part pig, you say, “Tastes like pig,” and you can then play another card from your hand. It doesn’t even have to match; you can just dump out any one of your cards. If you play a card that’s part chicken, you say, “Tastes like chicken,” and the player to your left has to draw a card and skip his or her turn. Or, if you play a Wild Rooster card, you get to choose the next animal—and game play reverses to the right. If, however, you can’t play a card, you have to say “Tastes like…(something gross)” and pick up a card.
The first player to get rid of his or her cards wins the game.
Though Tastes Like Chicken does have an end goal—to win the game by getting rid of your cards—the real object of the game is to be as silly as possible. The pictures on the cards are silly, the animals have silly names (which you have to say out loud), and, if you can’t play a card, you have to think of yucky things to declare to your opponents.
If players get into the silliness of it all, they’ll really get into it, often erupting into fits of giggles. And that will be the case for most younger players: they’ll love the wacky, mixed-up animals, and they’ll giggle every time they play a card. Older kids, however, will lose interest rather quickly. After all, once the novelty of the crazy animal pictures wears off, you’re left with a pretty standard card game. There aren’t many twists, and there isn’t a whole lot of skill or strategy involved.
Despite the game’s simplicity, though, most players (even the grown-up ones) will still have a hard time remembering which animal cards are special—and which rules go with which special card. The pig and chicken cards don’t have any special markings, so there’s nothing to remind you to play another card after you play a part-pig. You’ll just have to keep the rules card handy.
So while the silliness of Tastes Like Chicken will keep younger players giggling for a few rounds, older kids (and adults) will find that it lacks the challenge—and originality—to make it a family favorite.
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