Someone in the Big Potato marketing team knows what they are doing. Maybe I just have dirty minded friends but everyone I’ve shown the game components too, particularly the Hotdog, is surprised by the ‘Family Action Game’ tagline. That being said, I knew exactly what I was getting playing Chicken vs Hotdog.
Cast your mind back a bit and ‘bottle flipping’ was all the rage. The art of flipping a plastic pop or water bottle so that it lands back on it’s base. Maybe you missed it. I didn’t. Because my son insists on flipping every bloody bottle he gets his annoying little hands on. So much noise. I don’t want to be a grumpy old man but noise is annoying.
So when I saw this flipping game I wasn’t put off by the fact that the components you are flipping look like adult toys. Instead the ever present optimism that my son will actually play a game with me prevailed!
Flip Me
Gameplay revolves around flipping the chicken and hotdog and landing them stood up, so to speak. Both the titular Chicken and Hotdog come with suction cups on the bottom to aid their landing, but also make the adult comparison more obvious. Players will split into two teams. Each team takes either the chicken or hotdog and a matching set of scoring and betting cards. The 6 scoring cards are put together to form a vertical picture of your flipping item. At the start of the game your scoring cards depict your flipper in black and white and every time you win a challenge you flip over a card to it’s colour side – the first person to fully colour their cards wins! Essentially we have a first to six point race.
Betting cards are valued from 1-4 and are used to potentially take on a challenge. At the start of a round a challenge is flipped over. It defines how you must flip the flipper (two rotations, under your leg and so on) and how many tries you get. Each team chooses a number card to play and then reveal them. The team that bet the highest card will then take on the challenge. The card that you use is gone for the rest of the game so there is some tactics at play here. But if both teams place the same number the is a race to see who can land a flip first.
Flips Sake
Big Potato Games are fairly good at taking concepts and building games around them and Chicken vs Hotdog is one of their best. The auctioning mechanic is really good and makes you think more than you might expect. The challenge might be really difficult so you might want to bid low, but you also might want to save certain numbers for future rounds or try and force a flip off! A meta game develops surprisingly quickly between the two teams.
The Chicken and Hotdog flip as well as you would imagine, but obviously don’t contain any fluids. Whether this effects the flippability I wouldn’t know but my son seemed to have no complaints. In fact we all had a rollicking good time. Normally you would see a game like this as a one trick pony, and to some degree this might be true, but I really like what the bidding adds to the game.
Challenges are varied but could have been varied even more without too much thought. The art in the game is sparse and actually makes the comparisons to sex toys even more apparent with it’s stylised take on the flippers.
Flipping Heck
I see Hotdog vs Chicken filling that space of anyone can play this. It’s simple to teach, provides laughter and competition and has a bit of a bidding hook too. It would also make for a great drinking game with a little adaptation.
But it also does fit the term ‘family action game’, depending on how ‘educated’ your children are…
