Chicken Time Warp First Impressions

In Chicken Time Warp you’re hoping to use the one Escape Pod to get out of a time vortex…

Ooooo K…

While experimenting with time travel, a group of scientist chickens accidentally open an endless time vortex. Their lab and everything in it are sucked inside and only one chicken will escape alive. Battle against time and each other in this hilarious game that pays homage to all things time travel!

Chicken Time Warp Game Play

Give everyone a character card and layout the Timeline cards from 10 to 1 face down with the ‘Escape Window’ card after number 1.

You then do some jiggery-pokery with the deck but essentially you’re dealing all players 4 cards each.

A turn is played over 3 phases: Flip, Play, Draw

You start by flipping the first face-down card in the timeline face-up. This starts the countdown timer from 10 down to 1.

Then you may play a card if you want to. These let you reverse turn order, look at a player’s hand, switch hands, draw cards etc

Then you MUST draw a card and the next player takes their turn. But, some of the cards are black and when drawn they must be played immediately.

The first of these will make you remove the last card of the timeline from the game, starting with 10. This shortens the timeline.

The second of the black cards will kill you.

When you die, you put your player card above the last revealed minute in the timeline.

If you have a ‘Clux’ Capacitor card you can play it in response to dying. This lets you go ‘back in time’ by flipping back down the last 3 revealed time cards, preventing your death. Otherwise, do you need to rely on other people to do it for you?

Why would they?

Well, if the Timeline ticks down so the ‘Escape Window Open’ card is revealed, a player can play the ‘Escape Pod’ card and win. So, players that don’t have that card will not want the timeline to get that far, just in case.

But, the player that does do it will win the game immediately.

Theme

Time Travelling Chickens is silly but fun.

The way you ‘Die’ at a point in time and can rewind time to bring yourself back to life is very clever.

Setup & Rulebook

Setup involves handing out a character card, setting up the timeline and dealing out cards.

It’s one of those games where you need to separate cards, take some cards out, shuffle and deal then shuffle the other cards back in. A pain, but not too difficult.

Components & Artwork

The card quality is thin but OK. If you want to play this a lot you should probably sleeve it. It SHOULD fit in the box sleeved but check first.

The artwork is in a really fun style and the references on the cards are pretty good.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s kind of easy to teach… The timeline, coming back to life and a couple of the cards aren’t that straight forward though.

But, it’s accessible as long as you work through those issues. People can usually play a card at random and use its effect if they’re unsure.

Chicken Time Warp Summary

There are similar games of course like Fluxx for example. But this is a bit less random and with the time travel elements I’d put it up there with Chrononauts.

As you can die at any time (explained by the card’s flavour text so it doesn’t feel unfair) every card draw is tense, especially if you’re not holding a Clux Capacitor.

Playing ‘find the card’ with the Escape Pod is really good fun. But, draw it early and that happiness is fleeting as you know you’ll lose it then you have to try and follow it around the table.

One issue I had was card distribution. At one point I have 4 cards in my hand: 3 hand swaps and 1 swap block. This means the only card I could play is swap hand but then that player could swap it back.

If you don’t draw fun cards it isn’t fun, but there are plenty of fun cards in there.

But, the time travel and ‘die/rewind’ time element is great and unique, it’s well worth a moment of your ‘time’.

Jesta ThaRogue

Note: The copy I played was a review copy generously provided by Crash Stache Games, big thanks to them for this game.