The Games I Played at Breakout Con 2026: Something is Wrong with the Chickens
I've already covered Brindlewood Bay, The Wildsea, and Sock Puppets. The fourth game I played at Breakout Con 2026 was...
Something is Wrong with the Chickens
Something is Wrong with the Chickens is a single page TTRPG in the vein of Honey Heist. Very few rules, just a handful of dice, and a madcap premise. Our session was run by the author, Elliot Davis.
In this game you play a randomly-selected chicken (or turkey, or duck) that has acquired a randomly-selected Eldritch Trait. Tentacles, spikes, that sort of thing. If you want to know how this came about you're asking too many questions. Suspension of disbelief is mandatory. The party barrels through a randomly-selected scenario as they try to get revenge on Bryson Foods for their crimes against chickenkind.
Chickens has a single, simple dice mechanic that handles all skill checks as well as the push and pull between your chicken nature and your eldritch nature. There are three outcomes: A success (yay!), a chicken failure, and an eldritch failure. If you roll an eldritch failure you gain a (randomly-selected) eldritch trait. If you roll a chicken failure, you lose one instead. Gain too many traits and you transcend this world, removing your character from the game. Losing all your traits makes you too delicious and you are immediately taken away to be turned into nuggets. This also removes your character from the game.
I liked this system a lot. It feels silly to talk about 'depth' in a game featuring eldritch chickens but there are legitimately times where you're hoping for one kind of failure or another to keep your traits balanced out. Narrating failures based on the trait lost or gained was also a tonne of fun.
Chickens was great, and I would 100% play it again. One thing I think would be worth doing is expanding the list of traits that your chicken can acquire, as after a few rounds of losing and gaining them there was a fair amount of duplication between players. Rather than d6, a d66 or even a d100 table of traits would make for a richer and more surprising game, but then you'd need a second page for it so maybe that breaks the rules. Perhaps you could ask the players to come up with some at the beginning of the game?