Rulebooks/Chicken
Rulebook 01 · Match puzzle
How to play a chicken game
A farmyard match puzzle on a grid. You swap two neighbouring tiles — eggs, chicks, corn, a water pail — to line up three or more of the same kind, which clears them off the board and drops fresh tiles down from the top. Each board sets a small goal inside a limited number of moves. There is no timer and nothing to react to; most of a board is spent scanning for the next swap that is not a waste.
Dozens of near-identical farmyard match puzzles ship under different names, and they share one rulebook between them. This page describes the rules they have in common rather than one publisher's version, so where they differ — a free shuffle, an undo button — the page says so.
Corrected 3 August 2026: the controls table said a shuffle always costs a move. On most of the builds we tried it does not, and the table now says so.
- Game type
- Casual match-and-clear grid puzzle, single player
- One board
- One to three minutes, entirely at your own pace
- Input
- Tap a tile, then tap a neighbour, to swap the two
- Attention
- Relaxed and untimed; the board waits for you
- Progress
- Board goals met and tiles cleared
What is on the screen
The board is a square grid, usually seven by seven, filled with farmyard tiles in a handful of kinds. Above or beside it sits a goal panel — clear so many eggs, say, or clear every corn tile — and a moves-left counter. When you make a line of three or more matching tiles they pop and vanish, the tiles above slide down to fill the gaps, and new tiles drop in from the top edge. Nothing on the grid moves on its own; it only changes when you make a swap.
Because the board refills from the top, a single swap can set off a chain: the tiles that drop in may land in fresh matches of their own, which clear and drop again. Those cascades are free — they do not cost a move — and reading where they will happen is most of the skill.
Playing a board from scratch
Seven steps, in the order the game presents them.
- 1
Read the goal before you touch anything
Every board opens with a goal and a move limit. Read both. Clearing thirty eggs in twenty moves is a very different board from clearing the whole grid in twelve, and the goal decides which matches are worth making.
- 2
Find a legal swap
A swap is only allowed if it creates a match of at least three. Scan for two neighbouring tiles that, if switched, would line three of a kind up in a row or a column. If you swap two tiles that make no match, the board simply swaps them back and no move is spent.
- 3
Tap one tile, then its neighbour
Select a tile with a tap, then tap an adjacent tile to trade their places. Some builds let you drag one onto the other instead. Only up, down, left and right count as adjacent — never diagonal.
- 4
Watch the cascade settle before your next move
After a match clears, let the falling tiles land and any chain reactions finish before you plan again. The board can look completely different once a cascade has run, and a swap you were about to make may no longer exist.
- 5
Aim for matches of four or five
Lining up four or five tiles instead of three usually creates a special tile — one that clears a whole row, or every tile of one kind. Setting those up deliberately clears far more of the board per move than a plain three ever will.
- 6
Spend moves toward the goal, not just any match
The move counter is the only thing you can run out of. A match that clears tiles you do not need is close to wasted. Before each swap, check that it moves the goal panel, or sets up a cascade that will.
- 7
Finish the board and move on
When the goal panel is complete the board is solved and the next layout loads. If you run out of moves first, the board simply restarts from the same starting grid. Nothing carries between boards except which layouts you have cleared.
Controls
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tap tile, tap neighbour | Swaps the two tiles, if the swap makes a match of three or more. |
| Drag a tile | Same as the two-tap swap on builds that support dragging. |
| Special tile | Made by matching four or five; clears a whole row, column or tile kind when set off. |
| Shuffle | Reshuffles the grid when no legal swap is left. Does not cost a move on most builds. |
| Undo | Steps back the last swap on builds that offer it, before the cascade is used. |
What a session feels like
Pacing
Slow and thinking-paced. Nothing on the board moves until you move it, so a session is a string of small decisions with as much time between them as you like. It is the kind of game you can play one board of while a kettle boils, and it never punishes you for looking away mid-board.
Because each board is self-contained and there is no clock, there is no cost to stopping between boards. A board you cannot finish just restarts unchanged, so a tricky layout costs nothing but another attempt.
Pointers for a first hour
- Look at the bottom of the grid first. Matches made low down set off the longest cascades as everything above drops through them.
- Chase fours, not threes. A four-match makes a special tile, and one special tile clears more than several plain matches.
- Read the goal every board. The best swap on one board is a wasted move on the next; let the goal panel decide what to match.
- Let cascades finish before planning. The grid you are looking at mid-drop is not the grid you will be swapping on.
- Use shuffle without guilt. If there is no legal swap, reshuffling is free on most builds and better than staring.
- Count your moves against the goal. The move limit is the whole difficulty; a match that does not serve the goal is spending it for nothing.
Quick Play Notes is a reference site. This page explains the rules shared by farmyard match puzzles rather than one publisher's version, which is why it names no title. The goal panels and move counters it describes are display numbers inside the game. We have no commercial relationship with any game's publisher.