Publisher: Victory Point Games
Designer: Nathan Hansen
Year: 2012
Players: One to five players
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 10 – 20 Minutes
Retail Price: $9.95
Category: Children’s Game
From Victory Point Games:
For years we’ve pondered the question: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Well, never fear, because our very own VPG designer, Nathan Hansen, has the answer! WHY?! is a 1 to 5 player game featuring the perfectly normal, seemingly sane chickens, running headlong into traffic, causing a massive 42 car pileup! We ask you again, WHY?! What could have possibly been so important?
Each turn, players draw a card and follow the instructions to move their chicken, and either move current cars on the board or draw new ones into a random lane! Anything can happen to you as you cross this dangerous road to get to the other side.
A quick, easy to learn game, designed for children but challenging for all players!
Why? is the first game in VPG’s new Me and The Kids line of games. If anyone remembers playing Frogger at the 
Why? comes with a color game map displaying six lanes of traffic on a busy freeway. Each lane has nine spaces that you will move your chickens around in an attempt to get them across the freeway to victory. The first player to move one of their chickens across to the victory lane wins the game.
At the start of the game, each player receives a chicken token or tokens depending on the number of players. The chicken tokens are double sided and show a running chicken on one side and a chicken with a tire tread over it on the other side. If your chicken meets misfortune, you’ll need to flip it to the “run-over” side and it is out of the game.
The remaining tokens are cars that come in two types, fast and slow. The fast cars move two spaces during normal movement and the slow cars move one. During initial setup, players will draw several event cards to determine the placement of the cars on the freeway at the start of the game. The player’s chickens are placed in one of the starting spaces on the safe side of the freeway, and the game is ready to go.
Each turn, players draw an event card from the deck and follow the instructions on the card. The first section describes how the cars already on the board will move this turn. Normal speed indicates that you move the cars across the board with their normal movement. Slow speed means that all cars move only one space, and fast speed increases their movement by one, so fast cars move three and slow cars move two. Also, cars don’t run each other over, so a fast car will retain a space between itself and the slow car it is behind, regardless of how many spaces it is supposed to move. No doubt the driver of the fast car is honking and waving his arms in annoyance at the slow driver.
The second section of the event card indicates how many rolls to make to bring new cars onto the board. Each of the six lanes represents a number on a die, which is printed right on the board. If the event card tells you to make two rolls, you roll the die twice and place two cars in the starting position for the lanes matching the numbers rolled. If a car is already there, then you don’t need to place another one.
The last section of the event card indicates how many movements your chickens get this turn, but only during solitaire play. During normal play, everyone simply moves all of their chickens. You may move each chicken either one or two spaces sideways (in the same lane), or one space either forward or backward (changing lanes). You can never move into a car, or end up on another chicken.
Why? is just an ok game. It was a little much for my five year old daughter, of course it isn’t intended for 5 year old, but she did say that she enjoyed it. Why? would probably be most enjoyed by the 6-8 year range in my opinion, despite the 8+ suggested age. I think the chicken tokens should be smaller than the car tokens, because currently when you move a chicken you end up jostling all of the cars on the board too as they are all the same size and bump together.
Why? is a simple game that can be enjoyable, especially if you remember and liked Frogger back in the day. The board is really too small for more than three players to huddle around, as you will end up knocking cars and chickens all over the place when you move them, but for just you and a young’un or two it isn’t bad. My daughter did enjoy it after all, despite being under the suggested player age.
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