Animals: Hedgehogs/Porcupines

Theme: Chickens are learning to dance ("cha cha") by completing circuits around the yard.

Goal: To "cha cha" your chicken past every single other player's chicken, stealing each one's "tail feathers" as you go by them. The first player to collect all of the tail feathers wins.

Setup: There are two sets of large, thick cardboard tiles. One set of 12 are shaped as octagons, and the other set of 24 are shaped as eggs. Each octagon shows a different chicken-related image, and the same image appears on two of the eggs. The octagons are spread out randomly on the table, face down. The eggs are then arranged randomly, but face up, in a large circle around the octagons, creating a kind of "pathway" of egg tiles that is encircling the "yard" (of octagons). Each player has a single large wooden chicken in their color, and each chicken has slots on its backside into which wooden "tail feathers" may be stuck. Each chicken begins with only one tail feather, in its color. The chickens are then placed randomly on the egg tiles, with an equal number of unoccupied tiles separating each chicken from the next chicken "ahead" of it on the pathway as separate it from the next chicken "behind" it, with the goal that they be well spread out on the pathway.

Gameplay: The game is then played in turns, with players attempting to move their chickens clockwise around the pathway. On a player's turn, she looks at the image on the next egg tile in front of her chicken. The player then turns over one of the 12 face down octagon yard tiles. If the tile turned over shows the same image as the egg tile, the player moves forward one space on to that egg tile, turns the octagon back face down, and then repeats the process with the next egg tile. When the player turns over an octagon with an image that does not match the next egg tile in front of her, her turn ends and her chicken goes no farther. If the next tile in front of a player is occupied by someone else's chicken, then the player looks at the image that is on the egg tile in front of the other chicken, and then attempts to turn over the octagon showing *that* image. If the player succeeds, her chicken "leapfrogs" over the chicken in front of her to land on that egg tile, and in the process steals all tail feathers that the other chicken had - including those it stole from other players in the same manner. When one player has all of the tail feathers, that player wins the game.

In Sum: A creative memory game that ties memory to pawn movement. The first player to successfully memorize the images on each of the 12 octagon tiles, both from their own turns and from watching other players flip the octagons on their turns, will be able to move their chicken around the yard without stopping, and in doing so will win the game. The placement of the octagons is random, so the challenge is fresh each game.

This game is part of The Chicken Family of Zoch

The Zicke Zacke Igelkacke version has the same rules but hedgehogs instead of chicken, and it's in a smaller box.
The Hasbro version has the same rules, but is a Dragon Tales re-theme with large cardboard dragons as player pieces.

Description from the publisher:

Winter will be coming soon, and the forest creatures must look after their winter food supplies...
Gone are the days where all of them could find enough to eat without having to look very hard ... nowadays, they must fight for it!

In this card game, you'll take the side of hedgehogs, squirrels, rabbits or mice in the fight for the last food to be found in the forest. In the process, you can make use of all sorts of helpful items that people have "forgotten" in the woods. And there are lots of those items: an abandoned chainsaw, Cola cans, worn out, smelly shoes, illegally dumped oil containers and much more. If you're clever, you can also lure your opponents onto the roadway that people regularly travel through the woods.

Igels is a fast-paced, funny card game in which the winner is the player with the most food points at the end of the game.

As the first winner of the Spiel des Jahres award in 1979, Hare and Tortoise or the German Hase und Igel (for Hare and Hedgehog) will always be regarded as a classic game. It is a cunningly designed race to the finish in which your fuel (carrots) must practically run out (all but 10 carrots or fewer) at the moment you hit the finish line. You also have three lettuce cards you must spend during the course of the race. The farther you move, the more carrots you spend, and there are a variety of ways to gain or lose carrots as you go around the track. It's a very clever exercise in arithmetic which David Parlett has fashioned into an entertaining and unique perennial favorite.

There have several variations between the multiple prints of Hare & Tortoise by different publishers. Most variations come from methods of adding randomness that favor lagging player via cards, dice, or dice charts when landing on a Hare square.

Parlett Strategic Variant--The designer's preferred way of playing the Hare square is that "... you can land on them [Hare square], but must miss a turn. This would be the equivalent of the hare taking a nap, as in Aesop's fable. This is the rule I most favour and would prefer it to simply not landing on them at all..."