Some games lean heavily on design, while others offer a unique and imaginative play pattern. Then there are games such as Lay It or Break It, from Fotorama USA, which does both. It requires players to inevitably take a squatting position and walk around, birdlike, while a plastic egg trails behind them on a string.
Interested yet? Of course, you are! The set-up revolves around nine toy eggs filled with rolled-up, plastic yolks, which are placed on the fold-out frying pan that serves as the game’s starting point. Two players attach a chicken-shaped magnet—using a chicken clip—to either their back pocket or the back of their pants. Without using their hands, they compete to pick up eggs by squatting above them (the magnets can attach themselves to something inside the eggs), and hilariously, walking the eggs back to nests set up equal distances away. While the magnets are strong enough to carry the eggs, players must walk carefully so as not to drop them, lest they break open (and if they don’t break, opponents can steal them). Once all the eggs are gone from the pan, whoever has secured the most in their nest is the winner.
Lay It or Break It also comes with a pair of wearable beaks, which are unnecessary for actual game play, but definitely seem in the spirit of the whole enterprise. That, by the way, would be the spirit of mirth: While it may feel a little silly to wear an appendage over one’s face and go through the prescribed methods of egg-rescuing, if you’re playing with the right crowd, it’s also kind of fun. So go ahead and put on that beak! What are you, chicken? The lower end of the age range is 5 years, which makes sense since there’s some amount of set-up involved (all the eggs and nests have to be assembled from numerous pieces, which also must be kept track of and stored carefully), and because little ones will probably get the most enjoyment from walking around funny.
In spite of Lay It or Break It’s whimsical, chicken-themed design, the game play is actually quite challenging, especially bringing an egg back to one’s nest without having it slip off the magnet. Meanwhile, since the rope on the magnet can be adjusted by looping it around the chicken clip, even older players can get in on the action (though for the especially tall, much depends on their flexibility at the knee joints). That said, note that one’s success is determined as much by luck—or is that cluck?—as patience and skill. So please, no ruffling one another’s feathers afterward.
