No Yolk is a cute, farm management game made for 2 to 6 players where you must raise chickens and sell their eggs! Each player is looking to raise some wonderful chickens and sell off a bunch of eggs. You’ll need to improve your henhouse, manage the money you make, and work toward getting fifteen coins. The first player to fifteen coins wins.
This may sound like a really easy task, however, there are a lot of ways to spend your coins in No Yolk, and not a lot of ways to gain coins to spend. Let’s start from the beginning stages of your farm. The various players start with a single hen house, one hen, an egg carton to store their eggs, and just two coins. This little farm will soon be so much more, as long as you play your cards right.
In the middle of the table, you will see a market of five cards, each with a price on the top of them, as well as a face down deck of eggs, a face down inventory to populate the market, a face down stack of action cards and a pile of chickens. Players get three actions during their turn that they can spend a number of ways.
First, not costing a turn, you will first be dealt a number of eggs, depending on how many chickens you have and what your various hen house upgrades say. These eggs go into your carton — most of the time. Some of your eggs might be mouldy, meaning you need to get rid of them before selling a full carton of six eggs, costing an action. Other eggs can be fertile — which can go into your hen house if you have a free space. You can only hold as many non-fertile eggs as your carton holds, so at the end of your turn, any eggs not in your carton will be discarded.
There are a large number of ways you can spend your actions; purchasing anything from the shop, purchasing a chicken, selling a full carton for two coins, drawing an egg card at random from the egg card pile, discarding a mouldy egg, drawing an action card, and using an action card. Action cards are like wildcards that allow you to gain more money for selling eggs, gain more eggs on your turn, and even mess with other players.
Once you have spent your three actions, it moves onto the next player. This continues around until someone wins the game! The shop in the middle of the table is what most turns are really focused on, as some of the super awesome items for your hen house can really up your production.
Auto feeders allow all of your hens to produce an extra egg on your turn, while disco speakers allow a row of your chickens to produce extra eggs. Hen houses can only hold 6 chickens, so you can purchase more hen houses and more chickens to get even more eggs. As long as you have cartons for those eggs, gaining more should not be a problem (apart from the mouldy eggs stopping you from selling).
After some time of playing, you will find that with tactful upgrades your hen houses will be producing loads of eggs, with you swiftly moving toward the end goal of fifteen coins. The game itself does start slowly, but picks up the more your hens are upgraded.
No Yolk is a really nicely made, fun, family friendly game that is simply about keeping your chickens happy. The entire game is made by an 11 year old, who is currently very excited about having real life chickens to look after but also likes creating games. Although you probably can’t put disco speakers into a real hen house, these ones are fun to decorate up.
Personally, I really enjoyed No Yolk and can’t wait to see what else they come up with.
You can download, print, and play No Yolk on Itch.io for $2.00 or purchase the complete game from their Game Crafter page.
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