Lethal Chicken’s Alex Mackey on the value of playful packaging

Alex, it’s good to connect. To kick us off, what set you on a path into game design?
My background is actually video production. In 2017, when Hurricane Irma hit Florida, I was living in Orlando and went down to Fort Myers to help with their volunteer clean-up. After chain sawing trees all day, I started talking with a neighbour who I knew – but I didn’t know super well. I had written a script and we were talking about that, and he said: “We could turn that into a board game.” We talked about that and by the end of the night we’d come up with a party game!

And this was What The Film?!
Yes! We got back to Orlando where we both lived and over the next couple of months, we met up and designed What The Film?!. We put it into production, put it on Kickstarter and it funded. During this time we were at a convention playing What The Film?! and someone asked: “What are you going to do once the Kickstarter is done?” I very naively said: “I’m gonna go get it into Target, of course.” He said: “It doesn’t work like that – you don’t just go get your first game into Target.” So, for me that was like, challenge accepted!

How did that go?
That night, I jumped on LinkedIn looking for buyers at Target. I’d message them saying: ‘I see you buy the yoghurts at Target, do you know who buys the games?’ I sent probably 20 or 30 of these messages, then I stumbled across a guy named Nik Nayar. I messaged and he came back saying he thought our game looked good, so he connected me with the right buyer. Two weeks later, we flew out to Minneapolis and pitched the game. This was February of 2018 and we were on the shelves by July. It was a crazy journey. We even got a TOTY nomination. Very surreal.

Amazing. And how many games make up the portfolio now?
We licensed four different games and we’ve got some expansions coming out soon for those. We also recently ran a Kickstarter campaign for four new games that we’re self-publishing. So by the end of May 2025 we’ll have five games under the Lethal Chicken Games banner and another four – plus expansions – that are licensed.

What dictates whether you self-publish or license a game?
We’ve done both, but initially, I didn’t know you could license a game to a company. I just thought: ‘Well, of course we’re just going to make our own game!’ We self-published our second game – Camping with Sasquatch – but got to a point where it became a lot of logistics and it wasn’t fun anymore… It was a lot and there’s just two of us, right?

We got to the end of our stock and coincidentally a company came to us interested in acquiring the game. We ended up selling Camping with Sasquatch to a company called Big Discoveries – the parent company is Sun Company. It worked out perfectly and went well for them. We ended up selling Yeti Snowbrawl and Trash Dice to them too.

You mentioned you’ve recently debuted a slate of four new games on Kickstarter. Why launch them via that platform?
My business partner Mike and I had come up with this game, Little Pig Little Pig. We started putting it into production, but I really wanted to do something unique with the box. The idea we settled on was having this ‘hay’ be on the cover, and you can blow it away, right? So when you blow, these strips lift up and reveals the characters inside the box.

While we were trying to get that right, we began working on some other games and each one had their own complexities when it came to what we wanted to do with the packaging… With Tortilla Takedown, we wanted the package to be interactive. So you move this flap on the box and it looks like the Taquito Twin is hitting the Street Taco with the chair. It’s really funny. If you look closely you’ll see it knocks out a couple of teeth too.

Nice.
And as simple as this looks, getting to this point was a nightmare! It took time for manufacturing to get it right and it was iteration after iteration. In the meantime, we came up with Dice Batter.

You were busy! And this also had tricky packaging?
Yes! I wanted it to include a wooden spoon pen – and have that stand out from the box, which is an oven.

So you were working on Little Pig Little Pig, Dice Batter and Tortilla Takedown…
Yes – and What’s Under Your Bed?… And we’d submitted Little Pig Little Pig for a TAGIE award. Normally they let nominees know they’ve been nominated, but I didn’t hear anything, so I assumed we hadn’t been nominated. That meant we didn’t need to rush Little Pig, and we could bring forward some of the other games… Then I was seeing everyone post about being nominated for TAGIEs, and I was feeling sad, so I had a look at the finalists list… And our names were there!

Oh!
I rang Mike and told him the news – and it meant we very quickly had to get Little Pig Little Pig into production to qualify for the awards! We’d also been speaking with the factory about the other games by that point, so everything aligned at the same time… It meant that – somewhat unexpectedly – Little Pig Little Pig had to be ready, meanwhile Dice Batter was ready, What’s Under Your Bed? was ready and Tortilla Takedown was also ready… That’s when we decided, why not put them all on Kickstarter as part of one massive bundle.

The other factor was that we’d met with Diverse Marketing and they wanted to distribute our range. So it all came together neatly in the end. I like doing things that no-one else has done, and launching four new games as part of a bundle is new!

And exhausting I imagine! Sounds like something of a rollercoaster! You mention wanting unique packaging for these games – why is that important to you guys?
One of our core pillars is to create hobby-like quality games, but at a mass market consumer level. We want each of these games to be a quality experience, and the packaging is part of that. It also helps them jump off the shelves.

Before we wrap up, how does the game design process work between you and Mike?
Mike is in Utah and I’m in Los Angeles, but we’ll both collaboratively decide on what games we want to do, or the name of the game. Then Mike works on the core mechanics of it, and then we fine tune it together. Once we have that down, Mike kicks it over to me and I’ll take over the core design and do the artwork which we fine tune together. Sometimes we outsource that – it’s been a mix. But ultimately, we both have a chance to work on all aspects of it so it’s very collaborative.

Last question! What are your plans for the rest of 2025?
We’ll fulfil this Kickstarter and then the goal is to turn the games over to Diverse and have them sell it into mass retail. We’ve talked with a company over in England about distributing some of the line internationally – they’re looking at Tortilla Takedown and What’s Under Your Bed? We’ve also got a new game called Monster Hands that’s in the prototype stage right now. We’re excited about that one. We aren’t putting the name of the game on the front of the box but we have a creative way for customers to see what it’s called. I think it’s super clever.

Look forward to seeing it! Alex, thanks again for making time to chat!

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