“Chicken game” now means two different products. MyStake Chicken is a 25-tile grid game by Upgaming that was live by 2022. Chicken Road is a lane-crossing game by InOut Games that launched in April 2024 and went viral a year later. They look nothing alike, but underneath they run the same 25-position combinatorial maths. This page settles which came first, which pays more, which is easier to verify, and which one you should actually be searching for.
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MyStake Chicken is the older game: a 5×5 grid, 1 to 24 bones, 99% RTP (1% edge), €/$10,000 cap, sold as a MyStake exclusive. Chicken Road is the famous one: 25 lanes, four fixed modes, 98% RTP (2% edge), €/$20,000 cap, distributed to hundreds of operators. Both use the same “pick safe positions out of 25” formula. Chicken pays 1% more per decision. Chicken Road publishes a verifiable SHA-256 seed model and has twice the cash ceiling. Neither is licensed for the UK.
Older game
MyStake Chicken
Viral game
Chicken Road
RTP: Chicken
99%
RTP: Chicken Road
98%
Cash caps
€/$10k vs €/$20k
UKGC licensed
Neither
🔍 Two games, one name: at a glance
Search “chicken game casino” and you get two products blended together. The first is MyStake’s “Chicken”, made by Upgaming: a grid of 25 covered plates, some hiding roast chicken and some hiding bones, where you pick plates one at a time and cash out whenever you like. The second is Chicken Road by InOut Games: a chicken crossing a road one lane at a time, where every safe lane raises the multiplier and a car or manhole ends the round. Review sites now routinely call the MyStake title “Chicken Road” and call Chicken Road “the MyStake chicken game”. Both labels are wrong.
🏢 Which came first
MyStake Chicken is the original chicken game, and it is not close. A full review of the game with screenshots of the 25-dish grid was published on 30 September 2022, so the game was live and being played by then. Upgaming, the studio behind it, is a Swiss-incorporated company with its operational headquarters in Tbilisi, Georgia, founded in 2014, and it has been MyStake’s house supplier of “mini games” (Dino, Chicken, Icefield, Plinko) for years. MyStake’s own blog treats Chicken as one of its flagship exclusives.
Chicken Road came 18 months or more later. InOut Games released it on 4 April 2024, and our InOut Games provider page covers the corporate trail (IOGr B.V., Willemstad, Curacao, reg. 161532; Anjouan licence ALSI-202506032-FI2). The sequel, Chicken Road 2.0, is dated 15 April 2025 on InOut’s own site and runs at a lower 95.5% RTP (4.5% edge).
Here is the twist. Upgaming did not sit still when Chicken Road took off. On 15 May 2024, six weeks after Chicken Road appeared, Upgaming released “Chicken Cross”, a road-crossing game with four modes (Low, Medium, High, Daredevil) that is mechanically a Chicken Road clone. So the studio that made the original grid chicken game also made one of the first lane-crossing copies. If you see “Upgaming chicken” in a search result, it could mean either.
📝 For the record: We could not confirm an exact launch date for MyStake Chicken. Affiliate sites variously claim 2020, “2022” and 8 February 2023, and the last of those is contradicted by a review dated September 2022. Upgaming’s corporate site has no press release for the grid game (it does for Chicken Cross). The safe statement is “live by September 2022, probably earlier”. Treat any site quoting a precise day as guessing.
🎮 Grid picks vs lane steps
MyStake Chicken is a reskin of Mines. Twenty-five metal domes cover a 5×5 grid. Before the round you set your stake and choose how many of the 25 plates hide a bone, anywhere from 1 to 24. The rest hide chicken. You tap plates in any order. Each chicken raises the multiplier; a bone ends the round and takes the stake. You can stop and collect after any successful pick. That is the whole game. The comparison with the Stake and Spribe versions is on our Chicken Road vs Mines page.
Chicken Road removes the choice of where to click. The chicken can only go forward, so the only decision each step is “go” or “cash out”. A round looks like this:
Pick a mode and a stake
Easy, Medium, Hard or Hardcore. The mode fixes how many of the 25 lanes are lethal and how many steps the road has (24, 22, 20 or 15).
Step forward one lane
The game reveals whether that lane was safe. If it was, the multiplier shown on the next lane becomes your current payout.
Cash out or continue
Every safe step is a new decision, so the number of decisions per round is the number of steps you survive. Cashing out pays the multiplier shown on the lane you are standing on.
Reach the end or get hit
Cross every lane and the mode’s top multiplier pays out, subject to the cash cap. Hit a hazard and the stake is gone.
In practice the games feel different because the grid lets you spread your picks and the road does not. But the position of the hazards is decided before the first click in both games, so “spreading picks” changes nothing about the odds. Any plate is as likely to be a bone as any other. Any lane is as likely to have a car as any other.
📊 RTP, house edge and the maths they share
Both games are priced with the same formula. Take 25 positions, hide H hazards, and ask what the fair payout is for surviving k picks. It is the number of ways to choose k positions from 25 divided by the number of ways to choose k from the 25 minus H safe ones. Multiply by the RTP and you have the multiplier the game shows.
We checked this against every published number and it holds. MyStake Chicken’s advertised 1.03x for one pick with one bone is 0.99 times 25/24. Its advertised 24.75x for one pick with 24 bones is 0.99 times 25. Chicken Road’s mode ceilings are the same formula at 98%: Easy is one hazard in 25 (0.98 times 25 = 24.5x), Medium is three hazards (0.98 times 2,300 = 2,254x), Hard is five hazards (0.98 times 53,130 = 52,067x) and Hardcore is ten hazards (0.98 times 3,268,760 = 3,203,385x). Chicken Road is a Mines grid with the click positions locked into a line.
💡 Key insight
Chicken Road Medium is MyStake Chicken with three bones. Chicken Road Hard is MyStake Chicken with five bones. Chicken Road Hardcore is MyStake Chicken with ten bones. The only differences at any given step are the 1 percentage point of RTP and the fact that Chicken Road will not let you stop the road early to set a different bone count. Everything else is presentation.
Because the formula is shared, you can put identical events side by side and see exactly what the extra point of RTP is worth:
The last column is constant, which is the point. Whatever you do, the long-run return on MyStake Chicken is 99 cents per euro or dollar, and on Chicken Road it is 98 cents. Strategy choices move the variance, never the average. The Chicken Road calculator will give you any other step or bone count.
📝 For the record: Most reviews say MyStake Chicken’s maximum multiplier is 24.75x. That is only the ceiling for the two extreme settings (one bone, all 24 chickens; or 24 bones, one chicken). If Chicken uses the standard grid formula, which its published 1.03x and 24.75x figures match to three decimal places, then clearing 13 chickens with 12 bones would be worth over 5 million times the stake. We could not confirm from Upgaming whether the game truncates the multiplier ladder or simply lets the €/$10,000 cap absorb it. One older review quoted 97% RTP and “up to $10 million” wins; the 99% figure is the one Upgaming’s partners and MyStake’s own material use, and it is the one that fits the published multipliers.
⚙️ Volatility controls and the caps that matter
MyStake Chicken gives you 24 volatility settings. One bone is a 96% chance of surviving each pick and multipliers that move in tiny increments. Twenty-four bones is a single 4% shot at 24.75x. Everything between is available, and you can change the setting every round. Chicken Road gives you four settings, and the studio chose them for you: one, three, five or ten hazards. You cannot play “two bones” on Chicken Road.
That sounds like a win for the grid game, and for a player who wants to fine-tune risk it is. But four modes is also why Chicken Road became a phenomenon. “Hardcore” is a marketing word; “ten bones” is not. The mode names and the visible road turned a Mines clone into something people share clips of. Whether that is a feature depends on whether you are the player or the operator.
The cap is the number that actually limits you. MyStake Chicken pays at most €/$10,000 per round, on a maximum stake of €/$1,000. Chicken Road’s cap is about €/$20,000 per game on the original, and some operators set it lower. Both caps make the big multipliers cosmetic. A €/$10 Hardcore run to the end of the road would be worth €/$32 million on paper and €/$20,000 in fact. On MyStake Chicken, a €/$1,000 stake with 24 bones wins €/$24,750 by the formula and €/$10,000 by the rules. Read the cap before you read the multiplier.
“A 3.2 million times multiplier with a €/$20,000 cap is a 2,000x game for anyone betting €/$10. The rest is a screenshot.”
Both games have the same addictive hook: the payout is on screen and rising, and the decision to stop is yours alone, many times a minute. If you find that hard to walk away from, our page on crash gambling and harm explains why step games are worse than slots in that respect.
🛡️ Fairness and regulation
Chicken Road publishes a verifiable model. Each round takes a server seed (hashed and shown before you play), a client seed you can edit, and a nonce that counts up. The SHA-256 output of those three values decides where the hazards are. After the round the server seed is revealed and you can recompute the hash yourself. Our provably fair guide explains the general method and the is Chicken Road legit page walks through a verification. The system is only as good as the operator’s implementation, but the specification exists and it is checkable.
MyStake Chicken is described everywhere as “provably fair” and “verified on the blockchain”. We could not find a published specification. No Upgaming document we located names the hash function, the seed inputs or a verification procedure for Chicken. One affiliate claims bone positions are hashed before the bet and can be checked afterwards, which would be a standard commit-and-reveal scheme, but that claim does not come from the studio. Upgaming’s crash title Aero is certified by iTech Labs as an RNG and is not cryptographically provably fair, so the studio does not treat seed publication as standard.
🔍 Worth noting
“Blockchain verified” is a phrase, not a mechanism. A provably fair game needs three things you can see: the hash of the secret before you bet, the secret after you bet, and the formula that turns them into the result. If a game page offers the phrase but not the three things, the fairness claim is a trust claim. That is where MyStake Chicken stands until Upgaming publishes its scheme.
On regulation the two games are level. Neither studio holds a UKGC or MGA B2B licence. InOut Games operates under an Anjouan licence; Upgaming’s games run under Curacao licensing (a reported 2023 Dutch authorisation covers its sportsbook product, not the casino mini games). MyStake itself is a Curacao-licensed operator. Neither game appears on any UK-licensed site, and no UK regulator has tested either RTP. Our crash game regulation guide covers what those licences do and do not require.
🎯 Availability and the clone list
MyStake Chicken is close to an exclusive. Upgaming supplies it to MyStake, and the only other places its titles turn up are a small group of related brands (Goldenbet, Freshbet and Betfast are the names that recur for Upgaming’s games). We found no independent casino carrying the grid game under the Upgaming label. That is why the search term is “mystake chicken” rather than “upgaming chicken”: people know it by the shop, not the maker. Chicken Road is the opposite. InOut Games distributes it through aggregators to hundreds of operators, which is why 1win, 1xBet and dozens of others show it under their own branding and why so many people assume each one is “the official version”.
The success of Chicken Road produced a wave of copies. Here is who made what, so you can tell them apart:
Two things stand out. First, the original grid game still has the best RTP on the list, and the sequel to the viral game has the worst. Second, every studio that copied Chicken Road kept the four-mode structure, because the modes are the product. Even Spribe, whose Aviator is the biggest crash game in the world, built Pilot Chicken with selectable risk levels rather than a fixed curve.
📝 For the record: Mission Uncrossable’s developer is disputed. Roobet sells it as a “Roobet Original” and does not name an outside studio. Several trade reviews (and our own Chicken Road page’s comparison table) attribute the build to Upgaming, whose Chicken Cross shares the four-mode structure and the “Daredevil” name. Its RTP is also quoted at both 96% and 99% by different reviewers; 96% is the figure most sources and Roobet-facing pages agree on. The Stake Chicken launch date is taken from coverage dated 11 September 2025 saying the game had just arrived.
⚠️ Scam alert: The confusion between the two games is being exploited. Dozens of domains named “mystakechicken” and “chickenroad” offer “official demos”, “APK downloads” and “predictor” tools. None of them are run by Upgaming or InOut Games. Neither studio publishes an app, and no predictor can work on a game whose hazards are fixed by a hash before you bet. Anything that asks you to install software or pay for signals is a funnel, and our predictor scam guide explains how the funnel makes money.
🏆 Verdict: which should you play
On price, MyStake Chicken wins. A 1% edge against a 2% edge is a doubling of the cost of every decision you make, and over a long session the difference is real: €/$1,000 of total wagers costs about €/$10 on Chicken and about €/$20 on Chicken Road on average. The grid game also gives you 24 risk settings instead of four.
On everything else, Chicken Road wins. Its fairness scheme is published and checkable; Chicken’s is a phrase. Its cash cap is twice as high. It is available at hundreds of operators rather than one operator family, so you are not tied to a single Curacao brand to play it. And if you are going to play a 25-position hazard game, there is a stronger option than either: Stake Mines runs the identical formula at 99% with a published HMAC-SHA256 seed scheme, which is Chicken’s RTP with Chicken Road’s transparency.
The bottom line: MyStake Chicken is the original and the cheaper game (99% RTP, 1% edge). Chicken Road is the copy that became the category (98% RTP, 2% edge) and the only one of the two with a verifiable fairness spec. If you want the lowest edge and can live with an unverified RNG at one operator group, play Chicken. If you want to check your own results and a higher cap, play Chicken Road. If you want both, play a 99% Mines with published seeds. Whatever you pick, the cap is the real max win, and the multiplier on the box is not.
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❓ Frequently asked questions
Is MyStake Chicken the same game as Chicken Road?
No. MyStake Chicken is a 5×5 grid game by Upgaming where you pick plates and avoid bones. Chicken Road is a lane-crossing game by InOut Games released on 4 April 2024. They share the same 25-position maths but are different products from different studios with different RTPs (99% and 98%).
Which chicken game came first?
MyStake Chicken. A full review of the grid game was published in September 2022, so it was live at least 18 months before Chicken Road appeared in April 2024. Upgaming then released its own road-crossing copy, Chicken Cross, on 15 May 2024.
What is the RTP of the MyStake chicken game?
99%, which is a 1% house edge. That figure is used by MyStake’s own material and matches the game’s published multipliers exactly (1.03x for one bone, 24.75x for 24 bones). One older review quoted 97%; we found nothing from Upgaming to support that number.
What is the maximum win on each game?
MyStake Chicken pays at most €/$10,000 per round, on a maximum stake of €/$1,000. Chicken Road’s cap is about €/$20,000 per game on the original, and some operators set it lower. Both caps override the advertised multipliers, so the 3.2 million times Hardcore ceiling on Chicken Road is never paid in full.
Is MyStake Chicken provably fair?
It is marketed as “provably fair” and “blockchain verified”, but we could not find a published specification from Upgaming naming the hash function, seeds or verification steps. Chicken Road publishes a SHA-256 scheme with server seed, client seed and nonce that you can recompute yourself. Until Upgaming publishes its method, Chicken’s fairness is a trust claim.
Can I play the Upgaming chicken game anywhere other than MyStake?
The grid game appears only at MyStake and sister brands under the same operator group. We found no independent casino carrying it. Chicken Road, by contrast, is distributed to hundreds of operators through aggregators, which is why so many sites show it under their own branding.
Is either chicken game legal in the UK?
Neither studio holds a UKGC licence and neither game appears on UK-licensed sites. MyStake is a Curacao-licensed operator; InOut Games works under an Anjouan licence. UK players who find either game are playing on an unlicensed site with no UK consumer protection.