HAHA Nice run! Chickens are very fragile creatures ya know… Nah, it was just a way to bump up the challenge a bit and end the game without a countdown timer.
And yah, you do actually need to spook them. Randomness dictates when they actually lay the egg, so sometimes they’ll wander far away from you before laying. If you had one chicken on the board and never spooked it, it would never lay an egg. Oh, and getting close enough to the chicken counts as spooking it, so you don’t technically need to bark for them to lay an egg. If they do the chicken scream and run away, they got spooked.
That’s actually how the game started out early in the week. One chicken and the dog player. Then once I had that working pretty well, I tested out what a ton of chickens would feel like and really liked it.