"The cow patty game" sounds awfully familiar. A similar activity was very popular in the backrooms of New Orleans bars a couple of decades ago. The typical indoor venue, of course, required operations on a much smaller scale; the critical element, of course, is the use of a much smaller barnyard animal.

THE CHICKEN DROP
A ten-foot square, ruled off into 100 numbered small squares, would be placed or painted on the floor and enclosed by a low fence or wall. (One foot high was about high enough.) Squares would be sold for $1 apiece, and when all 100 were sold, the proprietor would toss a chicken into the ring. Do I need to explain how the winning square was determined? I strongly suspect that the chickens were fed something immediately before placement in the ring, because you never had to wait very long for a winning square to be "marked."

Because the winner took the whole $100 pot and the "house" did not take a cut, this was not illegal gambling. (The "house," of course, enjoyed large crowds and sold lots of beer on chicken-drop nights.)

There were usually a few shifty-looking characters on the scene wearing t-shirts and/or gimme caps with slogans or logos promoting cockfighting (which was and is illegal and largely unknown in New Orleans and surrounding suburbs, but which is not outlawed by the state of Louisiana and is actively conducted in rural areas).

The chickens performing the "dropping" may have been retired fighting fowl, and some of the more enthusiastic gamblers may have been recruited to join the spectators at out-of-town cockfights.

Chicken drops were a very popular local craze for a few years, back in the 1980s if memory serves, but no longer seem to occur hereabouts. Once in a while, I still hear of them being held somewhere else...