Dale Yu: Review of Critter Kitchen

• Designer: Alex Cutler, Peter C. Hayward
• Publisher: Lucky Duck / Cardboard Alchemy
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 12+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3JWcpom
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

It’s Restaurant Week in Bistro Bay! Restaurants are competing in food challenges, while also planning an epic meal to impress a celebrity critic. As one of 1-5 players in Critter Kitchen, you’ll send your chefs into the city to gather ingredients to create amazing meals and demonstrate that your restaurant is the best in town.

Each round, new random ingredients are placed in locations throughout the city. Players simultaneously and secretly plan which locations to send their three chefs to, hoping to collect the best ingredients. Some chefs are fast, but can gather only one item, while others can carry three items but arrive late. Rumors are also available at locations and provide guidance on what the critic desires.

Challenges revealed in rounds 1-6 offer the players opportunities to earn stars for crafting dishes with specific ingredient requirements. After round 7, the players must create an epic meal to impress the celebrity critic and cater to their appetites. A multitude of different critics, rumors, and restaurateurs mean every game is fresh!

To set up, place the long waterfront board on the table, arranging Challenge cards, a critic card and rumor cards above it and with location cards below it.  Mark sure the Soup truck is on the left of the row and the Midnight Merchant and the Chef Academy are on the right.  All of the oblong tokens (spices, rumors and Ingredients) are placed in the bag and mixed up.

Each player takes the kitchen board of their color, places their three chef meeples on that board as well as a player shield which hides their Critic plate and 3 challenge plates.  Each player also constructs a deck of location cards matching the locations in play for this game.  Two restaurateur cards are dealt to each player and one if kept face up, the other discarded.  Initial player order is randomized and the chef hats of the players are lined up on the waterfront board.

The game is played over 7 rounds, each with five phases.

A] Setup – reveal a new challenge card for the round. Replenish all the items on the number locations by drawing oblong tiles from the bag. Reveal a new Zous-chef card at the academy and replenish the bisque at the Soup Truck.

B] Planning – Looking at the things on offer, place one face-down location card above each of your three chefs at the top of your kitchen board.

C] Running – Now flip up your location cards and move each of your three chefs to the appropriate card, placing them in the appropriate queue area (equal to their carrying capacity).  The lower the carrying capacity, the quicker the chef is – and therefore will get to choose earlier.

D] Shopping – going left to right down the location card row, resolve each one.  All of the lowest carrying capacity chefs get to choose first before the next size is allowed to go.  If there are multiple chefs of the same speed present, they will take turns choosing one item at a time until all their capacity is filled – this is done in priority track order.  If the player at the front of the Priority line is involved in a tie, after their selections at that location are done, that player moves to the rear of the line.  In all other tie situations, the line order does not change.

Possible items that you can get:

• Ingredients – there are 7 varieties, each having values from 2 to 7.
• Spices – no value on its own, but if paired with an ingredient of matching type, it doubles the value of that ingredient
• Soup – worth 1 point; can be used as a substitute for a missing ingredient or any number of them can be added to a dish to increase its value by 1
• Bisque – worth 3 points; can be used as a substitute for a missing ingredient or can be added to a dish to increase its value by 3
• Rumors – three different types of rumors, each can be collected once a game. Each type of rumor can be used to look at one of the Rumor cards at the top of the Waterfront board – you’ll have inside information!
• Consolation soup – if your chef goes to a location and is unable or unwilling to choose any items at all, take a soup from the supply

As each location is finished, move any unchosen ingredients or spices to the Chef Academy. Any unchosen Rumors are discarded.  At the final location (Chef Academy), any unchosen ingredients and spices there are moved to the Soup Truck.

The three special locations in the row each have their own special rules

• Soup Truck – has one Bisque available per round as well as an unlimited number of soup tokens.  It also has any leftover ingredients and spices from the prior round
• Midnight Merchant – you only draw the tokens for this location as you are right about to resolve it – thus, when you commit to going here, you have no idea what you are choosing from!
• Chef Academy – There is one Zous-chef available each round; this is an extra chef meeple that must be used in the following round.  Each one has special rules that are listed on its card.  In the final round, instead of a Zous-chef, there is an Allspice token (wild spice).  This location also accumulates all the unchosen things during the current round.

E] End of Round – at the end of rounds 3 and 6, a challenge meal will be prepared.  At the end of round 7, the Critic Meal will be created.  Otherwise, advance the round tracker and then prepare the next round.

For the challenge meals, players can prepare one meal for each of the three challenge cards revealed at that time.  You must have at least one required ingredient on each challenge plate, but can otherwise use as much soup as you like for substitution.   You are also allowed to use as many of each required ingredient as you like.    Once all players have constructed all the challenge meals they want, they are simultaneously revealed and players announce the sum of the ingredients used.  Players earn

• 1 star for a challenge meal of value 6-11
• 2 stars for value 12-20
• 4 stars for value 21+

All ingredients and spices used in the challenges are returned to the token bag, the soups and bisques to the supply.  Finally, check your refrigeration limit; that is the number of oblong tokens you can carry over to the next round.  At the end of Day 1 (round 3), you can keep 5 ingredients/spices.  At the end of Day 2 (Round 6), you can keep 10 things.  You can keep an unlimited number of soups/bisques.

At the end of the final round, you must prepare the Critic meal.  Using the critic plate, place a single ingredient (possible matched with a spice) for each course.  You cannot substitute soup for any ingredients here.  Note that some of the critics have special rules that may affect how you can use ingredients.  Then it’s time for the final scoring (all friendly ties in this phase):

• 1 star for the highest score in each of the courses
• 1 star for having all seven courses
• 1 star for the most soup/bisque value left over
• Reveal and score the 3 rumor cards based on the criteria on those cards
• Score any bonuses from restaurateurs or critic cards
• Finally sum up the ingredients used on your critic meal and gain stars based on the chart found on the back of your kitchen board

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken by priority status at the end of the game.

My thoughts on the game

When I first read about the game, my mind immediately compared it to Flamecraft – done by the same design house (Cardboard Alchemy) and using the same sumptuous art from Sandara Tang.   And after my initial plays of Critter Kitchen, my feelings are also similar to Flamecraft.

To start, the game is beautiful – and while there isn’t a nice neoprene mat like my copy of Flamecraft, all of the components are well done.  The animal chefs are very dynamic and expressive.  For anyone familiar with the Food Network and other celebrity chefs, the puns surrounding the restauranteurs and zous-chefs are well done.

The complexity of the game is just slightly on the heavy side for a family game.  At its base level, this is really just an order fulfillment game – both for the special meals as well as the final critic dinner.  But… there are so many other variables that make it more complex.  The changing rules each game provided by the critic have to be taken into account as well as the special personal rule from your restauranteur.  Further, there is some hand management that has to be taken into account; especially when you are deciding whether to use ingredients for the interim scorings of the challenge meals or save them for the final critic reckoning.

The game also involves some worker placement/drafting – and I do really like the tiered priority of the workers.  It can definitely be a tricky decision when choosing where to send your three different workers to collect ingredients.  You’ll have to assess your own needs as well as predict what your opponents are likely to do in order to get the best selection of ingredients and spices for your own meals.  You can always be certain of tiebreaker order for the initial Soup Truck location, but then all bets are off after that, and you will have to be prepared for that uncertainty.

The rumor scoring cards also add a nice strategic twist to the game – everyone will score all three of these criteria at the end of the game, and it is up to the players to decide if and when they will try to learn about these cards.  There is no obligation to do so, and I’ve already played in games where the winner didn’t look at a single rumor card – just based some of his plays on what the other people were doing (i.e. when in doubt – just try to collect whatever everyone else is striving for).  If you are the sort of gamer who wants to know this information in advance, you’ll have to decide when it is worth it to spend one of your shopping actions to take a rumor token and then be able to read the cards.

So, while all of the individual mechanisms are fairly simple, the combination of them makes the game pleasingly complex – though still likely to be considered more of a family game than a gamers game.  (Or at least that is the sort of group I’d more likely propose this game to…)  

Yet, this game isn’t a slam dunk for me.  Tempering my enthusiasm is the constant administration load of the game.  At each location, tiles will be displayed, and then unpurchased tiles moved to the Chef Academy.  When you get to the Midnight Market, you have to both draw new tiles and then move them on if not purchased.  While certainly none of these chores is overly time consuming, the accumulation of little upkeep actions breaks up the rhythm of the game and tends to reduce my concentration on my game actions – because I’m spending a lot of energy making sure to constantly move chits around in the correct manner.

The theme here is really appealing as I love cooking and I enjoy cooking shows on TV.  I certainly appreciate the beautiful art and the clever (and familiar) puns in the character names and caricatures. Our games have certainly come in under an hour, so it never outstays its welcome.   Just be prepared to spend some of of that time moving chits to and fro. I think it will fit well in that niche when you want something slightly more than a family game, but you’re not ready for a 90-120 minute game night centerpiece.  Like Flamecraft, this falls into that middle ground of complexity, and you’ll probably already know if you and your gaming group like that sort of game.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Alison Brennan: There are 7 locations offering different types of food of varying quality. For the first three rounds, do a simul-reveal for the locations you want to send your low, medium and high priority meeples. Split up the food at each location between whoever went there based on priorities. After three rounds, cook your highest scoring meals (per the displayed menu cards) for points. Repeat. Then do one more round and get points for leftovers. Unfortunately the simul-reveal mechanic does not a 60-90 minute game support, although managing your priority meeples did its best to salvage it. The cutesy artwork also leavened the mood but there’s little want to play again given it feels like I’ve played it 7 times already in just the one sitting.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.  Dale Y, Steph, John P
• Neutral. Alison
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3JWcpom