Sandara Tang has been working in board game art for some years now, but in 2022 she got sole responsibility for illustrating Flamecraft, and her cozy, charming, yet detailed style helped the game become an instant hit. Now she’s been given an even closer fit for her talents in Critter Kitchen, a game where teams of anthropomorphic animals run a kitchen, competing to create the best dishes to please the punters and, ultimately, a rarefied food critic.
There’s a good deal of mechanical variety in here, as there’s some worker placement, some push your luck, some second-guessing, and some optimization, and they all hang together in a cohesive, thematic whole.
Critter Kitchen Board Game
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Critter Kitchen is one of those games with a lot of little bits that you’ll need to sort through and set up before each play. You start with the central board, which is really just a bifold information tracker and card organizer, onto which goes the wooden round marker and above which goes a variety of cards from three different decks, indicating the objectives, food critic, and scoring bonuses available during your game.
Beneath the main board there are boards for the different locations you can visit, which vary with the number of players. Each player also gets a deck of matching location cards, three cardboard plates, and a big critic’s plate, as well as a player screen behind which they can hide their growing stack of ingredient tokens. There are a lot of these, all of which must be punched out and stored in the provided drawstring bag, from which they’re pulled and assigned to locations during play. The final location, The Chef Academy, also has an associated deck of additional chefs for hire, each of which comes with a punch-out token to represent them in play.
Wooden pieces come in the form of three chef tokens for each player, cut and printed to resemble the animals they represent, a mouse, lizard and boar respectively, alongside a chef’s hat token to use on the priority track.
The art, throughout, is superb. There’s really no reason, mechanically, why Critter Kitchen should involve animal chefs rather than human ones, but it is a great excuse to showcase Tang’s delightful art. The cutesy style won’t be to everyone’s taste but if you can get into it, it’s very evocative, making the game’s setting, Bistro Bay, come to life with nothing more than an alliterative name and some incredibly charming, characterful illustrations of its denizens.
Rules and How It Plays
Given the slightly fiddly setup, it’s perhaps a surprise to find that the game runs fast and smooth once play gets underway. One player, labelled the Maître d’, spends a moment at the start of each of the seven rounds to fill the shops with tokens drawn from a bag, indicating what can be found there. Mostly these are cooking ingredients that have a quality rating between 2 and 7, but there are also spice tokens that double the value of the matching ingredient, and rumors, which let players find out more about the hidden final scoring requirements. The final location, The Chef Academy, also gets a random “Zous Chef” card.
Each player then secretly chooses a location for each of their three chefs by assigning them a face-down location card from their hand. Each chef has a rating between 1 and 3, with lower values going first but being able to purchase fewer items. When all the cards are assigned, they’re revealed, and the matching chef piece goes on the matching location. You then scan through the locations from left to right, and the chefs in that location from 1 to 3, picking which items from the stock that you want to take back to your kitchen.
This phase of play is an absolute riot. Shops generally only have three items available, so if a 1-value chef and a 3-value chef get assigned to the same shop, the 1-value chef gets first pick of the stock, and the 3-value chef only gets to take two items home. In a crowded field, or if one of the shops has a particularly tasty draw, this means there’s a real risk of a higher value chef going home empty handed although they get a consolation soup – a 1-value ingredient that can be used as a wildcard in place of any other – instead.
Assigning your chefs is thus a tense tightrope walk of trying to prioritize what you need and what you can risk, while second-guessing what other players might do, then praying things work out for you when everyone reveals their cards. The tension doesn’t stop there, though. Sometimes, a player won’t pick what you expect and you get something you wanted but were expecting to lose. Sometimes the queue-based tie-break mechanism kicks in, when two chefs of the same value sit on the same spot, and the player who wins goes to the back of the queue, meaning ties in later shops might work out in your favor. It’s all crossing fingers and biting lips right up until the last two shops in the chain.
The penultimate location is the Midnight Market, where you can’t see what’s on offer until you resolve the location. It’s a risky proposition as it’s not only hard to predict who might be there, but can also be a great way for a 3-value chef to snag some unbelievable bargains, or can lead to them trudging home with a bagful of grot. The final shop is the Chef Academy, where you can grab the unbelievably useful Zous Chef, who acts as a whole extra chef for you next round, with a handy bonus ability to boot.
Competition for the Zous Chef can become fierce, but in a clever twist, any ingredients left over from previous shops get sent to the academy, meaning there’s often a grab-bag of other stuff to pick up here. So you can always assign slow chefs here in the hope they’ll come away with something, but they risk picking up dross and have almost no chance of getting that super-helpful Zous Chef. In Critter Kitchen, every chalice is potentially poison by the time you get there. But while other players often upset your well-laid plans, the hidden location selection means it never feels cruel or targeted, giving the game plenty of interaction without too much negativity.
What you’re carrying home from this mad dash to the markets are ingredients that you’ll use to serve up three meals after rounds 3 and 6, and then a final plating to please a food critic in round 7. The ingredients needed for the first two scoring intervals are revealed one turn at a time, adding a delicious frisson of uncertainty to proceedings. You’ll get a smattering of points depending on the quality of ingredients you plate up but the bands are wide: a total of 6 quality is enough to get you one point, but 21 quality gets a whopping four. That makes the decisions around what to throw in and what to keep much more difficult, as does a limit on the number of items you can carry over after each plating round.
Most of the points come from the critic’s plate. This needs all seven types of ingredient, and the player with the highest quality in each type gets a point. The critics themselves are represented by a card that offers a specific bonus: you’re recommended to start playing with the mouse critic, for example, who gives extra points for the best cheese course. Once that’s all been assigned there’s an extra tranche of points from the total quality of ingredients you’ve used in your critic plate, then you tally up everyone’s final total to see who’s won.
Scoring rounds take a little while, as everyone figures out what ingredients they want to use, but other than that the game ticks along at a very pleasing pace because of the way your chef locations are decided simultaneously. And despite the apparent chaos of this round, it manages to strike a balance between strategy and excitement: you’ll be rewarded for prioritizing well just as much as you’ll be thwarted by failing at mind-games and second-guessing your opponents. Similarly, the slow reveal of objectives and rumors can sometimes feel frustratingly random, but really helps to keep up the tension and tempo of play.
