My favorite game this year is absolutely Critter Kitchen from Lucky Duck Games. Designed by Alex Cutler and Peter C. Hayward, with the incomparable art of Sandara Tang, Critter Kitchen, which funded at the end of 2023 and has hit the shops this year, challenges up to five players to send your chefs out into the city to create amazing meals and demonstrate that your restaurant is the best in Bistro Bay during restaurant week.
I won’t lie, I was primarily interested in the game because of its theme/aesthetic and worker placement, since I’ve found that I really enjoy those games. But, actually playing was SO MUCH FUN and if you’re drawn to the game, you’ll definitely love it.
What’s in the box?
Critter Kitchen comes with a whole lot of components. A waterfront board, eight location boards (the number used depends on player number), 16 spice tokens, 91 ingredient tokens, 12 rumor tokens, 2 Allspice 7th round tokens, 7 challenge cards, 28 rumor cards, 72 star tokens, 12 critic cards, 1 maitre d’ Card, 1 token bag, 1 hold token, 1 round tracker, 40 soup and 7 bisque tokens, 12 zous-chef cards and 12 zous-chef tokens, and 10 restaurteur cards (optional).
Player components include 15 chef figures (mice, lizards, and boards) and 5 chef hats in blue, purple, red, yellow, and orange, 5 player kitchen boards, 45 location cards, 5 critic plates, 5 player restaurant shields, 15 challenge plates (3 per player). Finally, the solo components include McDogald’s Kitchen board, 12 critic choice cards, 30 chef cards, and 14 manager cards.
WHEW.
The production quality on Critter Kitchen is solid. I had no issues punching out the various tokens and the finish on all the cards and boards is superb. My only complaint is that for the regular base version of the game, the insert isn’t super useful to organize everything. Not a dealbreaker, but since I do play a lot of games and dislike set up and break down the most, I always try to organize everything so it’s easy to put a game together when my friends and family are over. I suggest separating things out by player color so it’s easier to set up.
Certain aspects take the materials above and beyond though. I love that the figures are multi-colored so they have actual dimension, and the art components are super detailed so Tang’s art truly gets to shine.
How’s it play?
Gameplay occurs over 7 rounds divided across three days and each round has five steps with the goal of fulfilling challenge cards and, after the seventh round, serving the best meal for the critic chosen for that game. At the start of the round, the Maitre’d reveals a new challenge card, restocks bisque on the soup truck location, restocks the items in each of the locations, and reveals a new zous-chef. Every game always includes the soup truck, midnight merchant, and chef academy, with other locations dependent on the number of players.
Once ingredient and rumor items are placed on the locations, players plan where to send their chefs by placing location cards face down above their kitchen board. However! It’s not just about the location where you want to get items from, because your chefs vary in speed and how much they can carry. The speedy mouse gets to pick first, but only one item, whereas the lizard can pick up two and goes second, and the boar goes last but can pick up three items.
Once the cards are all simultaneously flipped, players move their meeples to the locations and go in speed order to pick one, two, or three items. If there’s no items to pick, the player gets one soup token.
The locations are all cleaned up and the round ends! Certain locations are unique. The soup truck holds leftovers from the previous round and endless soup, the midnight merchant doesn’t have items until AFTER meeples are placed there, and the chef academy doesn’t have items. Rather, it has a single zous-chef which offers support, but each chef can only be picked by one player, and if not used that round, goes back in the box.
At the end of the round, all location cards are return to the player, the round token moves one space on the round track, and at the end of day 1 and 2, players serve up challenges by matching ingredients with the three shown (except for on the third and sixth cards which only need two ingredients). Players plate and score independently of each other. Spice tokens double the score for the ingredient matched, and each meal adds 1 or 3 points for each soup or bisque token respectively.
The game continues until after the 7th round in which players serve the critic a meal and score based on which player has the highest scoring course. There’s other scoring methods but for the sake of this review, your goal is to simultaneously fulfill challenge meals AND keep enough ingredients to serve the critic meal.
The verdict?
As always, the player who scores the most stars wins the game, but players can surge in points if they play their ingredients right and if they managed to check rumors throughout the game and aim to score based on those. (A rumor might include scoring more stars if there’s more cheese or more spice.)
In the time that I’ve been reviewing board games, well at least once I’d reviewed a few, I got pretty good at picking games based on their mechanics and design. That doesn’t always mean that every choice was good. I’ve had a few games where the design was great in concept but didn’t quite work in execution (sadly). Critter Kitchen absolutely delivers on its premise and like the best games I’ve played, it’s going to be played over and over again until I get sick of it and try something else I played over and over again and got sick of.
You can pick up a copy at Lucky Duck Games or your FLGS now!
Images and review copy courtesy of Lucky Duck Games
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