Review – Critter Kitchen

Critter Kitchen is a 1-5 player worker-placement game where players are sending their Chefs throughout Bistro Bay to prepare the best dishes they can for Restaurant Week! At the end of each day (Rounds 3 and 6) players will score Challenge Dishes, which will net them 0-4 stars, which count towards their final score. However, players will also need to hang on to the choicest ingredients to present to the Critic at the end of the week.  And since the Critic has a refined palate, you can only choose 1 ingredient (plus a spice) per category. Will your chefs be able to get all the goods you need to be crowned the finest eatery in town, or will you need to go back to working at McDogald’s? Read on for the review!

Review

Critter Kitchen has a significant amount of setup for having such a cute art style, but after a round or 2 most players catch on. After setting up the locations, which change depending on the number of players, and the Token Bag, Challenge Cards, Critic, and Rumor Cards, players will take their individual components and 1 Soup token. Soup is extremely useful as it can be used to substitute for missing ingredients in a Challenge meal, or to bump up the score of a specific plate to get you more stars. However you cannot use Soup in the Critic’s meal—they know better!

After distributing all the ingredients to the locations that get them face-up (the Midnight Merchant doesn’t get any until that location resolves, but they get more ingredients than most places) players will then take their Location Cards and assign 1 to each of their 3 chefs. The Mouse is the smallest chef, and therefore can only carry 1 item, but the smaller chefs get to activate first in a given location. The Lizard can carry 2, and the Boar carries 3 if there are enough items left to pick from. Starting from the left, locations will activate and any chefs present will get to pick items there. If there aren’t any items left at all, a chef can still go home with a consolation soup. You can also pick a soup if you don’t want any of the items left. 

If ever there is a tie (2 Mice Chefs at a location, for example) players will consult the Chef hats on the Priority Track. The Chef hat in front will get to pick first, and if they are the first person to pick at that location, their hat will rotate to the back of the priority order. Besides ingredients, players can also pick up Rumors, which will let them peek at 1 of the 3 face-down Rumor cards. These will score at the end of the game and can net you serious points, or just a few stars more. You can also pick up a zous-chef from the Chef Academy (a chef-in-training who will help you out for just the next round), and each of them come with special abilities. Lastly, you can assign a chef to pick up ingredients or soup from the soup truck. While soup can’t be used in your Critic meal, its value is not to be understated: you can use it if you ever can’t get ahold of 1 or more ingredients, or you can use it to bump up the score of a Challenge meal. Also, you can get a bonus star at the end of the game for having the most soup. 

Between all the different Rumors and Critics, you will have a vastly different game every single time you play Critter Kitchen. And while it can get frustrating to miss out on key or high-value ingredients, there’s plenty of different ways to still cook up a great meal, whether you try to load up on Soup to fill the holes in your menu, or you constantly hire out zous-chefs to give you more hands in the kitchen. Or you could try to learn all the Rumors early, setting you up for more points in the final round. 

Another great thing about the game is the art. Not only is it cute and interesting, they went above and beyond when making each of the player’s components. Each kitchen has different staff, not just the same 3 animals in different colors. Also the food is genuinely eye-catching and could make you a little hungry. It has that anime-food quality where it looks really good, even if you’re not a big fan of one of the ingredients (I still don’t like fish but the Ultimate Melt Challenge plate is still well-done). My only real critique is that with all the components it has and the minor rules to keep track of, you really need someone who’s played it before to have a good time, and even then you might forget a rule or 2. Probably involving the soup. 

If you enjoy a good worker-placement that doesn’t have much in the way of “Take-that” gameplay outside of getting ingredients someone else was eyeing, you should check out Critter Kitchen. It has a ton of replayability, great art, lots of choices, and I didn’t even explain the solo mode, which is fully thought out and has its own setup as you compete with McDogald’s. If you’ve ever wished you could watch Top Chef set in the city of Zootopia, you should play Critter Kitchen.