Critter Kitchen

In Critter Kitchen you run a restaurant in a week-long competition. Each round you secretly assign your chefs to locations, everyone reveals at once, and then shopping resolves location by location — with faster chefs picking first and slower ones carrying more.

Challenges score after rounds 3 and 6. After round 7 everyone plates a seven-course meal for a food critic. Most stars wins.

Setup

Choose one player to be the maître d’. They put all the ingredient, spice and rumour tokens into the bag, shake it, and handle round setup for the rest of the game.

1. Place the waterfront board and the priority track.
2. Shuffle the challenge cards and place 6; return the rest to the box.
3. Shuffle the critic deck, choose one at random, box the rest. For a first game, use the mouse.
4. Shuffle the rumour cards, choose 3 at random without looking, and place them face down. First game? Use the base rumour cards — the ones without a small A at the bottom.
5. Put the round tracker on round 1, the hold token on round 3, and the allspice token on round 7.
6. Lay out the soup truck, the numbered locations for your player count, the midnight merchant and the chef academy. In a two-player game, use the 2-player sides of the midnight merchant and chef academy.
7. Place soup and bisque tokens near the soup truck, and the gold stars nearby.
8. Shuffle the sous chef cards, select 6 and place them by the chef academy with their meeples. Box the rest.
9. Each player takes a shield, kitchen board, chef meeples, critic plate, challenge plates, soup token and location cards — removing any locations not used in this game.
10. Randomly place everyone’s tiebreak markers on the priority track.

Restaurateurs are optional unique player powers. Skip them for a first game; otherwise deal one to each player and gain the stars shown at the top of the card.

How a Round Works

Three phases: round preparation, planning, then shopping.

1. Round preparation

The maître d’ draws ingredient tokens from the bag and fills the numbered locations, then:

• Reveal the leftmost challenge card.
• On rounds 3 and 6, place the hold token over the rightmost ingredient — it is not required for that challenge.
• Reveal a sous chef card and place it by the chef academy with its meeple. On round 7, place the allspice token there instead.
• If the soup truck has no bisque token, add one.

2. Planning

Secretly place location cards face down in front of each chef meeple in your kitchen — including sous chefs — deciding where each will shop. Then everyone reveals simultaneously.

Chefs slot in by speed: the mouse on the leftmost spot, the lizard second, the boar third. Sous chefs go on the spot shown by the little shopping baskets on their card.

3. Shopping

First check whether any sous chef ability triggers on reveal.

Resolve locations starting at the soup truck and moving right. At each location, chefs pick in speed order:

Chef	Picks	Carries
Mouse	First	1 item
Lizard	Second	2 items
Boar	Third	3 items

Sous chefs pick at their own printed speed and carry to match.

Put what you take behind your shield and send the chef back to your kitchen. Sous chefs are single use and are discarded rather than returned.

A chef may instead take one soup as their first and only choice and go home. And if a chef arrives to find nothing left, they still get a soup to go.

Leftover ingredients at a numbered location move to the chef academy as soon as that location resolves — so anyone who sent a chef to the academy this round can still pick them up. Whatever is left at the end of the round goes to the soup truck.

Friendly ties

If two chefs of the same speed want the first ingredient, use the priority track: whoever is closest to the door picks first, and their marker then moves to the back of the track.

After that, tied chefs alternate taking one ingredient in priority order until the ingredients run out or everyone has hit their carrying capacity.

If chefs tie for an ingredient after the first pick, they choose in priority order without moving any markers.

Rumours

Rumour cards are hidden end-game bonuses — some award stars for meeting criteria, others multiply one course of your critic meal.

Taking a rumour token while shopping lets you look at the matching rumour card immediately, and re-read it whenever you like. Wild rumour tokens let you peek at any available rumour you have not yet seen.

You cannot take a rumour token you already own, which creates a genuinely sneaky bit of play: if an opponent already holds that rumour type, you can safely grab an ingredient first, knowing the token will still be there for you.

Any rumour tokens left when a location resolves are removed from the game — they never move on to another location. If every player ends up holding the same rumour, just flip that card face up.

The Locations

Location	Behaviour
Soup truck	Always starts the round with one bisque and unlimited soup, as much as your chef can carry, plus anything left over from last round.
Numbered locations	Vary by player count and slot capacity. Leftovers go to the chef academy immediately after resolving.
Midnight merchant	Sits empty until it resolves — only then does the maître d’ draw tokens to fill it. Pick in normal speed order. If no chefs are there, the items are drawn and sent straight to the chef academy.
Chef academy	Holds one sous chef on rounds 1–6, or the allspice on round 7, plus any leftovers sent from elsewhere. Chefs here choose between the sous chef and the leftovers.

An unclaimed sous chef at the academy is discarded and replaced at the end of the round.

Challenges (after rounds 3 and 6)

Players simultaneously add ingredients to their three challenge plates, matching each challenge’s required ingredients and spices.

• You must satisfy all the ingredients of a challenge, and you may add multiples.
• Spices double one token of the matching ingredient.
• You may substitute soup or bisque for some ingredients — but a meal can never be made entirely of soup or bisque.

Plate total	Stars
6+	1
12+	2
21+	4

Refrigerate

After scoring, discard down to 5 ingredients and spices after round 3, and 10 after round 6. Soup and bisque do not count toward these limits, so hoard as much as you like.

The Seventh Round and Critic Scoring

Round 7 is your last chance to shop. The allspice token — wild, and able to double any one ingredient — sits at the chef academy in place of a sous chef.

Then score the critic meal in five steps:

1. Prepare the meal. On your critic plate, add one ingredient and spice token per type. Check your critic card, which may change how scoring works. Soup and bisque cannot be plated — but do not discard them yet. Keep spare tokens to one side in case a rumour needs them. Everyone reveals simultaneously.

2. Bonus stars. The player with the highest total value of soup and bisque gains a star; ties mean both gain one. Everyone who served all seven courses also gains a star.

3. Best of each course. The player with the highest value of each ingredient, spices included, gains a star. Ties award both.

4. Reveal and score rumours. Reveal every rumour card and score the ones awarding stars now. Multipliers wait for the next step.

5. Score the critic meal. Flip your kitchen board to the scoring track and total your ingredients, including spice and rumour multipliers, using your mouse chef as a marker. The row your mouse lands on is how many stars you gain. If you pass 70, loop back around and add the final row to the 10 stars you have already earned.

How to Win

Count your stars. Most stars wins. Ties go to the highest position on the critic score track, and then to the priority track — there is no shared victory.

Common Mistakes

• Forgetting slower chefs carry more. The mouse picks first but only takes one item; the boar picks last and takes three.
• Returning sous chefs to your kitchen. They are one-time use and get discarded.
• Trying to take a rumour you already hold. Not allowed — and knowing that is a real tactical advantage.
• Plating soup in the critic meal. Soup and bisque are barred from the critic plate, though they still score you a bonus star for having the most.
• Building a challenge plate entirely from soup. Substituting some ingredients is fine; substituting all of them is not.
• Counting soup toward the refrigerate limit. It does not count, so there is never a reason to discard it.
• Missing the round 3 and 6 hold token. It removes the rightmost ingredient from that day’s challenge requirements.