Wouter & Ymke 
In Burger Master, you step into the slightly chaotic shoes of a burger chef, trying to whip up burgers with the ingredients you’ve got on hand. You’re not working alone though. Everyone at the table is scrambling to do the same thing, using the same ingredients, and trying to outsmart each other by doing it in the fewest possible moves.
It’s a bit of a puzzle, a bit of a race, and very much a case of “easier said than done”. And yes, if you ever wanted to feel clever and clumsy in the same 30 seconds, this game has you covered.
👥 1-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 20 minutes
📝 Designer: Jeppe Norsker
🎨 Artwork: Ottol
🏢 Publisher: Korea Boardgames (review copy provided)
How it plays
Setting up is simple. You place four plates in the middle of the table, each starting with a burger bun. The rest of the ingredients like lettuce, cheese, patties, tomatoes and onions are shuffled and added randomly to three of the plates. One plate just gets the bun. That’s your clean slate.
Then you draw a Menu Card. It shows the exact burger you need to build. You take a moment to figure out how you’d go about stacking the ingredients to match that burger using only two possible actions: moving a stack of ingredients from one plate to another, or flipping a stack to reverse the order. Everyone thinks it through and announces how many moves they think they need. The player with the lowest number becomes the challenger.
The sand timer flips, and the challenger gets to work. If they manage to build the burger correctly within their declared number of moves and before the time runs out, they earn a fry token. If not, the other players get one instead. First to five fries wins. Which, I suppose, makes them the Burger Boss.
There’s a tie-breaker rule as well in case two players reach five fries at the same time. A sudden death round decides the winner, where only the fastest builder takes the crown or rather, the chip.
Modes and extras
The game includes a few variants, depending on who you’re playing with or how much brainpower you’ve got left after a long day.
Rookie Chef mode makes life a little easier by letting you have extra ingredients on top or underneath your burger, so it doesn’t need to be an exact match. It’s good for kids or anyone just getting used to the mechanics.
There are two different menus to choose from. The Value Menu has simpler burger recipes and is great for learning the ropes. The Gourmet Menu adds more complex burgers with trickier combinations that will properly test your logic and spatial thinking. If you fancy a challenge, you can shuffle the two together for what the game calls Master Chef mode. Not quite Gordon Ramsay level, but it’ll keep you on your toes.
There’s also a solo mode, which turns the game into a quiet logic puzzle. You try to complete five burgers and track how many total moves it takes. It’s surprisingly satisfying, especially if you like a bit of quiet tinkering now and then.
The look and feel
Visually, Burger Master leans into its theme with cartoonish charm. The artwork is cheerful and light, and the box has that exaggerated food art style that makes it clear this isn’t a serious cooking simulator. It’s playful and welcoming, which works perfectly for a game like this.
The components are really solid. Ingredient tokens are thick, bright, and easy to tell apart. Cheese looks melty, onions are purple with a bit of texture, patties have grill marks. It’s not gourmet food photography, but it makes everything quick to recognise, even when you’re under pressure.
Menu Cards are designed to look like fast food order slips, and they match the physical components really well, so there’s no second guessing. Plates help keep ingredient stacks clear and tidy. The fry tokens are slim little cardboard strips that slot into a smiling fry box, and players take one out each time they earn a point.
It all fits together nicely and has a real table presence without feeling over-produced.
Our experience with it
We played Burger Master with a group of adults and kids, and it went down surprisingly well across the board. Setup was fast, teaching the rules took no more than a couple of minutes, and after the first round, everyone was comfortably flipping stacks and arguing over whether someone had actually used four steps or quietly slipped in a fifth.
The Value Menu was a great place to start, especially for the younger ones, but once we all got the hang of things, we switched to the Gourmet Menu for more of a challenge. The game stayed light and silly, but you could see players really starting to think a few moves ahead and try to bluff their way into being the challenger.
There were moments of genuine tension. Someone would boldly claim they could do it in two steps, only to get completely lost halfway through. It led to a fair few laughs, especially when the final burger looked like it had been made during a small earthquake.
We found four players to be the sweet spot. It kept things competitive without dragging. The sand timer adds a nice bit of pressure, but it never felt stressful in a bad way. More like a fun little panic.
We also tried the solo mode, which turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Without the timer and other players, it became more of a personal challenge. A bit like solving a Rubik’s Cube, but with lettuce.
Our thoughts
Burger Master is a quick little game that doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. It’s not deep or strategic in the long-term sense, but it is sharp, interactive and satisfying, especially when you manage to build the perfect burger in two well-planned moves.
It works really well as a filler game. Something to bring out between longer games or after dinner when you want a bit of fun without diving into an hour-long rules explanation. There’s definitely skill involved in recognising how to manipulate the stacks efficiently, and the more you play, the more your brain starts to click into burger-flipping mode.
That said, if you’re into deep strategy games, this probably won’t hit that itch. It’s very much about speed, logic and a bit of showmanship. And while the game is great fun in the right group, it can feel a little repetitive over extended sessions. So it’s best served in short bursts. Like a good portion of fries, really.
We’d recommend it most for families, casual gamers and puzzle fans who enjoy a bit of real-time pressure. And if you like your games with a physical, hands-on element, you’ll get a kick out of flipping, stacking and trying not to send your entire burger flying off the plate.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Korea Boardgames for review purposes.
