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In Critter Kitchen, you’re running a little restaurant in the coastal town of Bistro Bay during Restaurant Week. Your team of animal chefs, mice, lizards, and boars, are all busy hunting down ingredients, cooking meals, and trying to impress a celebrity critic who’s coming to town. Over seven rounds, you’ll gather food, plan dishes, and end up serving a full seven-course feast. Whoever earns the most stars wins, of course.
It’s kind of a mix of worker placement and resource management, but it doesn’t feel dry or heavy. Think of it like a busy kitchen where everyone’s shouting orders, just with more fur and fewer knives.
👥 1-5 players, ages 12+
⌛ Playing time: 60 minutes
📝 Designer: Alex Cutler & Peter C. Hayward
🎨 Artwork: Sandara Tang
🏢 Publisher: White Goblin Games (Dutch version, review copy provided) Originally published by Cardboard Alchemy.
Gameplay Overview
The game plays out over seven rounds split across three days. Each round has five steps: start of round, planning, running, shopping, and end of round.
At the start, one player acts as maître, setting things up for everyone. You refill the market with new ingredients, flip the next challenge card, and reveal a new zous-chef at the academy. You skip the challenge in the final round, since that’s when the critic arrives.
Then everyone secretly decides where to send their chefs. Each animal has a different carrying capacity. Mice are quick but can only grab one thing, boars are slow but carry a lot. Once everyone’s placed their cards, you flip them all at the same time, and that’s when the table usually gets noisy.
Chefs line up at each location. Smaller ones pick first, and if there’s a tie, the order’s decided by the priority track, after which the player who picks first moves to the back of that track.
You collect ingredients, spices, soup, or rumors. If a chef comes back empty-handed, you get a little pity soup as compensation. Leftover items from each location go to the chef academy, and anything still left there at the end of the round moves to the soup truck. Then everyone resets for the next day.
At the end of the first and second days, there are challenge meals, small contests where you try to meet specific ingredient requirements. Soup and bisque can cover missing ingredients, and spices can boost the value of what you have. You’ll only score if the meal’s total quality hits at least six. After scoring, you’ll have to stick to your fridge limit: five items after day one, ten after day two. Soup and rumors don’t count for storage.
The last round is the critic meal, a seven-course tasting menu. Each course uses one ingredient, optionally paired with a matching spice. Soup’s not allowed here, the critic has standards. You’ll also get points for completing all seven courses, serving the best dish in each category, having the most soup left over, and fulfilling any rumor goals you picked up along the way.
Artwork and Components
The art by Sandara Tang gives the game a real storybook feel. Bistro Bay looks like a place you’d actually want to visit, markets full of baskets and jars, a soup truck steaming away by the water, and the academy bustling with new chefs. Everything looks warm and a bit busy, like a real kitchen.
The wooden animal meeples are great. Mice, lizards, and boars, all clearly shaped and easy to spot on the board. The ingredient tokens, bread, cheese, meat, and so on, are detailed and colourful enough that you almost wish they were real snacks. Soup tokens are endless, but bisque is limited to one per round, so it feels special when you grab it.
There’s a bit of humour running through the cards, with puns like Goat’n Ramsay and Jamie Owliver, and it fits the theme nicely without feeling over the top. The boards, cards, and tokens all feel solid in hand. It’s the kind of production that makes you smile when you set it up, but it’s not overproduced.
Our Experience
To be fair, this one surprised us. The first few rounds start calmly, but as soon as the planning cards flip, it becomes a guessing game full of small victories and quiet groans. The whole “where did everyone send their chefs?” moment never gets old.
I like that everyone’s doing something at the same time. There’s very little downtime, which keeps the game moving. The planning, revealing, and queueing phases all happen quickly, so even with four players it stays lively.
The tension between short-term and long-term goals is where the real fun sits. You want to score points in the early challenges, but overdoing it early can hurt. The critic meal at the end needs careful setup from day one.
Rumors add a bit of hidden information, just enough to mess with your plans but not enough to make it random. Sometimes you’ll chase one and realise halfway through that someone else probably saw the same thing.
One thing that stood out for us is how much the priority system affects tempo. Going first can feel great, but it’ll send you to the back of the line next round.
Zous-chefs are another nice touch. They only stick around for a round, but they give small boosts that make you adjust your plan a little. Nothing game-breaking, just small nudges that reward timing.
It really shines with three or four players, when the markets get crowded and every choice matters. Two-player games still work, but they’re a bit more tactical and lose some of that “busy kitchen” feeling that makes the game come alive.
Our Thoughts
Critter Kitchen feels like a confident medium-light euro that knows what it’s doing. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but it blends its ideas in a smart way. The combination of open queues, tempo-based order, and two scoring stages gives it a clear flow.
Luck is there, mostly in what comes out of the bag, but reading the table and managing tempo can make up for most of it. Once you’ve played a round or two, you start predicting what others will do, which is satisfying.
Timing really matters. Soup is best mid-game, spices are more important in the finale, and the cleanup system rewards anyone paying attention to which locations might be ignored. That movement of leftovers, from markets to the academy and then to the soup truck, is one of the more interesting parts of the design.
Now, it’s not all perfect. After a few plays, some rounds can start to feel a bit similar, especially if everyone’s aiming for the same spots. The rumor system’s fun but not always game-changing. And the fridge limits, while thematic, can be frustrating when you have to toss stuff just because you miscounted space.
Still, it’s hard not to enjoy the flow of it. It’s the kind of game that keeps everyone involved, looks great on the table, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s competitive but never mean.
There’s also a solo mode where you play against McDogald’s, a fast-food rival trying to take over the town. It’s clever and a bit silly in the best way. If you like that kind of challenge, it’s a fun extra.
So yeah, Critter Kitchen isn’t trying to blow your mind, but it delivers a really enjoyable experience about timing, reading others, and finding just enough order in the chaos to serve something brilliant.
📝 We received a copy of the game from White Goblin Games for coverage purposes.
