Secret Recipe – Deduction With a Cup of Tea

Some families argue about money. Others argue about furniture. In Secret Recipe, the big prize is grandma’s recipe book. And yes, everyone around the table is convinced they’re the one who deserves it.

At its core, Secret Recipe is a deduction game about missing information and about choosing carefully what you let others find out. Each player knows only part of a recipe, while the rest is scattered across the table and hidden in other players’ hands. Your goal isn’t just to figure out what others are hiding, but also to guide them toward discovering your own ingredients at moments that actually benefit you.

It’s polite on the surface, a bit sneaky underneath, and very much about timing. Let’s face it, that already sounds like a family gathering.

👥 2-4 players, ages 13+
⌛ Playing time: 40-75 minutes
📝 Designers: Blaž Hribar & Nika Mlinarič
🎨 Artwork: Dagmara Gąska

🏢 Publisher: SnowBoardGames (review copy provided)

Gameplay overview

At the start of the game, each player receives four recipe ingredients. These are placed face down on a personal recipe board and are known only to that player. These are your secrets for the game. Additional recipe ingredients are placed face down on the pantry shelves, and nine pantry ingredients are placed face up in a central grid that everyone can see.

Over the course of the game, players try to work out which ingredients belong to which recipes. You score points by correctly identifying ingredients in other players’ recipes, and you also gain points when your own ingredients are successfully discovered. In the end, the player with the most points wins.

Play happens in turns. On your turn, you may first discard one face-up pantry ingredient and replace it with a new one drawn from the bag. This step is optional. Sometimes it’s about improving your own future clue, sometimes it’s about removing something that’s helping someone else a little too much.

After that, you give a clue.

Most of the time, clues are about one of your own hidden ingredients. Only once all of your ingredients have been revealed do you stop giving clues and start asking questions instead. A clue compares one of your hidden ingredients to a specific row or column in the pantry grid, using either ingredient type or ingredient weight.

Type clues say whether your ingredient matches at least one ingredient in the chosen row or column, or none of them. Weight clues compare your ingredient to the pantry ingredients using lighter than, heavier than, or equal to relationships. All clues must be truthful, but how much information they actually give away is entirely your choice. To be fair, that decision alone already does a lot of work in this game.

After placing a clue, the active player usually gets to peek at one hidden ingredient on the pantry shelves next to the clue marker. If that ingredient hasn’t been seen by that player before, it’s marked with their fingerprint. This is how private information slowly builds up. Different players end up knowing different things, and not always the things you expect.

Once the clue is placed and noted, the discussion phase begins. This is when players can talk things through and decide whether they want to commit to guesses. There are two ways to do that.

Unveil votes are direct guesses. If you’re the only player who guesses an ingredient correctly, you score three points. If more than one player guesses it correctly, each of them scores one point. If the ingredient also happens to be in the pantry and is collected, that can add an extra point. Guess wrong, and you lose a point.

Think votes are more cautious. You can use a limited number of them during the game. If your theory turns out to be right later, you score a point. If not, nothing happens. Early on, these tend to feel safer. Later, they often feel a bit too slow.

When an ingredient is successfully unveiled, the player who made the correct guess scores immediately. At the same time, the owner of that ingredient receives a point token for having communicated it. Each ingredient can only ever give one such token, no matter how many players guessed it correctly. These tokens stay hidden until the end of the game, unless you choose to trade some of their points for additional peeks at hidden pantry ingredients. That choice always feels slightly uncomfortable, which is probably the point.

As players move along the score track, tea breaks may be triggered the first time someone crosses the marked threshold. A tea break happens after the discussion phase and involves everyone. During a tea break, each player asks exactly one other player a private yes-or-no question about whether a certain ingredient type appears anywhere in that player’s recipe. Answers must be truthful and are recorded secretly.

After a tea break, play continues immediately with the next turn. There is no extra discussion phase.

Tea break tokens can later be spent to refresh multiple pantry ingredients at once. These can be used on your own turn or just before the discussion phase on someone else’s turn. When this happens, every player can protect one row or column from being changed. It’s a small moment of shared control, and it often matters more than it looks.

The end of the game is triggered at the end of a round, after the discussion phase, once only one player still has hidden ingredients left. After that, the game continues for at most one more round. If the final player’s ingredients are revealed during that round, the game ends immediately. Any ingredients that remain hidden at the end do not score point tokens, and no one scores points for guessing them.

When the game ends, players reveal their unused point tokens and add those points to their score. Highest score wins.

Artwork, components, and visual design

Secret Recipe leans fully into its kitchen theme, and it does so in a way that feels natural rather than decorative. Ingredients are shown as familiar food items: fruit, eggs, flour, cream, herbs. Nothing abstract, nothing symbolic. You always know what you’re looking at.

The central board represents grandma’s pantry and workspace. It looks like a wooden surface dusted with flour, with bowls, utensils, and ingredients scattered around. The pantry grid is clearly laid out, and that matters, because players constantly refer to specific rows and columns when giving clues.

Ingredient tiles come in two sizes. Larger tiles are used for the pantry and stay face up. Smaller tiles are used for recipes and stay hidden. Both use the same illustrations, which makes comparison straightforward. The backs use a parchment-style design with handwritten notes, which fits the theme without drawing attention to itself.

Each player has a recipe board and a separate deduction board. The deduction boards are erasable and fairly dense, with grids showing all possible ingredients and their weights. You’re expected to write on them, cross things out, and keep them updated. This is not a game where you can just keep everything in your head.

Clue markers and tokens use simple symbols instead of text, making them easy to read and stay visible on the table. Fingerprint tokens mark which pantry ingredients players have already seen, and over time they become a quiet source of information on their own.

There are a lot of small components, but they’re purposeful. When the table stays organised, everything reads clearly. When it doesn’t, things can get messy fast.

Our experience

Secret Recipe consistently feels more about attention than intuition. Most of the time was spent watching clues, updating deduction boards, and keeping track of who had seen which pantry ingredients. Early turns were usually about narrowing things down. Later turns were more about confirming what you already suspected and choosing the right moment to act.

One thing that stood out quickly was how tightly giving information and gaining private information are linked. On most turns, you have to give a clue, and you usually get a peek in return. Helping the table also helps you. That relationship never really goes away, and it shapes how the game feels from start to finish.

The discussion phase became important very early. Even when no one placed a vote, players used it to test interpretations or gently push others toward certain conclusions. When unveil votes happened, they created real tension, especially when several players were clearly circling the same ingredient.

Tea breaks felt like natural pauses rather than interruptions. Because they trigger only once per player, they arrived at moments when players already had partial information. A single yes or no answer during a tea break often confirmed something that had been floating around for several turns.

The pantry didn’t stay static for long. Optional swaps during turns and larger refreshes using tea break tokens meant the shared grid kept changing. Players didn’t just react to the pantry, they actively shaped it to prepare future guesses or protect certain scoring opportunities.

Engagement stayed high for most of our plays, largely because information gained on other players’ turns often mattered just as much as information gained on your own. Fingerprints became especially interesting over time, as they showed not only which ingredients had been seen, but who had seen them.

Our thoughts

One of the more interesting choices in Secret Recipe is that having your own ingredients discovered isn’t purely bad. When someone correctly identifies one of your ingredients, you gain a point token. It means you’re constantly weighing how much you want to hide versus how much you’re willing to reveal. Quite often, those two things turn out to be the same decision.

Over time, this creates a shift in how the game is played. Early on, helping others find your ingredients can be useful, especially if it earns you tokens and extra peeks. Later, especially if you’re ahead, slowing the game down can be just as effective. The focus moves from whether your ingredients will be revealed to when that should happen.

The mental load is noticeable. Players are expected to track eliminations, ingredient counts, weight relationships, private peeks, and fingerprints. The game assumes active note-taking, and timing and behaviour matter just as much as the clues themselves. If your group enjoys that kind of structured reasoning, this works well.

Component handling matters too. Dry-erase boards and a lot of small tokens work smoothly when everyone stays organised. When they don’t, clarity drops quickly, and that has a real impact on how the game feels.

How demanding Secret Recipe feels depends a lot on the group. Generous, high-information clues keep things moving and make the game feel more accessible. More guarded clues slow everything down and increase the importance of private peeks, sometimes giving a noticeable edge to players who happen to see the right thing at the right time.

Unveil votes reinforce that risk. Guessing early can pay off, but waiting for better timing and higher-value reveals often becomes the safer choice. Tea breaks play into this as well. Because each recipe is small, a single confirmed yes can remove a large chunk of uncertainty and act as a real turning point rather than a small bonus.

The endgame encourages restraint. Revealing your last ingredient too early can open the door for others, while keeping something hidden denies opponents points. Over repeated plays, this rewards pacing over speed.

For us, the game worked best with three or four players, where information is spread more evenly and the timing around tea breaks and scoring creates more tension.

Taken as a whole, Secret Recipe feels like a game for people who enjoy sitting with information rather than reacting quickly to it. It asks you to pay attention, to write things down, and to notice not just what is said, but what isn’t. The rules don’t rush you, but the table sometimes will.

It’s a good fit for groups that like deduction to be a shared process, with conversation, hesitation, and the occasional wrong turn along the way. If your group enjoys logic puzzles, tracking information, and games where timing matters more than bold moves, there’s a lot here to dig into. If you prefer lighter deduction or faster, more instinct-driven play, this one may feel demanding. To be fair, that’s not a flaw, just a matter of taste.

📝 We received a copy of the game from SnowBoardGames.