Critter Kitchen asks each restaurant to build a collection of ingredients during seven rounds. After rounds three and six, you can spend ingredients on challenge meals for stars; after round seven, your best remaining ingredients become a critic meal. The competitive game is for two to five people. The official solo mode changes how the opponent chooses locations and items.
Set up the restaurant week
Place the Waterfront board with its round marker on one, six facedown Challenge cards, one faceup Critic card and three facedown Rumor cards. Mix ingredient, spice and rumor tokens in the bag. Lay out the numbered location boards appropriate to player count, then add the Soup Truck at the left and Midnight Merchant and Chef Academy at the right. At two players use the two-player sides of the Merchant and Academy; the Water Market enters at three, Air Docks at four and Lantern Lane at five.
Each player takes a kitchen board, restaurant shield, mouse, lizard and boar, matching location cards, challenge and critic plates, and one soup. Randomize chef hats on the priority track. For a first game, the rulebook suggests The Mouse critic and leaving the advanced rumors out. Optional Restaurateur cards give individual powers; agree on that module before setup.
A round has five steps
- Start of round: reveal the next challenge, restock location spaces from the bag, and put a new zous-chef at the Academy. In round seven, use the special Allspice token there instead because an intern would have no next round to work.
- Plan: all players secretly assign one face-down Location card to each of their three chefs. A restaurant’s three chefs must go to three different locations. If you have a zous-chef for this round, assign its additional location too.
- Run: reveal assignments and move chefs to their chosen location queues. A mouse has capacity one, a lizard two and a boar three. A hired zous-chef follows its card’s capacity and timing text.
- Shop: resolve locations from the Soup Truck at the left to the Academy at the right. At each location, all capacity-one chefs pick first, then capacity-two, then capacity-three. Chefs tied in a queue alternate one item at a time according to the priority track.
- End: return Location cards and retire zous-chefs used this round. After rounds three and six, prepare challenge meals and apply the refrigerator limit. After round seven, prepare and score the final critic meal.
What does speed versus capacity mean?
The mouse can reach a coveted item before the slower chef queues, but takes only one. The boar can take three, yet may find a crowded location depleted. If two chefs are in the same capacity queue, the rightmost chef hat on the priority track has first pick; the rulebook moves a hat to the back in the specified first-pick tie case. Once a chef reaches capacity, return it to its kitchen. If a chef goes home with no item, it can take one consolation soup, even if it had capacity three. You cannot choose to pass with items already collected merely to gain that soup.
Ingredients, spices, soup and bisque go into hidden storage behind your shield; rumors are marked on your visible kitchen board. A rumor lets its owner privately inspect one of the critic’s three hidden conditions. The Soup Truck has unlimited ordinary soup and a limited bisque supply. The Merchant reveals its item tokens only when that location resolves. At the Academy, a zous-chef is an item you can collect for next round. Leftover ingredients and spices flow to the Academy as locations clear, then to the Soup Truck after the Academy; abandoned rumors leave the game.
Serve challenges on days one and two
After round three and again after round six, three revealed Challenge cards are available. Each player may make up to one meal for each. A meal must include at least one ingredient matching every printed requirement. Soup or bisque may substitute for a missing required ingredient, but at least one required ingredient must still be real; an all-soup meal is not eligible. You may add more of a required ingredient and more soup to raise quality. A matching spice doubles one ingredient’s value. The thresholds are one star at quality 6–11, two at 12–20, four at 21 or more.
The Hold token covers the rightmost requirement of the last revealed challenge at each scoring, changing what must be served. Spent meal items return to their supplies. Then retain at most five ingredients and spices after day one, or ten after day two; soup and rumors do not consume fridge space. The strategy guide examines when to spend a strong ingredient now or protect it for the final critic.
End with the critic
At the end of round seven, put at most one ingredient and one matching spice into each of seven courses, subject to the Critic card. Soup cannot stand in for an ingredient here. Award the most-soup star, the all-seven-courses star, stars for the best quality in each course, applicable Rumor and card bonuses, and stars from final meal quality on the score track. Ties for individual stars are friendly. The player with most stars wins; remaining ties use final quality-track progress, then priority-track order. See the step-by-step scoring page for an example and exact order.
Explore Critter Kitchen: Overview · How to play · Strategy · Scoring · Solo · À La Cart expansion.
Sources and scope: Cardboard Alchemy’s English core rulebook (PDF), searchable rulebook transcription, and Lucky Duck Games’ retail product page, checked 4 October 2026. Rules describe the English retail base game; variant cards can override general procedures. Tactical examples are editorial analysis of the rules, not firsthand playtest findings.