Boardgames Party: Rival Restaurants

Rival Restaurants is a game I ordered on Kickstarter. When ordering from KS, it's always a bit of a gamble, but my wife loves cooking, so I figured she will like it. Last night we played it with some friends and it was a blast.

In Rival Restaurants, each player has a restaurant (d'oh) and a chef and the goal of the game is to be the first one to get a popularity score (likes) of 20. To do this you need to cook recipes that get you likes. You get more points if you cook recipes that match your restaurant's cuisine.

Each recipe needs ingredients from different categories and you can only go to one market every day. Cooking generates garbage bags, which you have to dispose off, otherwise your recipes won't give you as many likes.

You can barter with the other players. You can use various action cards to gain an advantage (or to put others at a disadvantage). Each chef has it's own super powers, such as blocking other players from accessing the market they are in.

The game is really well made physically. They blew through all their Kickstarter goals, so they added lots of extra nice touches. All the cardboard cutouts are really solid. And the coolest thing is that they have acryilic coins. I'm actually thinking about reusing them in other games too.

Score: 9