My Best Chef

A multi-action card game in which you earn resources by putting more than 50 kinds of restaurant staff to work efficiently. As the restaurant manager, you gather resources to hire staff, put them to work to gather even more, recruit better staff, and aim to build a highly rated restaurant.

The cards you can hire range from kitchen staff such as the chefs who cook the food, to staff who handle service, purchasing and recruitment, and even staff who manage waste. Gathering resources by combining staff from each department is the heart of the game. Chain the effects that trigger when staff work and you can expand actions that would otherwise be limited to once per turn, for a snappy engine-building experience in a short playing time.

The other key element is the waste token. It represents the food scraps produced when staff work; overwork your staff and the waste piles up, your restaurant’s reputation falls, and you lose rating points or even have to dismiss staff. Hiring management staff who dispose of waste and keeping the restaurant clean matters too. When someone has collected 11 staff including the manager card, everyone takes their actions for that round and the game ends.

• Game system: engine building, set collection, resource management