Theme: Food / Cooking

It's Restaurant Week in Bistro Bay! Restaurants are competing in food challenges, while also planning an epic meal to impress a celebrity critic. As one of 1-5 players in Critter Kitchen, you'll send your chefs into the city to gather ingredients to create amazing meals and demonstrate that your restaurant is the best in town.

Each round, new random ingredients are placed in locations throughout the city. Players simultaneously and secretly plan which locations to send their three chefs to, hoping to collect the best ingredients. Some chefs are fast, but can gather only one item, while others can carry three items but arrive late. Rumors are also available at locations and provide guidance on what the critic desires.

Challenges revealed in rounds 1-6 offer the players opportunities to earn stars for crafting dishes with specific ingredient requirements. After round 7, the players must create an epic meal to impress the celebrity critic and cater to their appetites. A multitude of different critics, rumors, and restaurateurs mean every game is fresh!

—description from the publisher

In Portugal, some restaurants serve traditional Portuguese food alongside performances of fado, a music genre that can be traced to the 1820s in Lisbon, Portugal and is often characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, often about the sea or the life of the poor, while being infused with a sentiment of resignation, fate, and melancholy.

People spend their entire evenings in these restaurants, called Casa de Fado ("House of Fado"), dining and listening to the music, which speaks about "saudade", a Portuguese word meaning "longing, nostalgia, yearning, missing something or someone". Typically, there isn't any rotation of the tables. Once you enter the restaurant, you stay until it's closed.

In its traditional form, fado is played by a trio of musicians: a guitarist plays "Guitarra Portuguesa" (a twelve-string Portuguese Guitar); a singer, that is, a "fadista"; and a guitarist playing "Viola de Fado" (classical guitar). The Portuguese guitar has a unique sound, and the chords are played in different bars from those of the classical guitar.

In the game House of Fado, players have to manage their restaurant, attract customers, and contract and promote fadistas and musicians, thus gaining prestige for their fado house. Managers will move their staff members to different places to perform some actions, using the same bump action as in The Gallerist.

A delicious spin on the classic Sushi Go game. Collect the best combination of dishes from the Spin Table. Each dish scores in a unique way. Collect menu items from the basket in front of you or use your Chopstick tokens to rotate the Spin Table and choose a different dish. Snag the Steamed Bun Squishy to spin the tray for free! Plus, if you have the most squishy tokens you get more points at the end of the game. Try to build the most valuable combinations of dishes. The game ends when everyone has 12 total dishes, highest score wins!

-description from publisher website

Something delicious is cooking up in the kitchen, and as a talented chef, it’s up to you to carefully carve up the right ingredients and turn them into culinary masterpieces. Prepare a wide variety of recipes from around the world, and hype them up to earn extra praise!

In Diced Veggies you take turns with the cleaver, slicing ingredient dice away from the shared chopping block and assigning them to the recipes you’re working on. This unique resource-gathering mechanism is the key to your scrumptious success. The particular veggies that your recipes require isn't your only consideration... you can only take a limited number of pips with each chop, and the right dice values can unlock all sorts of drool-worthy Hypes to boost a recipe's score!

A clever cleaver is all you need to whip up delicious recipes in this dice-slicing game for up to four chefs!

—description from the publisher

As a master sushi chef, you've studied your craft for years. It took diligent training to perfect specialty maki like your All-Day Breakfast, Octopus's Garden, and Squid Salad Sandwich, but now you face your toughest challenge yet: Friday night dinner rush!

In Maki Master, you compete with your fellow chefs to complete the most valuable orders. You can concentrate on short and simple orders to get bonuses quickly or take your time to make complicated masterpieces for big rewards!

Each turn, add a new ingredient to the shrinking kitchen space and try to arrange them for the orders you're working on. Complete a scrumptious recipe for points or take an action card like Chop!, Stack!, or Switch! to help with future turns. Don't forget to collect spicy wasabi to complete orders with style! At the end of the night, the chef who has earned the most points by completing their recipes wins!

Maki Master adds new mechanisms, streamlined rules, and fresh art by Claire Lin to the Wasabi! design from 2008.