Too Many Cooks Rulebook

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Ingredients
• Setup
  • Set up soup base
  • Deal tastes
• How to play
  • Change a card
  • Rotate a row or column
  • Taste Satisfaction
  • Pass
• End of round
• Legend
• Key Terms
• Strategy tips
• Extended Games

Ingredients

• 64 vegetable cards (8 per vegetable)
• 60 taste cards (20 for each difficulty: Easy, Moderate, Hard)
• 18 soup base cards (6 for each difficulty: Easy, Moderate, Hard)
• 5 star cards

Setup

1. Place 2 star cards on the table.
2. Choose a difficulty. Find and shuffle the 20 taste cards of your chosen difficulty: Easy, Moderate or Hard, to make a deck.
3. Place the vegetable cards on the table in 8 splayed sets of the same vegetable, leaving a 4 by 4 card space in the middle.

Set up soup base

4. Shuffle the 6 soup base cards corresponding to the chosen difficulty.
5. Draw and place one soup base card face up on the table near the middle.
6. In the center of the table, place vegetables to form the 4 by 4 soup grid shown on the soup base card, making sure that the colours also match those on the card. It's faster if everyone helps! Then put the soup base card away in the game box. Leave the remaining vegetables around the soup – these are now the spare vegetables.

Example: This is the setup at the beginning of a 3 player game, starting on Easy mode.

Deal tastes

7. Draw a number of taste cards based on the round as follows:

   • 1st Round: 7 tastes
   • 2nd Round: 9 tastes
   • 3rd Round: 11 tastes

   Set the rest of the tastes aside – you won't need them for this round.

8. From the drawn taste cards, deal as many tastes as can be evenly divided between chefs, to a maximum of 2 each (or 3 each if playing with two players). These are your personal tastes – don't show them to anyone!

9. Reveal the taste cards that couldn't be divided and place them face up near the soup. Rotate them so that the unhappy face is up, where up matches the orientation of the vegetables.

These are shared tastes everyone sees and works towards.

Example: In the second round of a 4 player game, 9 cards divided evenly means 2 personal tastes each. The 1 remaining taste card of the 9 cards is placed face up as a shared taste.

How to play

All chefs aim to satisfy as many tastes as they can within 5 minutes. You know about the shared tastes, and your own personal tastes, but you may also need to deduce what the other chefs want. The better you do, the more stars your soup kitchen accumulates!

Hold your personal taste cards in hand so other chefs can only see the card backs and not the front. Only you know your tastes! To start, rotate your cards so the unhappy face is the right way up.

Review this round's shared tastes.

The first player for the first round is whoever most recently ate something they didn't like, and in later rounds, clockwise from whoever was first player last.

When you're all ready, start the 5 minute timer for the round! (To start your timer, head to toomanycooksgame.com.)

In clockwise order, take turns changing the soup to satisfy both the shared and your personal tastes. On your turn, you may take 1 of the following actions:

1. Change a card, or
2. Rotate a row or column, or
3. Pass

Change a card

Choose a card in the soup and replace it with a spare vegetable card – but with the following restrictions:

1. Change the colour only, keeping the vegetable the same

   OR

2. Change the vegetable only, keeping the colour the same

You cannot change both the colour and vegetable at the same time!

Discard the replaced card back into its matching spare vegetable set.

Rotate a row or column

Choose a full row or column and shift it all along one card place in either direction. Cycle the card that's been pushed out into the empty space you've created.

Example: Rotating a row eastwards.

Example: Rotating a column northwards.

Taste Satisfaction

As play proceeds, watch out for when your personal tastes are satisfied or spoiled, and immediately rotate your cards to show the card backs that best reflect your state of happiness to the other chefs. Rotate the happy face up if satisfied, and the unhappy face up if unsatisfied. Make sure to track changes to the shared tastes as well.

While you're doing this, make some noise! Let the others know how you feel about their moves, for example:

• "That's disgusting!"
• "How delicious!"
• "That's fine by me"

However you cannot say exactly what you liked or disliked, like

• "Mushrooms are disgusting!"
• "Oh no, we can't have that green!"

Keep a poker face until each chef has finished their move, to avoid influencing their decision. Bottle up your body language for after chefs' moves!

Some things you can't do:

• Suggest moves to other chefs.
• Ask about which cards were recently changed.
• Ask other chefs if a move would be OK for them.

Pass

If your personal tastes and all shared tastes are satisfied, you must instead pass. You cannot pass otherwise. If you become unsatisfied again for any reason, rotate any unsatisfied card to unhappy, express your dissatisfaction, and then continue to play in turn order as usual.

End of round

The round ends when:

1. The timer runs out, or
2. All chefs have passed because their personal and the shared tastes are satisfied (and everyone has checked!)

Determine your success for this round:

1. Stop the timer, then reveal everyone's taste cards, and collectively check which ones are satisfied or not.
   • a. If all of the tastes are satisfied, gain a star (maximum of 5 stars).
   • b. If only one taste is not satisfied, your star level doesn't change.
   • c. If two or more tastes are not satisfied, reduce your stars by one. If you have no stars and need to lose a star, players lose.
   • d. If there are 5 or more unsatisfied tastes, players lose the game.
2. Continue to the next round by going back to Step 5 of the Setup. You'll find it quicker to first deconstruct the soup back into the spare vegetable sets.
3. The game ends after the 3rd round. Count your stars and if you've made it to 5 stars, you are ready for the next level of difficulty!

Legend

• Any card
• A card of a specific colour, in this case blue, but any vegetable
• A card with a specific vegetable, in this case carrot, but any colour

Key Terms

Identical cards: Two cards that share the same vegetable and colour. They don't have to be next to each other (unless the taste card says so).

Next to: Cards that are adjacent to each other. Diagonal doesn't count!

Corners, Rows, Columns: (illustrated in the rulebook by diagrams of the grid.)

Do the tastes ever contradict each other?

Never completely. The tastes are designed to guarantee that they are always possible to satisfy within each difficulty level.

Strategy tips

• The best way to succeed is to make quick moves. You have limited time, and a quick decent move is usually better than a slow perfect move.
• Watch and listen to what the other chefs do or don't like so you can avoid upsetting them.
• Plan your move ahead of time, looking out for smart moves that help solve multiple tastes at once.

Extended Games

All day soup: Want a longer session with progression? For a 60 minute, 9 round game, start on Easy difficulty with no star cards. Progress to the next difficulty up after the 3rd round, bringing over your star cards in between. Can you build and maintain a 5 star rating across 9 rounds and all 3 difficulty levels?

Unreasonable: Think you're all hotshot chefs? Play a round of Hard difficulty with 12 tastes or more. To win, all tastes must be satisfied. If you win, and you want more, add another taste to the mix and play again. If you win with 15 tastes, let the publisher know.