DESCRIPTION & INSPIRATION

Before deciding on a concept for the game, we decided to come up with some themes including country trivia, general knowledge, and chef games. We settled on some sort of a chef game because it sounded the most original and grasping. The initial concept of the game was to create a card game that could ignite both competition and enjoyment. In order to prevent game boredom, we wanted to create a game that lasts around one round. We also chose a card game so that participants could play it anywhere. To encourage more laughing and playful tension, we also tried to make the game enticing and inefficient by adding “surprise cards” and constantly rotating/handing cards. We opted to have two decks—one with dishes and one with ingredients—because chef games or even just the concept of a chef corresponds with food and ingredients. In essence, the player is given a dish card and then must gather the ingredients required for that meal in order to present it to the other players. The person who has the most appetizing dish wins, and the game is over. We believed that this game's modification satisfies both our concept of cooking competitions and the concept we wanted for our game. The game also relies on both knowledge/intelligence and luck which we believe makes it all the more fair and fun.

In cooking, choosing a dish is typically done before gathering the ingredients. This is because it's easier to build up while having a final product in mind. That same approach is used in our game. We wanted to give our players the ability to be creative and inventive even if they're not particularly skilled in actual cooking, so providing recipe cards would be informative as a baseline. We also included images on all of the cards as to aid in the player’s quick recognition of ingredients or dishes, especially if it is particularly new to them. The way we picked our dishes was based on a few goals; they needed to be versatile in terms of cuisine and taste, they need to be flexible to allow room for the incorporation of unconventional extra ingredients, they need to possess a degree of complexity that warrants a collection of ingredients to be necessary to complete the dish, and the dishes need to be different enough as to create a different experience for each player in a single round. With this in mind, each of us came up with a list of 5 dishes each, totalling to about 20. We then collaboratively made decisions to either omit or keep the dishes based on the set criteria, which left us with 17 dishes. We then started to curate suggested ingredients for each dish to aid the players in their decision making process during gameplay. For this, we decided to go for essential ingredients that the dish fundamentally contains, such as flour and eggs for eclairs. We wanted to not overwhelm and restrict the players so we kept the suggested ingredients to a maximum of 4 or 5.
Rulebook