Too Many Cooks (Card Game)

Too Many Cooks is a co-operative hidden information card game about fussychefs cooking soups together. It is played in 3 rounds of 5 minutes. You canplay in one of 3 difficulty settings; easy, moderate & hard, or you canplay through all of them in an hour long session.

You are chefs working together on a delicious soup that satisfies sharedculinary tastes. The catch is, each chef has secret personal tastes which mustalso be sated!

The game starts with a soup base of 16 vegetable card ingredients laid outon the table. Rising to the challenge, players take it in turns to change ormove the soup ingredients to satisfy as many tastes as possible before the timeruns out.

On your turn you may either:

Change just one aspect of a card – ie its vegetable or colour, by swappingit out for a spare card.

or

Rotate a row or column of vegetables 1 card in either direction.

or

Pass – if your personal tastes and all shared tastes are satisfied.

Of course changes to the soup may upset or satisfy other chef’s secrettaste sensibilities too! So, players vocalise their satisfaction ordissatisfaction and rotate their taste cards in hand to indicate how happy orunhappy they are after each change to the soup. But they cannot say exactly why.Eg “Ewwww, that’s disgusting!” is fine, but not “Ewww, I hatemushrooms!” Watch what other chefs seem to be working towards, and try to makechanges that make everyone as happy as possible.

Play fast to get your soup kitchen up to a 5 star rating over 3 rounds atyour chosen difficulty level. Each of the 3 rounds gets a little harderstarting with 7 tastes to solve, moving on to 9, and ending at 11 tastesdivided between the players as secret personal tastes (2 each max, or 3 eachin the 2 player game) with leftovers placed face up as shared tastes all chefscan work towards together.