How to play
Party Kitchen
Chop, cook and plate each order together, and get it to the pass before the ticket runs out.
At a glance
- Players
- 1–4 at once
- Ages
- 7 and up
- Round
- Minutes — a sit-down game
- In the packs
- Party, Big Kids
Controls
The stick and button 1 are enough to play. The rest add moves for the older kids.
| What you press | What it does |
|---|---|
| Stick | move |
| Button 1 — the big button | grab, put down, use, serve |
| Button 2 | hold to chop, wash up, or put out a fire |
| Button 3 | throw what you are holding |
| Button 4 | dash |
How a round goes
Three shifts of sixty seconds each, with a breather card between them. The counters are the level: ingredients along the top, two chopping boards on the left, two pans and the fire extinguisher on the right, and the bin, the sink and the serving hatch along the bottom.
Lunch is salads and burgers, a new ticket every nine seconds. Dinner adds the cheeseburger and comes faster. Rush adds the five-part Deluxe and puts a ticket up every five seconds — it is not meant to be beaten, it is meant to be the two minutes everybody shouts about afterwards.
Lettuce and tomato go on a board and are chopped by holding button 2 for two seconds. A patty goes in a pan and cooks by itself in five seconds; it is then perfect for seven, smokes as a warning, burns, and a burnt pan left alone catches fire. A fire blocks that station, spreads from a pan if nobody puts it out, and dies on its own after a while — expensive, never fatal.
A plate only takes ready components, so a plate can be the wrong dish but never a badly made one. Serve it at the hatch and it fills the most urgent matching ticket, then comes back dirty. There are four plates and the sink is the bottleneck: hold button 2 at the sink to wash, or mash button 1 there if that is all you have.
Throwing is generous: a teammate with free hands catches it, and otherwise it lands on the nearest free counter. Dash is short — a way to beat a teammate to the pass, not a way to travel.
Scoring and winning
Every served ticket pays a tip into the team pot, and the same tip into the server's own column. A ticket served the moment it lands pays half as much again as one served on the buzzer. A ticket that expires costs the pot eighteen dollars, never a player.
The team pot is the score. The card names who served the most, or calls it a proper team if nobody out-served anybody. There is no fail state: a kitchen that burned every patty still finishes the third shift with a number on the board.
Tips
- Work you walk away from bleeds off slowly rather than vanishing, so 'you chop, I'll fetch' is the better plan.
- Pink is raw, brown is ready, black is bin it. Smoke comes before burning, and it is the warning you can act on.
- Four plates is the number that makes the sink matter: in Dinner the kitchen jams unless somebody stops cooking and washes up. That is the moment you have to talk to each other.
- Drop a finished component onto a plate somebody left on a counter. That hand-off is how a whole team builds one Deluxe.
- Button 1 alone gets you burgers, cheeseburgers and the washing up; the chopping board needs button 2, so salads and the Deluxe need a second button somewhere on the team.