Designed by: Reiner Knizia
Too Many Cooks is a trick-taking card game of soup confection: over five rounds, players ‘make soup’ by collecting cards of the ingredient – the suit – they need.
Everyone is given five recipe cards: Onion soup, Pea soup, Mushroom Soup, Chilli Soup, and No Soup Today. At the start of each round, ingredient cards are dealt that match the recipes: onions, peas and so on. Each suit has number values between 0 to 5, one 10 card and one Boil Over card. More on these momentarily. Having looked at your ingredient cards, you secretly choose which recipe you’re going to try and make this round. If you have a lot of onion cards, for instance, you might want to go for onion soup. All players reveal their chosen recipes, and play begins.
As with most trick-taking games, following suit applies: if someone starts a trick by leading a Pea card, you must play a pea card too if you have one. If you don’t, you can play any card you like. The number value of the trick is the combined numbers of the cards added up, and if you play the card that takes this number to 10 or over, you win the trick and take the cards. If you’re collecting onions and there’s onions in the trick: that’s points! Non-onion cards like mushroom and peas mean nothing. Chilli cards, however are minus points… unless of course you are making chilli soup, in which case the Boullion cards (the zeroes in each suit) are minus points. If you’re cooking ‘no soup’ then as you probably guessed, you don’t want to win any tricks at all.
What this means in practice is that everyone has a dual interest in every trick: to stock it up with the ingredients they want, or to poison it for opponents by sticking in a chilli or bouillion. And it’s further complicated by the 10 cards being worth zero if they lead a trick, and the Boil Over cards reset the trick to zero no matter what cards have been played.
Be aware also that recipe cards do not come back to you: once you’ve cooked pea soup, you can’t do it again! So as the five rounds progress, you have dwindling choices as to what you can cook – and in the fifth round, no choice at all! After the fifth and final round, the player with the most points is the winner.
A little. No-one can steal your points, but they can throw a chilli in your pot - or make you pick up cards when you really don't want any.
Present - Too Many Cooks isn't a rapid-fire game of easy decisions, despite the bonhomie of the artwork.
Sometimes you'll have no choice at all, but when you do - choose carefully. It can be worth picking up minus points sometimes if it stops opponents getting a huge haul.
You can't predict what cards you'll get, or which recipes the other players will go for. There's always a sense of engaging tactical play.
2-5
Players
12+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
A clever little card game that's slightly let down by the production - maybe because it hails from a time when publishers felt games = bright colours and cartoon characters. The play actually has more nuance than that, and our visits have had genuine tension and hilarity. That said... it's not become a go-to game for me in the way other trick-takers (Voodoo Prince, Texas Showdown) have, I think because the unravelling of control - over recipes, over what cards you can play in a given round - means it feels like the game should take 20 minutes rather than the half-hour or more it demands of four players. (It officially plays two, but we wouldn't recommend that at all) But decent fun all the same.