Menu Masters Review

Grace

What does this rating mean?

Posted by Grace on Jan 12, 2017

A few years ago, Calliope Games announced their Titan Series – “a line of family-friendly games by some of the best game designers in the world”. The end of last year saw the release of some of the first in this line, with Menu Masters being among this first batch. Though I had heard of some of the other designers in the line, I had never heard of the Menu Master’s designers before. After looking them up, it appears Jordan Weisman has been involved with HeroClix, BattleTech, and Golem Arcana – certainly not a family-friendly genre of games. Zach Weisman has done one other game, also published by Calliope almost five years ago. So, at the risk of sounding like a real jerk, I don’t think anyone would consider these designers titans. Of course, designers can branch out and newcomers can make great games. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with this one though.

Fierce fighting over ingredients, just like a Saturday morning Farmer’s Market.

Menu Masters is about being a chef and creating, surprise, the best menu. Each menu consists of two or three ingredients that include a vegetable, meat, and dessert. In fact, sometimes, the menu is just green beans and fudge cake or pork and ice cream sundae. So, you have your basic get-stuff-complete-goals setup. Each board provides three options for ingredients and you place your chef’s hat to line up in order for buying them. This lining up is the cleverest part of the game. Each person that gets in line after you bumps up the price. For example, if your chef hat has three other hats under it, the price will be $4 total, one for each person in line (including yourself). Additionally, you can choose to “own” the store, which means you can’t shop there, but you get all the money from purchases afterward.

When you acquire all the necessary ingredients for the one of the two secret menus in your hand or one of the three public menus on the table, you immediately complete it. First person to complete three ends the game and points are totaled by the stars on the ingredients used. You only used a 2-star steak? Shame on you. Grade D beef isn’t going to cut it in haute cuisine. From what I’ve described so far, the game actually sounds fairly solid, so why does it end up feeling so odd? Well, first of all, it’s supposed to be a family-friendly game, but you can really mess with people by bumping up the price of ingredients. This happens because A) you want to be mean, B) you have nowhere else to place, or C) you’re trying to support local business because that hipster charcuterie place is just so cool with its artisan meats and the butcher’s artfully-waxed mustache. This kind of screwage in a very short, lightweight game feels way out of place for its target audience. However, this isn’t the only thing off.

Maybe if I put two salmons on your plate and call it pork, you won’t notice.

Although you can use two cards of the same time as a wild (e.g., two broccoli cards to count as green beans), you still can be at a loss depending on what ingredients get stocked in the shops. And yes, having three public menus available means you really have five menus to potentially fulfill, but with so much overlap among them sometimes, you still feel stymied. In the games I played, the winner was not only the first person to complete three menus, but also the one that had the best luck in the ingredient/menu selection. Plus, your cash flow is really restricted. If you can’t buy ingredients when you need to, either because of your position in line or because you own the shop, there’s very little you can do about it. You’re only permitted to use one chef hat per round to get one coin from the bank. I understand that limiting the cash flow makes the cost for ingredients and position in line tighter. Nonetheless, it feels like getting your choice of ingredient for the right price seems heavily dependent on luck, much more so than skill.

Put your knives down. You’re only metaphorically “slicing and dicing” your competitors.

Overall, Menu Masters feels like something thrown together in some kind of designer quick-fire challenge. It’s got some neat, albeit half-baked, ideas. The chef theme is really fun and accessible (and a huge high five for the diversity of player board chef characters). However, for the game’s length and weight, there are much better family-friendly options out there.