Too Many Cooks is a co-operative hidden information card game about fussy chefs cooking soups together. It is played in 3 rounds of 5 minutes. You can play in one of 3 difficulty settings; easy, moderate & hard, or you can play through all of them in an hour long session.
You are chefs working together on a delicious soup that satisfies shared culinary tastes. The catch is, each chef has secret personal tastes which must also be sated!
The game starts with a soup base of 16 vegetable card ingredients laid out on the table. Rising to the challenge, players take it in turns to change or move the soup ingredients to satisfy as many tastes as possible before the time runs out.
On your turn you may either:
Change just one aspect of a card - ie its vegetable or colour, by swapping it 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 secret taste sensibilities too! So, players vocalise their satisfaction or dissatisfaction and rotate their taste cards in hand to indicate how happy or unhappy 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 hate mushrooms!” Watch what other chefs seem to be working towards, and try to make changes that make everyone as happy as possible.
Play fast to get your soup kitchen up to a 5 star rating over 3 rounds at your chosen difficulty level. Each of the 3 rounds gets a little harder starting with 7 tastes to solve, moving on to 9, and ending at 11 tastes divided between the players as secret personal tastes (2 each max, or 3 each in the 2 player game) with leftovers placed face up as shared tastes all chefs can work towards together.