Critter Kitchen is one of Cardboard Alchemy’s releases in 2025, with a group of animals trying to cook the best food for a variety of food critics (who are animals as well, of course). The game is as cute as it sounds and has a solo mode where you play against McDoggal’s, a fast food chain looking to steal the business from local businesses.
I appreciate that a lot of new board games come with a solo mode and it really helps to learn the game. It’s even better when it’s a solo game you actually want to sit down and play in of itself. This review will cover whether Critter Kitchen fits that bill.
Opening Up
The way you win solo Critter Kitchen is by earning more stars than McDoggal’s. You do this by cooking a variety of meals, with the final meal for the food critic being the most valuable. You can boost the points of your meals by using higher quality ingredients and using spice to double the value of ingredients. You won’t know what the critic is looking for from the beginning as these criteria are hidden with the rumour cards but you can take certain tokens to reveal these. The base game comes with a selection of different critics (naturally of different species).
Critter Kitchen is a somewhat set up heavy game, both for the multiplayer and the single. For the single player you set up like a two player game, using the appropriate shops, adding in the rumours and the food critic. The main difference is the McDoggal’s board (which is very cute) where you place the three chefs and a solo deck of cards. These cards are then split into four, one for the manager, one for the mouse, one for the lizard and one for the boar. These determine where the chefs will be placed and the manager determines the overall theme for their movement. You don’t need a screen or plates as the McDoggal’s chefs won’t be using these.
You add all the ingredients to the location and you can begin play. Every round a new card is revealed and you base what you want on that. If your meal scores within a certain threshold you can score more stars. You and the automa place your chefs and then you work down the line taking ingredients. The mouse gets to take one first, the lizard can take two ingredients next and then the boar can take three last (if there is anything left). Since the automa is random it can’t strategise against you but it definitely can still be annoying when it happens to take exactly what you wanted. Apart from ingredients you can also take a sou chef which is a one-time use chef that you can place to get more ingredients or get a bonus for you. At the end of the round, leftover ingredients are moved to the Chef Academy and Soup Kitchen (no waste here).
There are seven rounds in total with three opportunities to score points from meals. You repeat collecting ingredients each round until the challenge meals where you begin cooking your best meals based on what you’ve collected. You can only refrigerate a certain amount of ingredients so you might as well spend them here rather than saving them for later. The automa doesn’t cook meals in the same way, basically if it obtains an ingredient that matches the current round’s card they get a star. At the end of the game for the critic’s meal they just get to score their highest ingredient and don’t need to throw food away (they have unlimited fridge space over there apparently.
Order’s Up
Despite the game being a bit complicated to learn, it’s fun and has lots of satisfying actions. And once you get into the flow, it’s not that hard at all. And it’s really fun to begin strategising with your ingredients and putting cute little meals together.
The game follows an unfortunate trend of making you want to play the game with more people, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s definitely very good to learn the game and appreciate the different mechanics. Ultimately you’re not going to have the same level of competition that you would with multiple players.
The art is insanely cute and it’s a very fun theme as well. Given how heavy the set up is, it’s not the most appealing solo game. But it’s still fun to play and worth giving a go, especially in order to learn the game. There’s a decent amount of variety with the different sous chefs, challenges and critics so it’s a good way to familiarise yourself with the game before dominating your future culinary opponents.
