PAX East was filled with industry new comers this year, all of them jockeying for a chance to show off their hard work and effort to this year’s crowd. While the majority of the media attention was pointed towards the million dollar industry giants that were on the scene, I made it a point to scout out a lot of the first-year entries in both video games as well as board and card games. While the majority of the fresh faces present were showing off their take on already popular and perhaps overused and tiresome gaming themes, one game I found was taking a fresh and delicious take on the world of cooking.
Made from Scratch is a culinary card game made by food-gurus Nicholas Richards and Willie Pogue, both of whom are dedicated and passionate cooks who love being in the kitchen, making up culinary masterpieces. Their appreciation for fine dining led the two to team up and create this delicious cooking and baking game. In it, you must go head to head with other chefs in a kitchen to try and prepare, cook, and finish mouth-watering morsels.
Players will be presented with various recipes to start the game as well as a series of cards from a Pantry Deck. The majority of these cards will have a type of food or spice on them of various qualities. Players play food cards based on recipes they wish to complete. So if you are jonesing to finish up and score points on the BLT recipe, you will need to find cards with bacon, lettuce, tomato, bread, as well as various spices on them. However your opponents may also be looking to complete that same recipe and if they wind up playing more of the food-items required by the card and if their food items are fresher than yours, they may wind up stealing that recipe away from you.
Obtaining a completed recipe isn’t the last step as some more involved food-preparations require you to prepare items on a stove or possibly in an oven. As you are all ‘sharing’ a busy kitchen space in this game it may mean that someone else has dashed to the oven faster than you and you will have to wait your turn for the highly coveted cooker. Items in the oven or on the stove are still at risk as each requires a specific time to be cooked, boiled, broiled, blanched, or baked. If you forget to monitor your time properly, you may wind up scorching a soufflé or burning your brownies.
Made from Scratch was a fun, quick play in between busy appointments at PAX and very easy to learn. While the game itself is still under going some tweaking by the creators, they attest that it is almost done and ready to be put forth to the public. Made from Scratch is currently up on Kickstarter and I highly recommend you whip up some bread to support it.
