Designed by Jordan Mishra Johnson, Drawn Hungry: Play Like a Chef is a party game where the 3-10 players are making creative use of their ingredient and dish cards to pitch a meal shown on a 'special occasion' card. You have to make use of at least one of the ingredients and dish cards in your hand, plus the 'special ingredient' for the round, but you can earn more points the more ingredients and dishes you include in your pitch. There's a 'take that' element in that there are some cards in the deck that allow players to steal ingredients from others.
The rules envisage players writing out or drawing their meal, and even including recipe and cooking tips, with descriptions of texture, flavour and nutrition! The suggestion is that this is done against a 5-minute timer. Each round, one player is designated as the Head Chef and they adjudicate between the other players' written submissions, choose the winner. The winner scores the points values of the all the cards they've used.
These rules might work if you're playing with a group of chefs and dedicated foodies. However, only a few of the review team at Board's Eye View qualify in these categories and others found the writing, drawing and describing tasks altogether too serious and drawn out for an otherwise light party game. We switched therefore to a more conventional party game format: essentially the same as in Jordan Mishra Johnson's design except that players made oral pitches to the Head Chef. Our storytelling game approach also made the game play much faster: you can easily cut the 5-minute players' work time down to just 1 or 2 minutes. It also means players' pitches are shared and heard by all; avoiding the downtime while the Head Chef reads and digests players' written submissions.
With its rules as written, Drawn Hungry can be a long (60-90 minute) game with only niche appeal. Played as a storytelling pitching game, however, it has much broader appeal as a game that anyone can play and enjoy, and you can expect to cut two thirds off the playing time. As with most other pitching games, tho', you may well find players cooking up pitches that go for laughs rather than nutritional content.
Drawn Hungry: Play Like a Chef is already partway through its Kickstarter campaign. Shown here on Board's Eye View is a preview prototype with text-only cards but the published version will have colourful illustrations on all the cards. Click here now to take a look and to check out the campaign.