Grandma's Recipe
- Board's Eye View
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
In Grandma's Recipe, the 2-5 players are collecting ingredients and putting them together to concoct recipes. It's a drafting game designed by Carlo A Rossi but tho' it's a lighthearted game there is 'take that' interaction as players can steal others' completed (and scoring) recipes simply by duplicating them and adding their own 'special ingredient'.
The game is set up around a cutting board display with five stacks of ingredients; initially with just one card in each stack but that increases as the game progresses. On your turn you have a drafting choice: you can either take all the cards in a stack on the cutting board or you can name two of the five main ingredient types (tomato, carrot, meat, fish, pasta) and turn over five cards from the face-down draw deck. You then take all the cards of the types you called out, or one of them and a 'special ingredient' if one of those has been turned up. If you don't like or want or cannot take any of the five cards you drew, you can just take the top card off the draw pile. Cards revealed but not drafted get added to the stacks above them on the cutting board display...
To make a recipe, you simply take any available recipe board, place it on the 1-5 ingredients you want to use for the recipe and flip the board so that its points value is hidden. The recipe boards have a dry-wipe surface so when you create a recipe you can use the supplied marker pen to give a name to your concoction. It has no bearing on the gameplay but we found this naming element added to the game's appeal, especially among younger players.
Watch out tho': we warned you that this is a 'take that' game. If your recipe is easily duplicated then another player is likely to steal it merely by making it using the same ingredients plus a special ingredient.
The recipe boards all have different points score values, and you're not supposed to peek at them once a recipe board has been taken, so there's a small memory element to gameplay, especially with younger children. For older players, there's a set number of each ingredient type, so any card counters will be able to narrow the odds of matching cards coming up of the two types they name or of opponents being able to duplicate their recipe.
Altogether, Grandma's Recipe is a light family and children's game that you can expect to play in around 20 minutes. The game is published by Korea Boardgames with cute art from Makoto Takami.
