Stronghold Games 7160SG Kitchen Rush Piece of Cake

Christmas gifts

The cooperative game Kitchen Rush was released in 2017, and is a popular game with real-time gameplay, plus a compelling and fun theme. You're using miniature sand-timers as workers, and must work together under time-pressure, combining your skills to successfully run a restaurant kitchen.But as we all know, even the best meal can be improved by adding dessert - and that's also true of Kitchen Rush. The original game is a nutritious gaming feast on its own, but what better way to expand it than by the addition of cake! That's exactly what you'll find in Kitchen Rush: Piece of Cake, which adds a new dessert order type, along with more player actions.OVERVIEW1. Desserts:The major addition that the expansion brings to the original game is fulfilling orders for desserts, which can include straight-up serves of ice-cream for customers, or more complex creations that require other ingredients as well. The Dessert Order cards simply get mixed into the regular Order Deck, and work much like standard orders, except that you're using new ingredients (creams and fruits), spices (e.g. nuts), and ice-cream scoops (five flavours). Using a freezer (an actual 3D cardboard Freezer comes with the expansion) for the ice-cream scoops and a fridge for refrigerating completed desserts makes good thematic sense, and the mechanics are designed well to fit with this theme.The expansion comes with a new game board with the additional actions you'll need for whipping up your desserts. You'll use the new Maitre D' action to suggest ice-creams for desserts, thus adding ice-cream orders; the new Freezer action will get you the ice-cream scoops you need for both the new Dessert Orders and for straight up orders of ice-cream; the new Fridge action lets you put desserts in the fridge for refrigeration ahead of serving; and the existing Shopping action will let you get the new ingredients you'll need for these desserts. All this means that there is more going on, so there will be a bunch of new things that you'll have to be thinking about and doing - all the while doing the regular kitchen preparation as well. This will add a little time to your set-up, but if you found the base game too easy, then these desserts will be a perfect addition to an already excellent game.2. Specialists:The other big addition is the new Specialist, which lasts twice as long as the hour glasses from the standard game, and lets you accomplish improved versions of the actions. And you will need them to help you accomplish your dessert creations along with all your main meals! Three Specialist cards are randomly placed face-up at setup, and each round you can use each ability once at most. One nice thing about this expansion is that it feels modular, i.e. you can include only the new Specialists to the original game if you wish, without adding in the desserts and ice-creams. But due to their advanced abilities, they do make the game easier, and they really become essential to use when adding in the desserts part of the game.IMPRESSIONSThis expansion will be well received by anyone who really enjoys the base game and is looking for more options and complexity. It's certainly not an essential expansion, in the sense that the original game doesn't have a sense of being incomplete without it. But if you do want more variety and are itching for a new challenge, that's exactly what you'll get here. I wouldn't recommend playing your very first game with these additions, simply because they make the game a little more complex from the outset. But how they work will be relatively straight-forward to anyone already familiar with Kitchen Rush - it just means that there's more going on in your kitchen!The components of the expansion are very good, except perhaps for the somewhat slippery ice-cream scoop tokens, which can be hard to pick up when the clock is ticking and you're scurrying about your kitchen trying to grab things quickly. The 3D freezer is a particularly `cool' touch, both literally and figuratively! And if you really want to, you will be able to squeeze all the expansion components into the base game box.RECOMMENDATIONSo is the new edition of Kitchen Rush: Piece of Cake for you? Keen fans of the base game will really enjoy the new options that this expansion brings to the game, and the additional challenge and it provides. This expansion does a wonderful job of continuing where the theme of the original game left off, with a very natural addition: desserts. It plugs in naturally and smoothly into the original game, by adding new elements without changing up the core mechanisms. At the same time there are the new specialist options which add in new firepower to your kitchen staff.This isn't an expansion that makes drastic changes to the base game. But just like a real kitchen might expand its menu in an effort to please more customers, so that's what happens with Piece of Cake. After all, who doesn't like the sound of adding cake and ice-cream to a game that's already good, to make it even better?!Where to get it? Kitchen Rush: Piece of Cake is available from the publisher Stronghold Games (here).

This is awesome, but I wish that they would have said it is an EXPANSION at first. I didn't read the entire description (my bad) but they didn't actually say it was an expansion until the end of the description. Now I am debating on returning it or forking out the $70 for the dinner rush game.