Food fight! Created by The Odd 1s Out, Cafe Chaos is a great card game for when you want the wild fun of flinging food at your friends without the chore of having to clean it up afterwards.
First things first: everyone picks a character. Each character comes with their own special character action that will join the three basic actions in making up your initial hand. Whoever ate last also gets the Starting Player marker. Each round, starting from the starting player and going clockwise, each combatant will declare their target by pointing a sauce bottle at them; anything you throw this round will be thrown at them unless actions indicate otherwise – for instance, the Mad Scientist’s special ability, Outsmart, makes all attacks against you instead aimed at your target (unless it’s splash damage, which is unavoidable… but we’ll get to that later).
Once your targets are selected, everyone chooses three actions from their hand and places them face down on their player mat, in order. The way Cafe Chaos works, there are effectively three mini-rounds to each full round of gameplay, and now is when you determine what you’ll be doing for each of them. These actions are not adjustable once you’re past this step, so choose wisely.
If it isn’t the first round of the game, you’ll then interrupt your regularly scheduled chaos for something even more unpredictable – an event card! Whatever the top card of the event deck is, the table must abide by its terms, whether that’s a one-time effect (e.g. School Nurse: the player with the most splat points heals two) or an ongoing effect for the rest of the round, such as Cruel & Unusual Punishment, which mandates that every time you successfully attack someone with Food, you must take one splat point yourself!
Hey, what are splat points? Damage, effectively. We’ll get to that in food fight phase: everyone reveals their first action card (only the first) at the same time, and beginning with the starting player, those actions are resolved. The actions everyone has are Grab, Throw, and Duck. Grab lets you take any one card from the Floor (face-up cards in the middle of the table), or two if they’re both Food. Either way, you immediately draw replacement cards to bring the Floor back up to 5.
There are four types of cards in the deck. The first is bonus actions – you can pick these up using Grab to be used in later rounds, and unlike throwable cards, actions always go back into your hand after being used. Throwable cards are the other three categories: Food (yellow), Toppings (pink), and Conditions (blue). As you might expect, these are what you use for the Throw action. There are several possible combos, but the gist of it is that Food gets thrown, Toppings can either be thrown as Food or used to modify it, and Conditions can be used to modify either of the others, but cannot be thrown on their own – after all, “Scalding” isn’t an object you can hold. The more cards used in your combo, the more splat points you cause your target. These are red tokens that are used to cover the letters of “Cafe Chaos!” at the top of your player mat. If you make an especially epic combo (either one card of each type or one Condition and two Toppings) not only do you do four splat points of damage, but you also heal two of your own!
And then there’s Duck, which is fairly self-explanatory – you’re avoiding thrown Food and its accompanying splatter. This only works on thrown Food, though, and only on attacks that have Food at all. For more thorough defenses, look to the character and bonus actions, like Outsmart, but beware that many cards do splash damage (blue splatter rather than red, though the tokens are the same) which cannot be ducked, caught, or otherwise avoided. It’s also worth noting that anyone attacking with Food does not have to decide what Food they’re attacking with until it’s their turn, at which point, since everyone revealed at once, they already know if their target is ducking. (If you have a card to throw, you still have to throw one, but you don’t have to waste your combo on someone it’ll miss. Thrown cards get discarded.)
As you might expect, the next step is to rinse and repeat with actions two and three, after which, you’ll check for victory. More accurately, check for crushing defeat – once someone has all ten letters of “Cafe Chaos!” covered in splat tokens (yes, they count the exclamation point), the game is over, and whoever has the least splat damage wins. (Less laundry to do, huzzah!) If nobody’s hit that limit yet, pass the Starting Player marker clockwise and start picking new targets!
Because of the 10-point end-of-game, there’s a 9 Point Rule that says once you’re at nine points, you’re immune to damage from yourself or from events; in other words, it has to be another player that knocks you out. There’s also no hand limit, and a guide for if you want to mix unused character actions into the deck. Apparently the ratio of actions to Toppings to Conditions to Food should be 1:1:1:4. Feel free to use that information for strategic purposes.
While the many different actions can make this game seem complicated, it’s not hard to get the hang of. If there’s anything you’re still confused by, though, there’s a reference section in the rules with more thorough explanations for all the actions and events, including some of the expansion packs! All in all, Cafe Chaos is fun, it’s goofy, and it’s exceptionally well thought-out.
