It’s actually surprising to me that food (a fundamental concept important to all living things) is not more prevalent in games.
From my collection, matching one of the Food & Drink: * and/or Food / Cooking BoardGameGeek families, I have:
- Agricola
- Bites
- Candy Land (well, my kids have this, and for long enough that I was still in the habit of databasing it as part of my collection)
- Enchanted Cupcake Party Game (also a game belonging to my kids. this one is actually pretty good! It’s a shame they’ve lost all the pieces)
- Food Chain Magnate
- Grand Austria Hotel
- Guess Who? (my partner’s… this edition has interchangeable boards; one of them is food, I believe)
- Harvest Dice
- Hungry Hungry Hippos
- ICECOOL
- King Chocolate
- Morels
- Ramen Fury
- Scoville
- Sushi Go!
- Sushi Go Party!
- Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
- Tokaido
What I notice is that about half of my list are my kids’ games, my partner’s games, or random games that have been gifted to me by my kids/partner.
Of the above list, I’ve played the following, ranked in order of how much I like them:
- Agricola
- Grand Austria Hotel
- Scoville (this could switch with Grand Austria Hotel. I really like it, but it’s been almost 9 years since I’ve had a chance to play it, so some things are kinda fuzzy)
- Morels
- ICECOOL
- Sushi Go! / Sushi Go Party!
- Harvest Dice
- Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
- Enchanted Cupcake Party Game
- Guess Who?
- Hungry Hungry Hippos
- Candy Land
I’m not sure any of these games really excel at the theme of food. Feeding your workers in Agricola is memorable, and at times, when you can’t afford to, a visceral feeling.
Grand Austria Hotel usually boils down to “I need a brown cube and a beige cube…” where the theme is, effectively, completely invisible while mentally crunching down the decision space.
Scoville, also, feels more like a cube pepper-pusher than, I imagine, what it feels like to be an actual pepper farmer.
Morels (Fungi, in other markets, I think?) may be here with the strongest theme; I actually look at that butter and think how good it smells in the frying pan. But I don’t, generally, like or eat mushrooms, so most of the theme is lost on me (great game though)
ICECOOL features fish meeples as part of the race mechanisms; I suppose that’s food-related, but I think they just needed a “thematic” meeple shape to put in the box.
Sushi Go is, of course, a great game. But I don’t usually eat sushi, so none of these things are mouth-watering to me. Also: they have adorable faces (also not mouth-watering).
Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is… a game; and it has food. It’s quite fun, but I’m not sure it really counts here.
Food: Donuts? Definitely some sort of pastry. For “meal” I might say mashed potatoes and gravy with chicken, turkey, or something similar to go with.
I have a chili recipe that’s really good (and is based quite a bit, but not entirely, on the chili recipe that SUSD/Matt did on his Opener video for Ultimate Werewolf). I make it, generally, 5 or 6 times each year, but only during cooler weather.
At the moment, it’s really just following the trends of whatever my children will eat. We have a lot of air fryer chicken strips and also spaghetti (with various sauces)
Bonus mention: I forgot until I got to the bottom here that I did buy for my partner the Edible Games Cookbook: Play with Your Food by Jenn Sandercock. Unfortunately, it took so long to fulfill that we were squarely in our “we don’t really have time to play games” parenting mode by the time it arrived.
