Burger Boss - First Play!

30th June 2022

It's a Thursday and we're at Aldershot for some gaming goodness.

Burger Boss! What's better than being a king? Being a boss of course!
​Be a boss of those burgers in this game of resource management and worker placement or if you want to be specific; dice-placement.

---

What's in game?

• Cards: Burger Boss is not a card game per se but uses cards as a sort of proxy board and uses them for a variety of functions.
  • Restaurant cards: These come in every player colour and each has a differing humourous restaurant theme.
  • Kitchen cards: Can't have a burger joint without kitchen. Kitchen cards come in each player colour and have spaces for a worker, cold storage (A fridge basically.) and a grill track. Each colour also has a couple of expansion kitchen cards that when unlocked add more fridge spaces and additional grill tracks.
  • Game cards: Each of the game's main 8 actions are managed by a card. Each will have an amount of numbered worker spaces that can be used. Many of these spaces also require dice of specific value.
    More on game cards below.
  • Secret mission cards: Each of these provides players with a secret bonus scoring opportunity only revealed during the game end.
  • Manager's Special Cards: These can be acquired during play and provide players with bonus or special actions including some 'take that!' actions.
  • Meal Size Cards: The longer customers have to wait, the hungrier they get and the more food they'll buy! I'm sure that's how it works in real life?
    These 3 cards give a bonus of $1-$3 per customer respectively and speaking of customers...
  • Customer Cards: There are 30 customers, they're all very fussy and have specific food requirements for their burgers as displayed on their cards. Each card also lists how much they pay for their burger.
  • Turn Order Card: Burger Boss does not use a traditional turn order and it is tracked on this card.
• Dice: There are 4 dice in each player colour. These are typical six-siders.
• Cubes: Burger Boss has little wooden cubes, although there's only 1 in each player colour and they're used in conjunction with the turn order card.
• Ingredients: Ah yes - the meat of the game! (SIC). Ingredients are represented by these sort of tiny - but chunky wooden discs. They come in 5 colours which correspond to the types of 5 ingredients; buns, burger patties, cheese slices, lettuce and tomato.
• Money: Cash is represented by the standard round card tokens.

All the game's cards are finished in vinyl/plastic and as such feel quite sturdy.
The dice plastic, although they have nicely rounded corners.
Wooden components are always a plus in my book. The discs used to represent burgers and ingredients are obviously wrongly proportioned but if they were correctly sized, they'd have to be much bigger, otherwise they'd make the handling ingredients even more fiddly than it already is - which is quite fiddly and is my one criticism of the components.

Presentation wise, Burger Boss uses a cheerfully brash palette along with cartoonish illustrations. It's a bright, colourful art style that suits the game's light-hearted approach perfectly.

There's little iconography used in the game and it's easily understood, mostly consisting of symbol ingredients and and dice values.
The manager's special cards use text to provide information, which is a little sparse and will probably have players referring to the rules. It's not something that will occur too often though.

---

---

Packaging
I don't usually talk about a game's packaging - because usually it's just a box.
Burger Boss however, comes in a giant burger! Inside are several layers to hold all of the game's components.
Yes I know that it won't stack with other games and the manual doesn't fit in the burger and it'll just have to be put all back into it's normal, typical box anyway which technically defeats the  purpose of the burger packing - but it gives the game a unique, eye-catching presentation and I like that.
Yes, I also know it's just a gimmick but I like gimmicks!

---

---

How's it play?
Setup

• Starting cards: Give each player the restaurant card, kitchen card and 2 dice in their player colour.
• Cash: Give each player their starting $3.
• Secret mission cards: Shuffle the cards and deal 1 face-down to each player. These should be kept hidden until the game end.
• Game cards: Put out the 8 game cards.
• Manager's special cards: Shuffle these cards into a face-down deck.
• Meal size cards: Arrange the 3 cards in a row sequentially with the lowest on the left and highest on the right. Thus going $1, $2 and $3.
  During the game, customer cards will be added in columns beneath the meal size cards and slide rightwards throughout the game.
• Customer cards: Shuffle the customer cards into a face-down deck. 

On to play
The objective in Burger Boss is to fulfil customer orders to earn money, this is done by gaining and cooking the required ingredients. All of these actions are achieved by putting dice on cards, many of these cards will require dice of specific values.
The game does not have a traditional turn order and instead uses a mechanic that mixes randomness and player choice to determine player order. Once player order is established, whenever someone becomes the active player, they can take an action by using a die.
Each round consists of the following phases.

• New customers: Deal 2 customer cards in a column beneath the $1 bonus card.
  There will be no customer cards at the game start but in subsequent rounds any unfulfilled customer cards will be slid 1 space to the right and more customers will be introduced using a sort of conveyor belt mechanic. Thus there can be up to 6 customer cards available at any one time.
  If a customer card has reached the 3rd space and must be slid across, it is instead discarded out of the game. Now that's an unsatisfied customer!
• ​Turn order: Every round, dice are rolled to determine turn order.
  For the first round, the turn order is dictated by players openly rolling their 2 dice, whoever gets the lowest roll goes 1st, 2nd lowest goes 2nd and so on.
  However, in all subsequent rounds, every player rolls their dice in secret and can choose how many and which of their dice they want to use and declares them to the other players.
  This decision will apply to both turn order and to having dice to use as workers and their values during the round.
  It means for example; a player can use 1 die to go earlier in the turn order but will only get 1 worker.
  This becomes more important when players get 3 or 4 dice to use. Generally, having more workers is beneficial, but they'll be times a player will want to go first.
• Actions: Once turn order has been determined, the game goes to actions and players get to each place 1 die at a time in that order.
  Spaces on game cards are limited, furthermore, the actions on many game cards will require a die of a specific number, additionally a couple of actions will require 2 dice.
  Once a the active player has placed a die (Provided it meets the required conditions.) it is immediately resolved. There a numerous actions potentially available to players.
  • Bakery: There are 5 spaces here numbered from 1-5 and they allow the active player to gain 1 or 2 burger buns depending on the value of the die used.
  • Butcher: There also 5 spaces on this card but numbered 2-6, again they allow the player to acquire 1 or 2 burger patties.
  • Cheese shop: There are 4 unnumbered spaces in a row here and they work a little differently. Dice are placed left to right and the 1st die placed here can be of any value but all subsequent dice must have a value equal to or higher than the preceding die.
    This means if the 1st die placed is a 6, then all subsequent dice must be 6's.
  • Fruit & veg: There are 6 spaces here, numbered 1-6. Spaces numbered 1-3 allow the active player to gain lettuce while spaces numbered 4-6 gives them a tomato ingredient.
  • Kitchen expansion: This card can be used exactly twice by all players to gain their kitchen expansion cards.
    The first expansion requires a pair of doubles or a single die of any value and cost of $5.
    The final expansion requires a pair of doubles and $5 or a single die and $10.
  • Manager's specials: There are 8 unnumbered spaces here. The active player may place a die of any value here to draw a manager's special card.
    These will provide players with some sort of bonus of some kind. Manager's special cards can be played at anytime in the active players turn.
  • Supermarket: This card allows players to gain any ingredients of their choice by paying for them.
    There are 3 unnumbered spaces here that allow a player to buy 1, 2 or 3 ingredients of their choice for a respective cost of $2, $4, or $6.
  • Workers: As with the kitchen expansion, this card can be used only twice by each player and allows them to gain more dice for use in later rounds.
    The first worker dice requires a pair of doubles or a single die of any value and cost of $5.
    The final worker requires a pair of doubles and $5 or a single die and $10.
  • Kitchen: The kitchen is where customers' burgers are created. Players must create stacks of ingredients that exactly match the requirements on customer cards. There are a number of rules regarding the kitchen and cooking.
    Gaining ingredients: Whenever a player gains ingredients from the above actions, they go into the storage space on their kitchen card(s), any excess ingredients are discarded. Also: ingredients acquired cannot be used for cooking in the round they were acquired.
    Cooking: To cook food, a die of any value must be placed on to the kitchen card, only 1 die ever required to cook, regardless of the number of kitchen cards a player has. This allows the player to move ingredients from the storage onto the grill, these ingredients cannot be removed, however, in later rounds more ingredients can be added. It's also possible to have multiple food orders cooking at the same time on the grill's 3 spaces.
• Next player: Once the active player has resolved their action, play progresses to the next player in the turn order. If the new active player does not have any dice left to place, they simply pass. Once all workers have used, the game goes to the next phase.
• Sales: This phase only occurs once all players have placed all workers. Then, in turn order players can fulfil customers orders, allowing them to remove the required ingredient stake from their grill, take the customer card and earn the money listed on the card plus the size bonus of the column it was in.
• End of round: Several events occur at the end of a round.
  Ingredients on grills: All ingredients on all grills move 1 space to the right on the grill track. If a stack of ingredients comes off the 3rd and final grill space, they are discarded and the player receives a kingly​ $1 for their troubles!
  ​Dice: All players retrieve their dice from all cards and play returns to the new customers phase.

Endgame
The endgame is triggered when the customer card deck is depleted - although there will be customer cards in play. There is then 1 final round of playing then the game goes to scoring.

Players total money from the following:
Money earned from selling food to customers.
Money earned from their secret objective card.
Anything still on the grill earns $1 apiece; food in storage earns nothing.

Cash is tallied, highest amount wins.

---

---

Overall
Burger Boss is a light-to-midweight game, as written above, the rules seem a bit complex but in practice they're fairly straightforward. That's not say it's a good game for beginners - because it's not!

There are several mechanics and concepts in Burger Boss that that require thinking ahead and someone nuanced decisionmaking.
Quite often, it'll be impossible to complete a customer's order in a single round and generally there isn't enough cold storage to hold the required ingredients. This means that players will probably have to put ingredients on to their grill and hope to complete them in a later round. Mistake's can be costly and $1 is scant compensation for losing food.
Which brings me to customers. There's a balance to be found between completing a customer order as quickly as possible and waiting for a later turn to earn more money but risking another player getting that customer first!

While there is no direct interaction between players in Burger Boss, the game has a lot of open information and it definitely pays to watch what other players are doing; what they've got on their grills, where they're putting their workers and responding to this.

This ties in with the turn order mechanic, sometimes players will want to use less workers to go earlier.
​Worker spaces to gain ingredients are limited and turn order can play a vital role when fulfilling customer orders, in both cases, going later and being stymied by other players' actions (Whether accidentally or deliberately.) can be infuriating.

Burger Boss also has a a bit of the unexpected, manager's special card can also throw spanners into the works with unexpected special actions, especially when used judiciously.

Despite this, the game provides options to gaining other benefits - or benefits other ways, if the baker or butcher is inaccessible for any reason, there's always the supermarket. There's a pretty generous number of worker spaces on the card for the aforementioned manager's cards.
All of these means that rarely is a player presented with meaningless decisions which is always a good thing in games.

I found Burger Boss to be a colourful, visually appealing game of making burger (OK, they stacks of ingredients, but still it looks good.) and fun worker placement and resource management game with a reasonable play time and gameplay that's tricky enough to tax the brain enough to be engaging, along with a side order (SIC) of competitiveness.