Good news for all chefs on BGA: You can now choose all the Stir Fry 18 game variants from the official rulebook plus two additional point goals suggested on the BGA forum.
The variants are:
Close the Kitchen Variant: This is a scoring variant. After the first player reaches
the points goal or higher, each other player may take 1 turn. The highest score at the end of these turns wins. Identical scores lead to a tie (which means that this variant is not the best choice for tournaments).
Empty Pantry Variant - Players do NOT draw a card after cooking! Note that this has been changed over the rulebook (in accordance with the publisher, of course): the official variant says that players do not draw at the beginning of their turns instead. This would have some extreme effects on the gameplay and surely be far more than a “slight variant”: You are in fact eliminated if you run out of cards, which can happen very easily and even won’t be avoidable in certain cases. Taste tests are a great risk. On the other hand, the players will be probably forced to bluff with a single card on hand often. I am sure that just slowing down the game a little bit was the original idea of this variant.
Bullseye Chef Variant - Players must score EXACTLY to win! This means, if you have too many points, you will have to loose some. This is the favorite variant of the game’s inventor.
The final scoring for this variant is adapted as follows, if needed: Players who finish with too many points get the difference substracted from the point goal (e.g. finishing with 67 points in a standard game leads to a final score of 33 points). Here too, a little change has been added for the BGA online adaption: Even if it is possible to loose points, it is not easy and depending on the situation it may even become impossible. So a bullseye game ends automatically when all players at the table have collected more points than set up, with the player with the most points after re-calculation being the winner.
We also have added two points variants: Besides the standard game (50 points) and the Master Chef variant (200 points), you can also play to 100 and 150 points now.
That’s still not all: As a special bonus we have also added a promo card: Tofu. Tofu serves as protein source, but of vegetable origin. Thus the card combines elements of protein and vegetables. Like the other protein cards, you can discard it alone to draw a card (in this case just 1). You can also use the card as wildcard to replace any vegetable when discarding a pair (everything which is not noodle, protein or soy sauce is considered as vegetable). Of course, you can also cook the tofu, but beware: if you cook it together with one of the three protein cards in the game, you will loose 5 points! As the game should stay “Stir Fry 18”, one card is removed randomly from the deck before adding the tofu. The identity of the card is kept secret.
The best thing is that you can combine all these variants. As “Empty Pantry” and “Bullseye Chef” may result in a much longer game I’d like to suggest to try these with the original 50 point goal first.
Have fun, and good cooking!
The variants are:
Close the Kitchen Variant: This is a scoring variant. After the first player reaches
the points goal or higher, each other player may take 1 turn. The highest score at the end of these turns wins. Identical scores lead to a tie (which means that this variant is not the best choice for tournaments).
Empty Pantry Variant - Players do NOT draw a card after cooking! Note that this has been changed over the rulebook (in accordance with the publisher, of course): the official variant says that players do not draw at the beginning of their turns instead. This would have some extreme effects on the gameplay and surely be far more than a “slight variant”: You are in fact eliminated if you run out of cards, which can happen very easily and even won’t be avoidable in certain cases. Taste tests are a great risk. On the other hand, the players will be probably forced to bluff with a single card on hand often. I am sure that just slowing down the game a little bit was the original idea of this variant.
Bullseye Chef Variant - Players must score EXACTLY to win! This means, if you have too many points, you will have to loose some. This is the favorite variant of the game’s inventor.
The final scoring for this variant is adapted as follows, if needed: Players who finish with too many points get the difference substracted from the point goal (e.g. finishing with 67 points in a standard game leads to a final score of 33 points). Here too, a little change has been added for the BGA online adaption: Even if it is possible to loose points, it is not easy and depending on the situation it may even become impossible. So a bullseye game ends automatically when all players at the table have collected more points than set up, with the player with the most points after re-calculation being the winner.
We also have added two points variants: Besides the standard game (50 points) and the Master Chef variant (200 points), you can also play to 100 and 150 points now.
That’s still not all: As a special bonus we have also added a promo card: Tofu. Tofu serves as protein source, but of vegetable origin. Thus the card combines elements of protein and vegetables. Like the other protein cards, you can discard it alone to draw a card (in this case just 1). You can also use the card as wildcard to replace any vegetable when discarding a pair (everything which is not noodle, protein or soy sauce is considered as vegetable). Of course, you can also cook the tofu, but beware: if you cook it together with one of the three protein cards in the game, you will loose 5 points! As the game should stay “Stir Fry 18”, one card is removed randomly from the deck before adding the tofu. The identity of the card is kept secret.
The best thing is that you can combine all these variants. As “Empty Pantry” and “Bullseye Chef” may result in a much longer game I’d like to suggest to try these with the original 50 point goal first.
Have fun, and good cooking!