Chefs De Partie

Make a full meal out of your Long Rests

I should preface this review by saying that the project lead behind this game, Taylor Navarro, is a good friend of mine, and my romantic partner, Poorna M., is also one of the writers on the game.

Suffice to say they have been hyping it up for a while while rudely refusing to tell me anything about it until I had my review copy in hand. I've had Chefs de Partie for about a day now, and have had the time to chew it over, and let it digest. I’m ready to dig in, and put to use my handy-dandy copy of The Lazy Writer’s Guide to Food Related Puns to good use.

As I write this, I am worrying about groceries. A man’s got to eat, three meals a day - that’s a mechanical need there’s no getting around. Humans need food, daily, and if you’re playing a game, you can for the most part take it as a given that your adventurers are getting enough sustenance to keep them in fighting shape for their next adventure - it’s not something most TTRPG gamers really spend a lot of time thinking about.

Humans need food, but cooking is about something more. It’s about community. It’s about culture. It’s about small histories - a character’s favourite meal that they’ve enjoyed since they were a child, someone’s family recipe handed down for generations, a light-hearted brag about how one region’s food is so much better than another’s. It’s homesickness, when you’ve been going for months without a certain spice or cooking technique that just doesn’t exist in the lands you’re travelling through, and the nourishment to the soul that comes from sharing a meal you’ve been craving for weeks on end. Whenever my family gets together, a good chunk of the conversation is about the meals we’ve shared that hold stronger in our memories than most of the stuff we’ve actually done together. There are many stories we’re leaving out of our games by not talking about cooking - but the writers of Chefs de Partie have served us all up something special.

Chefs de Partie is a game about cooking.

It’s a simple, one-page game that in a few paragraphs introduces a simple mechanic to get your adventuring party working together to create a meal for the whole group. With 3d6, you’re either going to be serving them up some food poisoning (don’t worry, I checked the math, your odds of getting this are about 10%) or a heavenly meal (a slightly more enticing 16%) - both of which have mechanical penalties and bonuses, respectively. In between those extremes, you will serve up something more average, but depending on your rolls you may have just created a bonding memory all the same.

Cover by Nala J. Wu

The rest of the game’s page contains “recipes” with mouth-watering descriptions of meals from a variety of different cultures. The Chefs de Partie mechanic is broad enough to be used in pretty much any system, and indeed, the game’s six recipes have specific mechanical effects for four separate TTRPGs, from the classic D&D 5e to Blades in the Dark. I imagine that people who look through this game’s rules will have more than a few ideas for their own recipes that can better suit their games.

I’m simplifying the rules a bit, of course, but with a one-page-game review there’s the danger of me just giving you the whole of it right here in this review, and then Taylor would be very mad at me.

It’s depressing, given that most of my social life is online, but I’ve always held a quiet belief that you don’t really get to know people until you’ve shared a few meals with them. Get to know what they like, what they dislike. Who scarfs down their food, who savours it, who needs extra chilli powder and who will leave half the food on their plate if any of their food is touching other bits of food. Downtime activities like cooking add so much to the bonds characters create with each other, but it’s most players rarely think to have scenes like this unless they’ve been mechanized. Chefs de Partie does exactly that, and does so charmingly.

More importantly, there is a lot of love that has been put into these short descriptions of each recipe, and the the game’s mechanics. It’s a short project, but one that has brought together a group of lovely people from various backgrounds in the TTRPG community, all offering up a little piece of home. There’s as much soul poured into this game as there is in a meal that’s been lovingly crafted by hands that only choose the freshest of ingredients and that refuse to serve a meal before it’s perfectly done.

Chefs de Partie, despite its small size, is a full meal of a game.

You can find it on DriveThruRPG here.

Bon Appetit.