Cookard Your kitchen, dealt as cards

Every dish is a small recipe chain: drag ingredient cards like egg, dough or honey onto utensil cards like the oven or stove, and the finished dish appears as a card you can serve. The recipes section tells you what goes where, so you are never stuck guessing. It starts simple, and as you unlock more recipes the chains grow longer and the table gets busier. There is a real pleasure in laying out your cards so that everything you need is one grab away: a stack of dough up top, a pile of fresh bread underneath, ready before anyone asks.

Drag a customer card onto a table and they reveal the dish they want. Serve it by placing the dish on top of them, and do it while they are still there, because customers do not linger forever. To keep cooking you need ingredients, and ingredients cost coins: place a coins card on a store or fruit stall to restock. Too much clutter? Sell it at the Trade House, or trade items for things you actually need, like another table or a second oven. Quests hand out rewards along the way, often new utensils and recipes that push the restaurant forward.

If you like running a business, this is the whole loop in miniature: stock, cook, serve, get paid, reinvest. The early game is all hands-on, including holding down a water pump or hand crank for electricity. Then you hire workers, put them on a running wheel to generate power for you, and unlock the magnet to pull cards across the table on their own. Bit by bit the kitchen stops needing your hands on everything, and watching your card layout hum along is the best part of the late game. Fair warning: the table is small, and it fills up fast.