A demo code was provided, many thanks to Genco Interactive.
Cook with Card is a cooking simulator where all the cooking happens through cards — the ingredients, kitchen appliances and utensils and even cleaning products are all cards. You will unlock recipes and serve customers, but you’ll need to keep a close eye on the ticking clock.
Serving Customers
Your first step to manage your restaurant in Cook with Card is serving customers. They will ring the front table and ask for one specific dish. They don’t have infinite patience, so you’ll need to take their order and prepare the meal quickly. Deliver on time, they will pay and give a good review for your restaurant. Miss the window, they will leave and get you a bad reputation.
This loop is fairly standard for a cooking game—speed is key. However, there’s a strategic nuance: customers lose patience much faster while waiting to place their order than they do while waiting for the food itself. The optimal strategy, therefore, is to take all pending orders before you start cooking.
Managing the Kitchen
Once you enter the kitchen you will notice that it functions as a card game. You follow the recipes displayed below your counter, dragging ingredients onto appliance cards—such as the knife, pan, oven, meat grinder, or pot. Don’t forget that some dishes also require final assembly. Each utensil will take a different amount of time to be used, but no more than a few seconds.
You begin with a basic set of ingredients, enough to cook the two basic recipes: salad and steak plate. After that, you will have to buy all the ingredients from the market—including for new recipes. The dishes will get increasingly more difficult to prepare, requiring more steps to be completed and also a lot harder to remember.
Starting on day two, you’ll also face a random kitchen crisis at the beginning of each shift, such as a mice infestation, a muddy floor, or a grease fire. Buy the necessary supply from the market to deal with each individual problem and stack the cards. This adds a little extra challenge to the gameplay and makes the kitchen a bit more chaotic.
Over the course of the campaign, you’ll unlock roughly ten recipes. The margherita pizza was one particularly tricky to understand as it involves a lot of different steps. Fortunately, each day before opening the restaurant, you can take your time to study new dishes and even let some already prepared. While this greatly reduces the difficulty later on, it can also make the gameplay feel a bit trivial if you over-prepare.
Roadmap and Future Potential
Cook With Card has a clear early-access roadmap, promising new foods, side orders, desserts, and additional kitchen tools, which will make the game a lot more challenging than it already is.
However, I’d love to see the developers consider a spoilage mechanic. Right now, you can prep a massive stockpile of food before opening and instantly fulfill any order. If dishes slowly decayed over time, you’d have to think much more carefully about how much to prepare in advance, adding a genuine risk-reward element.
The developers also plan to expand shop customization, since the current one is pretty limited to just changing some colours in the background. If they carry this feature a little further, you could also have special furniture to add bonus to your gameplay. But simply having items to add on your background would already be a lot more fun.
Final Thoughts
Cook with Card is a charming and creative management game together with a card game to prepare food in the kitchen. It has tons of potential, and I hope the developers lean into expanding the early-access content.
At the moment, the experience is a bit short—you can finish it in less than an hour and half. But the gameplay mechanics are solid and genuinely interesting. The management-card hybrid genre is pretty rare and unique, which makes Cook with Card a lot more special. If the roadmap delivers on its promises, this could become a hidden gem for fans of strategy and time-management alike.
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