Game · Godot 4 + C++
Service
Two kitchens, seven critics, and four moves you each get to make exactly once. The guide goes to print tonight.
The game
Two rival kitchens are chasing the same seven critics before a restaurant guide goes to press. Every round you draw six ingredients and spend four actions — hide one under the cloche, trim two out of the round, offer the market a choice, split a crate and let your rival pick first. Each action is used once per game. The whole thing runs about fifteen minutes and almost none of it is luck.
The split-crate move is the heart of it: you divide, they choose. Getting it right means knowing what they're missing, which means paying attention to what they've already spent.
How it's built
- Rules and AI in C++, exposed to Godot 4 as a GDExtension. The engine runs headless, so it can play thousands of games against itself overnight.
- The UI never sees the opponent's hand — it talks to a match interface, not the rules engine, so online play can slot in behind the same seam later.
- Solo against the house AI works now. Online play is designed for and not written yet.
Why this one
After Leaving Earth I wanted a small game with a hard AI problem instead of a big game with an easy one. Hidden information and a tiny action space is exactly that: the state fits in a handful of bytes, and playing it well still takes real search.
The theme and rules text are original. Mechanically it's my own take on the two-player divider-chooser format.