Random recipes, exciting flavors, and actual acid await in this adventure game and cookbook combo that teaches you how to make pickles, yogurt, ceviche, sour cream, and more while you do your best to appease the dinner partying dragons… 

Jump to: 

• Audience for Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test
• Setting for Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test
• Characters in Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test
• Mechanics in Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test
• Overall thoughts on Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test
• Find a copy of Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

Audience for Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test by Oddfish Games aims to make cooking for/with family and friends fun and exciting via gamification.  You’ll be cooking to a story, leveling up by how adventurous you are with your recipes and character skills, and seeing if your appetizers can impress a dragon dinner party.  The story is also very all-ages friendly – you’re a chef cooking for some quite silly dragons instead of diving into combat.

Characters are easy to track with a fun story and one special move each… along with the list of recipes they collect from session to session.  Mechanics are also pretty easy, requiring you to roll from tables for ingredients and track XP but not managing a ton of stats (so you can focus on cooking).  You’ll need to be able to measure in the kitchen, but that’s about the most complex mechanic, so there’s low mechanical barrier to play.  

The recipes are all-ages and beginner friendly with clear instructions to follow.  If playing with kids, they may need assistance from grown ups for things like cutting and using the MY-CROW-WAVE, but this book is actually all about cooking without open flame, so it’s a lot of mixing and watching things change with ACID!

From all of these factors, I’d say this is all-ages friendly and works great for a family cooking together, a group of friends having a chaotic TTRPG dinner party, or someone just looking to make something interesting for a snack tonight.

Setting for Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test is set in a medieval fantasy world of taverns, dragons, and explorers!  And the taverns don’t need a dishwasher or another cook (so go make some coin elsewhere), the dragons throw dinner parties to impress the neighbors, and not all explorers know how to fight (unless it’s a cooking competition). 

You’ll be helping a pair of acid dragons, one intent on party planning to impress and one who needs to take a break from just eating string cheese at the kitchen table, to create an unforgettable night of acid-based appetizers!

As you’re cooking (in real life and in the game), you’ll get bits of stories from your dragon hosts about what kinds of ingredients are available (and why), and, at the finale, you’ll really need to do a good job!  Your score for the party will determine which kind of ending you get!

Characters in Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

Your character in Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test is an adventurer!  And a chef!  Who has NO MONEY!  To earn your living, you (and maybe friends if you choose to play as a group) take on a catering request from the tavern notice board to kick off your cooking career in this new town.

Your character can be chosen from 8 playbook style character sheets that include classes like the Saucier (human wizard with a staff that looks like a giant spoon) and the Rotisseur (a knight with a shishkabob lance).  

Your character sheet has a fun foodie-themed story about your character’s background, check boxes for tracking your level ups, space for you and your character’s names, and one special ability.  This special ability grants you bonus XP if used, and could involve singing while you cook (for the feline bard Sommelier), wearing clothes to match your dish (dark elf frost mage Glacier), or giving out a battle cry when you open a jar (ogre warrior Garde Manager).  

Picking a character took only a few minutes to read through the different options and choose, and I really liked the flavor that the ability added to each one, encouraging players to act things out and have a bit of RP fun by awarding some bonus XP. 

Mechanics in Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

Your main mechanic in Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test is cooking… with a twist!

The goal of the game is to level up so you can unlock new, higher level, recipes until you get to level 6 and come up with your own original recipe, based on what you’ve learned.  

Level 1 recipes include Quickles (quick pickles) and Ceviche Tomato Bombs (ceviches stuffed tomatoes) while level 5 has a recipe for making popping candy rims on a drink.  They get progressively more involved and interesting as you go, all while teaching you how to do it, and why it works.  

To level up, you earn XP by completing recipes, and you can earn bonus XP by using your special ability or swapping ingredients from the base recipe – and that’s where all the chaotic fun comes in. 

There are three rolls tables for each recipe, giving you over 1000 possible combinations that you can make for each base.  For example, when we tried out the Quickles recipe, we rolled and got: 

Vegetable (rolled 18): Carrots

Vinegar (rolled 1): Distilled white vinegar

Seasoning (rolled 8): Rosemary

This combined with some sugar, salt, and water created… 

Rosemary Carrot Quickles!

And they were pretty tasty!  I’d never had pickled carrots before except as a small garnish, and I quite enjoyed these with the rosemary.  

Because we made a level 1 recipe (+1 xp), rolled for all three ingredients (+6 xp), used an ability (+2 xp for using the charitable spirit ability to give kiddo a carrot piece while cooking), and am sharing a pic (+2 xp… the pic is here), we earned 11 XP and got to level 2!

So now we have unlocked the recipes for Dragonfly Jam and Quark & Crackers, and we are one step closer to our level 6 Chef de Cuisine Master Challenge!

In this section, I also want to note that the game teaches you not only how to make the recipe but WHY it works.  It gets into a bit of the science behind how acids react to “cook” food.  It also gives tips, via helpful info from the game’s player character personalities, on food storage, other uses, additional modifications, and more.  So… I would say this game is also very educational, in a fun way, with the additional info it provides alongside the basics.

Overall thoughts on Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

I LOVED this.  I really enjoy experimenting with different recipes in maybe a similar way to how some of the roll tables here are laid out (i.e. I will list 4 kinds of cheese and 4 types of jam then spend the next couple weeks trying out different grilled cheese variants with them to find the best one), so this really clicked with me… and then it also added in TTRPGs!  It’s like the perfect blend of both!

The RP and game elements were engaging while not being overpowering.  They are a mechanism to facilitate cooking in an interesting way versus getting you stuck on the crunch, but they are still present enough to matter… A LOT. 

And the recipes are cool and versatile and show you how to keep spicing things up from your base knowledge.  Once you know the basics of how something works, it is really clear that you can explore different substitutions.  Sometimes you might make something that isn’t a good combo, but… sometimes you find a hidden gem too.   It encourages you to experiment and not be afraid to fail. 

Overall, Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test was a fantastic game, and I am getting quite pulled into some ideas for other pickles and the jam recipes roll charts, in particular.  It was fun, it was engaging, it was something I could do with kiddo, and I think it would be awesome to run with some adventurous friends too!

Find a copy of Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test

You can find a copy of Cooking With Dice: The Acid Test on the Oddfish Games website here.

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