GAMA Expo 2025: Critter Kitchen, Sweet Takes, Temple Code, and Parks & Potions | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Let me return to the halls of GAMA Expo 2025 yet again, stopping at a few more booths to show you what’s coming in 2025:

▪️ Publisher Cardboard Alchemy has received a lot of love for both Flamecraft and Andromeda’s Edge — two vastly different designs — so I’m curious to see whether their next release, Critter Kitchen from Alex Cutler and Peter C. Hayward will be equally well received. This game and its Critter Kitchen: À La Cart expansion will both be released in April 2025 through distributor Lucky Duck Games. Here’s what to expect:

It’s Restaurant Week in Bistro Bay! Restaurants are competing in food challenges, while also planning an epic meal to impress a celebrity critic. As one of 1-5 players, you’ll send your chefs into the city to gather ingredients to create amazing meals and demonstrate that your restaurant is the best in town.

Each round, new random ingredients are placed in locations throughout the city. Players simultaneously and secretly plan which locations to send their three chefs to, hoping to collect the best ingredients. Some chefs are fast, but can gather only one item, while others can carry three items but arrive late. Rumors are also available at locations and provide guidance on what the critic desires.

Challenges revealed in rounds 1-6 offer the players opportunities to earn stars for crafting dishes with specific ingredient requirements. After round 7, the players must create an epic meal to impress the celebrity critic and cater to their appetites. A multitude of different critics, rumors, and restaurateurs mean every game is fresh!

▪️ Temple Code is a Mastermind-style competitive deduction game for 1-4 players from Yoann Levet that French publisher Bankiiiz Editions released in 2024, and Lucky Duck Games will bring the title to the U.S. market in 2025.

I previewed Temple Code in March 2024 after sampling the game at GAMA Expo 2024, so one year later that preview might be useful again for those on the U.S. market seeing the game for the first time.

▪️ Parks & Potions is the debut title from designer Chris Eastridge through his Moon Saga Workshop brand, and the base game and two expansions — Bugs & Bottles and Potion Perils — will debut in June 2025.

Here’s an overview of this 1-5 player game:

Players step into the boots of Park Rangers whose expertise in botanical alchemy transforms the wilderness into a sanctuary for healing. With the roll of the dice, players gather extracts from the park’s flora, concocting potent potions to treat the ailments of animals from different biomes. Successfully healing animals and performing experiments earns points, directly reflecting your role in maintaining the park’s well-being. Aim for animals in similar habitats to unlock bonus points, reflecting the depth of your commitment to conservation — or take the path of experimenting to find new potions.

Parks & Potions plays over 5-6 rounds, each representing a day of work. The game is divided into phases in which players roll dice to discover flowers to extract, manage their inventories, and use potions to fulfill objectives and cure animals. Strategic potion mixing and objective completion are key to becoming the most renowned ranger.

Bugs & Bottles allows a sixth player to join the game, in addition to treating insects, and Potion Perils adds more challenges and “time of day” dice that determine which potions are available when.

▪️ While exiting the exhibit hall on the first evening, I passed the Hasbro booth and snapped the pic, meaning to return the next day for details of this non-Magic, non-Avalon Hill minimal game display:

Sweet Takes will be available at hobby stores in the U.S. starting June 1, 2025 and available online in August 2025. (Amazon.fr shows a July 2025 release date.)

▪️ While the focus at GAMA Expo is mostly on new and upcoming games and titles in a publisher’s back catalog, you could also find unexpected items, such as these ancient titles in the Chessex booth that carried extremely low wholesale prices, presumably because these games have been parked in a warehouse for years and Chessex would be happy to have them sit on a retailer’s shelves instead.

Weird to see Skyrealms of Jorune (3rd Edition) on the table as I remember stocking that book in my role as caretaker for the RPG and miniature section of a San Francisco game store in the early 1990s…which is ironic given that I’ve almost never played those types of games.