Kitchen Rush

Kitchen Rush is a cooperative real-time board game designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Konstantinos Karagiannis and published by Artipia Games in 2017. One to four players become restaurant staff, trying to rescue a financially troubled business through demanding service days.

Each player receives two small hourglasses representing workers, and their sand functions as the game's clock. A worker placed at a station remains committed until its glass empties, producing frantic decisions about timing and priorities throughout every shift of service.

The restaurant board includes locations for taking orders, preparing ingredients, cooking dishes, serving customers, washing dishes, and dealing with payments. Players physically move hourglasses among these spaces rather than choosing actions in turns, so coordination is continuously tested under pressure.

At the beginning of a day, customers and order cards establish what the restaurant must deliver. Ingredients have to be obtained, recipes prepared, and completed meals served before the customers lose patience. Failure can cost money and reputation during play.

Kitchen Rush does not treat cooking as a decorative theme. Recipe requirements determine which ingredients must be available, while workstation bottlenecks make kitchen layout and worker allocation central problems. Dirty dishes also demand attention, forcing players to balance food production.

The campaign structure links the restaurant's days and introduces changing goals and pressures. Earnings can be spent on improvements, allowing the team to add useful capabilities as it progresses. The restaurant develops from day to day instead of resetting entirely.

This progression is paired with rules that make money more than a score. The team must meet financial obligations as well as satisfy customers, so a busy kitchen can still be unsuccessful if its bills are ignored too long there.

Although all participants share the same restaurant, Kitchen Rush avoids a leisurely discussion phase. Sand continues to run while players speak, plan, and reposition workers, making quick communication a practical part of its challenge rather than an optional convenience alone.

The game uses a restaurant-management premise to support its distinctive time mechanism: activities consume actual seconds rather than abstract action points. Its hourglass system makes delayed labor visible, since a worker cannot be reassigned until that timer has finished running.

Kitchen Rush is thus known for combining cooperative planning with simultaneous time pressure instead of the alternating turns common in worker-placement games. Its restaurant campaign, recipe handling, upgrades, customer service, and physical timers all serve that specific operational race directly.