Working on a Card Game! CookCook: Soups n’ Curries #
Overview #
CookCook (full working title CookCook: Soups n’ Curries) is a light 2–4 player card game about cooking Thai soups and curries. Each player holds Menu cards (dishes to complete) and collects Ingredient cards from a shared Market and deck. On your turn you Gather (buy from the market or take a free draw), then you can Cook by discarding ingredients that match the Menu’s requirement lines.
Ingredients use two ideas at once: a broad Type (the category the kitchen cares about for a normal cook) and a specific Name (the exact item on the card). A normal cook cares about Types (and any OR / “any Name of Type” wording on the card). A perfect cook asks for matching Names on Signature lines, scores the higher VP, and uses the perfect effect instead of the normal one — so there is a clear “good enough dish” path and a “chef’s special” path without reading a huge rulebook.
The design goal is something quick to teach and easy to read at the table, in the same spirit as small-box games like Sea Salt & Paper, but with a food theme and a bit of engine flavor from menu effects.
When I started, how long it’s been, and where things stand #
I put the project on the calendar in March 2026: the CookCook repo’s first commit landed on 1 March 2026 (“initial rules”). From there through mid‑April 2026 the rulebook, ingredient/menu data, and card layouts have been iterating — including tighter Type + Name rules, normal vs perfect cooks, and deck targets aligned with Card-Maker.
So as of this post (18 April 2026), the game has been in active rules-and-cards work for about seven weeks.
Right now the prototype is in playtest prep: card images and TTS-oriented decks are being assembled, and the next step is to run sessions both in Tabletop Simulator and at a real table with printed cards. Internal playtest notes and session templates are already sketched in the design repo so feedback has somewhere to land.
Card Maker (FLATLINE → generic → CookCook) #
The art you see below is not a one-off export from a throwaway template. Card Maker started life as tooling for FLATLINE — weapon boards, tiles, and card frames — and I have since upgraded it toward a generic pipeline: per-game data (YAML), HTML layouts, and project config live side by side, and the same app now renders CookCook menus and ingredients as well (Types/Names, deck counts on ingredients, Menu_2 layout, and so on).
That matters for CookCook because the rulebook and spreadsheets are not the only source of truth — the printed card has to match what players are taught. Keeping one Card Maker stack for multiple games means fixes to export, typography, or batch rendering benefit every project hooked into it, instead of maintaining a separate fork per game.
Card preview #
A couple of Menu cards and Ingredient cards from the current export set:
Tom Yum (Menu)
Green Curry (Menu)
Lemongrass (Ingredient — Aromatics)
Curry paste (Ingredient — Spice base)
You can right click → Open image in new tab if you want a closer look at the layout.
