Designer: Ayi & Hypercross R&D
Publisher: Ayi Boardgame Craft
Artist: Ayi
2-4 players  |  40 min. |  ages 10+  |  MSRP $45 | BGG Entry
Time ot teach & learn: 10-15 min

Game Synopsis

You have inherited your grandfather’s small restaurant. His specialty: tofu! In order to become a Tofu Shifu, a master of this culinary art, you must learn every method and step in the process. From soy milk to silken, from firm tofu to dried, you’ll develop recipes to serve your customer’s tastes. To grow the restaurant, you’ll need a staff including waiters, chefs, cashiers, and masters. By assigning your Shifu and staff (represented by tokens and cards) to different tasks on the board, your humble eatery will grow and thrive. The player to complete the most objectives will become the greatest spot for bean curd in the market. 

Why We Love Tofu Shifu

Tofu Shifu celebrates how subtle complexity can arise from a simple array of choices if they are arranged in just the right order. 

Each turn you will assign your Tofu Shifu pawn to one of nine action spaces on the charmingly illustrated board. You must pay the cost in hats in order to go to a space. The hats represent your staff, the work needed to perform the task. Hats could be tokens or icons on cards you have in your hand.  If you’re the first player to go to a space, it’s a bit cheaper. The actions range from making tofu, seating, serving and cashing out customers, hiring new staff, upgrading your restaurant, setting objectives and resting. Each of these elements is necessary to the overall success of your restaurant, but how you prioritize your actions will dictate how your restaurant evolves. 

Cards in the game serve multiple functions are are placed into different areas of your restaurant, depending on the action you choose. They provide potential upgrades. They will dictate what types of tofu you make or what objectives to aim for. Objectives are collected by serving the right group of dishes to people who order at your place.  Cards can also be spent as hats to perform actions. Your hand of cards will help guide each decision, allowing you (hopefully) to chain a series of actions together that build toward a wider array of dishes to serve and more customers to feed. 

And while the order and choice of actions you take are very important, so much of the game builds toward your decision to rest. This is when new staff is brought in (meaning more hats to use and more actions to perform).  You can also spend money earned from serving customers to purchase new cards, ones better and different than your starting complement. Then all cards played are gathered so you can decide how and where best to play them, starting on your next turn. Rest refreshes your options and often provides new ones. 

The general flow of the game is thematic and yet familiar. You can imagine the master wandering through the place assigning tasks to the staff so dishes come out like clockwork to the customers, allowing you to earn money and complete objectives. But a great master also knows when to rest. Do you push yourself to work until you have to rest? Or do you rest earlier in order to have access to the right set of hats and the right spaces on the board?

In the West, tofu is often maligned for its blandness. This is a great injustice to such a delicious and wildly adaptable ingredient! Tofu is subtle. It may seem like a simple or harmless addition, but tofu helps create complexity of flavor and texture in any of its many forms. As a game, Tofu Shifu echoes these qualities. Seemingly simple actions develop into complex strategies as players understand how to combine them to achieve their goals. And perhaps best of all, just like the ingredient, you’ll discover how versatile Tofu Shifu is, allowing you to explore different recipes for success each time you play. 

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Congratulations to designer Ayi & Hypercross R&D

More information on Whirly Derby at: Ayi Boardgame Craft

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