™
A Cheapass Board Game for 2-6 Players
Completely Untrue Background:
This game, originally entitled Claude Hubert la
Criée, was designed and published by the French
chef Jacques de Flandres in 1909, as part of his
“Jeux Cuisines” series.
De Flandres went on to create other
cooking games, but none was more successful
than his earliest work.
In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, there was a resurgence
of the cooking genre, with several new cooking
games that owed a debt to de Flandres.
In 1994, Shimizu-Leifan Holding Company
(SLHC) released Yum Yum Super Fish Delicious
which was a direct copy of de Flandres’ original
game. Cheapass Games has licensed this game,
to be released in English as Fish Cook.
About the Game:
No, actually, Fish Cook was invented in 2012 by James Ernest,
and published by Cheapass Games in the Spring of 2013.
Summary: In Fish Cook, everyone is a chef who specializes
in fish.
Each day, players will buy fish at the fish market, and
other ingredients at the farmer’s market. Then they will create delicious dishes using old family recipes, and new ones
they learn at the Cooking School.
Earn the most money, and you will be declared the
Master Chef!
Players: 2 to 6
Playing Time: About 45 minutes
Components in the Free Game:
Fish Market Board
Farmer’s Market Board
36 Recipe Cards
You Also Need:
Money in denominations of $1, $5, and $20 or $25,
enough for about $250 per player.
One chef token.
A die or other means of tracking the day (1 to 5).
Counters in six colors matching the ingredients in the
Farmer’s Market, or a set of printed counters.
Twelve 6-sided dice for the Fish Market.
Note: If you have at least one more 6-sided die, it will be
easier to set up the Fish Market and the Farmer’s Market at the
same time. You can use a different colored die for each row in the
Farmer’s Market, and roll all the dice at the same time.
Setting Up:
Give each player $100. Put the rest of the money in the
bank.
Shuffle the recipe cards and deal two cards to each player, facedown. These represent each player’s “family recipes.”
You never just draw more cards, but you can buy cards, as
described later.
Fish Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass Games: www.cheapass.com
This Cheapass Game is free. That’s right, free. You can print it, copy it, and share it with
your friends. Obviously, if you like it, we’d appreciate a dollar or two in return. We think
this is the best way to get great games into your hands, so please help us make it work.
Yes! I gave Cheapass Games $_________ for this game!
To learn more, read the last page of this document, or visit www.cheapass.com.
Place the Fish Market and Farmer’s Market in the middle
of the table, with space for the Cooking School between
them, as shown below. The Cooking School is just empty
table space containing four faceup recipe cards, plus the
deck of recipe cards, and the day marker (s).
You will play a different number of days based on the
number of players:
Players
2
3 or 4
5 or 6
Days
3
4
5
The player who has most recently cooked will take the chef
token and the first turn. It’s up to your group to decide what
qualifies as “cooking.” Putting milk on cereal probably
doesn’t count.
If you play another game with the same group, then the
winner of the previous game will go first.
On Each Day:
A “day” consists of two parts: Morning and Evening. In
the Morning, players can buy goods from the Farmer’s
Market, fish from the Fish Market, and cards from the
Cooking School. In the evening, players will cook.
Preparing for the Morning:
At the start of each day, refill the Fish Market, Farmer’s
Market, and Cooking School, as follows:
The Farmer’s Market: Roll a die for each row in the
Farmer’s Market.
Each row in the market has small dice icons in some of
the spaces, showing how to fill the row. Fill each row from
left to right, up to the designated spot.
.
For example, in the row below (the Roe/Ginger row), if
you roll a 2 or a 3, you fill the row to the third spot, because
that spot is marked with a 2 and a 3.
If the row is already filled to that level or higher, then
you will leave it as it is. You never remove anything when
setting up the Farmer’s Market.
The Fish Market: Roll all 12 Fish dice, and sort them
into the appropriate spaces in the Fish Market. Fill each row
from right to left. (This is backwards from the Farmer’s Market,
because both markets have the more expensive spaces towards
the middle.)
Each row can only hold five fish. If you roll more than
five fish of the same value, re-roll the extras.
The Cooking School: The School is between the Market
boards. It contains four faceup recipe cards, and the deck.
Each day, add new cards from the deck until there are four,
leaving any cards from the previous day.
Fish Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass Games: www.cheapass.com
Playing the Morning:
In the morning, the players can buy the ingredients they
need for cooking.
Starting with the leader (the player holding the chef
token), and proceeding clockwise, players take turns buying
one item at a time.
On each turn, a player may do one of the following:
Note: Pay attention when you buy fish, because sometimes
bigger fish are cheaper, and therefore strictly better, than
smaller ones!
Each recipe has two cash values: a larger main value and
a smaller bonus value. When you cook a recipe, you always
earn the larger number, but the bonus is awarded differently depending on who owns the recipe.
Buy a Fish: Take a fish from the Fish Market, and pay (to
the bank) the price marked on that space.
Details of Cooking:
You can make any recipe you can see. This includes recipes in your hand, in the Cooking School, or in anybody’s
menu.
A menu is a collection of faceup cards on the table in
front of every player, representing that player’s specialties.
Here are the details:
Buy an Ingredient: Take an item from the Farmer’s
Market, and pay the price marked on that space.
Buy a Recipe: Buy a card from the School and put it in
your hand.
The price for a faceup recipe is $5.
You may also buy the top card of the deck (keeping it
facedown) for $2.
Pass: Buy nothing. Passing does not take you out of play,
but if everyone passes in turn, the morning will end.
Ending the Morning: The morning ends when any single
row in the Farmer’s Market is empty. For example, if someone
buys the last Sake, this will empty that row of the Farmer’s
Market, and cause the morning to end.
When the last item in a row is bought, it’s customary to
ring a bell (surely you have a bell?). Every player then gets
one more buy, including the player who bought that item.
When the bell is rung, pass the Chef to the next player
(the player after whoever bought the last ingredient). This
could move the Chef to anyone, even the player who currently has it.
The player holding the Chef will cook first in the evening, and will also go first on the next day.
Other Ways to End the Morning: The morning also
ends if the Fish Market is completely empty (with the same
Chef-passing rules as above), or if all players pass in
sequence. In the latter case, the chef marker goes to the
next player in sequence, after the last player who passes.
(This hardly ever happens.)
To Make a Recipe from Your Hand:
Collect the money indicated on the card, including the
bonus. Place card faceup on the table in front of you, as part
of your menu.
To Make a Recipe from the School:
Collect the money indicated on the card, but not the
bonus. Add the recipe to your menu, as described above.
Note: You do not have to pay for these recipes, as you would
in the morning. You’re basically “stealing” it from the School.
To Make a Recipe from Your Own Menu:
This earns you the money again, including the bonus.
To Make a Recipe from Another Menu:
Collect the money for the recipe. The recipe’s current
owner gets the bonus.
Now you have a chance to steal the recipe, as follows:
Roll a die. If you roll equal to or higher than the bonus
value of the recipe, steal it. Move the recipe card into your
menu.
An example: if the recipe has a bonus value of 4, you must
roll a 4 or higher to steal it.
Playing the Evening:
In the evening, players take turns making recipes. Players
will make one recipe at a time, taking turns as they did in
the morning, until everyone is out of fish.
Basic Rules of Cooking: To make a recipe, you must
spend all the ingredients shown on the card (one of each),
as well as a fish of the appropriate value.
The ingredients must match exactly, but the fish can be
any size of the required value or higher. For example, if your
recipe calls for a size-4 fish, you can actually make it with a
fish of size 4, 5, or 6.
Playing a higher value of fish does not change the dollar
value of the recipe, but it does give you some flexibility with
larger fish.
Fish Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass Games: www.cheapass.com
Passing: In the evening, you must pass if you can’t cook
anything.
If you pass while you still have fish, you must throw one
fish away.
Ending the Day: The day ends when everyone’s fish are
either cooked or discarded.
You can keep market ingredients from day to day, but all
fish spoil. Fish will always be either cooked or discarded.
At the end of the day, remove one day marker from the
Cooking School. If today was the last day, the game is over.
Otherwise, refill the Markets and the School, and play
another day.
Ending the Game: At the end of the game, players will collect a “menu bonus” as follows:
For each rank of fish (size 1, size 2, etc), award a menu
bonus to the player who has the most recipes of that rank.
The bonus is the same as the rank of fish: $1 for the
size-1 recipes, $2 for the size-2’s, and so on.
If there is a tie for most recipes, all the tied players
receive the full bonus.
After the bonuses are awarded, count up your money.
The player with the most money wins!
Designer’s Notes (James Ernest, 2013)
The current version of this game is set in a strange crossover
universe between France and Japan. The dishes are clearly
Japanese dishes, but some thematic elements remain from the
original French design.
There is an odd abstraction in Fish Cook that dates back to the
original game, in which a “day” seems to have both the concrete
length of one day (fish go bad at the end of each day) and a more
abstract length of “part of one’s career,” which could represent a
number of months or even years. We believe this is a charming
artifact of the design and have made no attempt to fix it.
Fish Cook
Designed by James Ernest. Tested by the Internet, plus the usual
assortment of Cheapass Games guinea pigs. © 2013 Cheapass
Games, Seattle WA. www.cheapass.com.
If you enjoy this game, try our other games. We make lots of them.
Some are free, some are fancy, and some occupy the murky flavor
zone between Sweet Freedom and Tasteful Excess. Some rights
reserved. Art from clipart.com. Published by Cheapass Games,
Seattle WA: www.cheapass.com.
Other False Historical Notes:
Copies of the original game Claude Hubert la Criée are difficult to find.
The game was originally released in France in 1909 as the
first in Jacques de Flandres’ “Jeux Cuisines” series. All the
games in the series were based on the same basic mechanics,
with Claude Hubert la Criée being the original and most popular. Some images from the game appear in catalogs of the time,
and a very small number of intact copies survive in the hands of
private collectors.
Throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s there was an American
revival of the fish cooking game genre, including Owen Pordland’s
Fishcraft, and Works and Sundry’s game Beyond the Sea, both
of which owed a clear debt to de Flandres. There was also a
humorous cooking game called Bring Your Fish to Work Day,
published in the October 1997 issue of Parody Title Magazine.
There is some controversy over the intellectual rights in this
edition, specifically whether the Japanese publisher, ShimizuLeifan Holding Company (SLHC), who released Yum Yum
Super Fish Delicious in 1994, had a clear right to the game
mechanics. It appears that no French patent or trademark
existed on the original game, and so in theory Shimizu-Leifan
was within their rights to copy it with no legal obligations to the
heirs of Jacques de Flandres, the game having certainly fallen
out of copyright.
Hoping to rise above such petty issues as copyright and
trademark law, Cheapass Games is proud to release this English
translation of Yum Yum Super Fish Delicious under license
from SLHC. We hope that our cavalier attitude with regard to
the true pedigree of this work will serve as an homage to de
Flandres’ original high concept of stealing fish recipes without
giving credit.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial - NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy
of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street,
Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. There is a
brief license rights summary on the following page.
Fish Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass Games: www.cheapass.com
Free?
Seriously?
Tell me a little more about that.
Okay, here’s the deal. If I made a great game and sold
it to you for ten bucks, I’d probably keep about a dollar.
If I sold it to a big game company, they’d probably
make a nicer version for thirty bucks, and I’d still get
about a dollar.
The rest of your money would go to printers, distributors, retail stores, and freight companies. And most of
those guys don’t know anything about what makes a
great game.
Mass-producing entertainment is a gamble. It’s a convoluted way for creators to protect their intellectual
property, by selling it in a way that is prohibitively
expensive to counterfeit. And it’s getting a little old.
Why do you pay $30 for a board game? The story goes
like this: the retail price of a game covers the cost of
manufacturing it, and there is no way you could make
your own copy for that price, to say nothing of the
hassle of finding little wooden men in six colors. So,
it’s worth $30 because it costs $30, QED.
But the value in a board game isn’t the manufacturing
cost. It’s the play value. Unfortunately, this means that
some games are priced way out of whack with what
they are worth. And because the big gamble doesn’t
always work out, some of your money helps pay for the
stuff that goes straight to the dump.
I’ve decided to try a different gamble. I’m giving my
games away for free. This way, you can read the rules,
make a copy, and even play the thing, before you
decide what it’s worth.
If you do like my games, I hope you will send me some
money. But I’m also hoping you will share this experiment with your friends. You are my sales force, my
marketing department, my demo team.
You’re also my testers, so if you can think of ways to
improve my games, please share them with me. I’m
easy to find at big gaming conventions, and even easier online. Look for Cheapass Games on Facebook, or
drop me a line at [email protected].
If we do this right, we will get famous and do shaving
ads. But more importantly, we will prove that there is
a better way for a creator to profit from his work.
And nothing has to go to the dump.
Our Creative Commons Agreement
Summary: This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution - Non Commercial - NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
To view a copy of this license, visit:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite
300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
This agreement means...
You are free:
To Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work (in
this case, the electronic files that comprise the work).
Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner
specified by the licensor (but not in any way that suggests that
they endorse you or your use of the work). In this case, “Fish
Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass
Games: www.cheapass.com.”
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or
build upon this work.
With the understanding that:
Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you
get permission from the copyright holder. (For example, a license
to manufacture, or approval to distribute a new set of rules or
graphics, can be obtained under a separate agreement.)
Public Domain — Where the work or any of its elements
is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no
way affected by the license.
Other Rights — In no way are any of the following rights
affected by the license:
• Your fair dealing or fair use rights, or other applicable
copyright exceptions and limitations;
• The author’s moral rights;
• Rights other persons may have either in the work itself or
in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
Notice — For any reuse or distribution, you must make
clear to others the license terms of this work. That means
including all pages of this document, unaltered.
Fish Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass Games: www.cheapass.com
How to Make The Boards and Cards:
Making your own boards and cards for Fish Cook is simple.
Here’s how I do it. If you’re an expert, you can ignore these hints
and do it however you like.
Boards, Step 1: Full-Sheet Labels:
Full-sheet mailing labels are great. Get white ones, not
clear, suitable for your type of printer. You can get them at
any office supply store for about 25¢ each (in packs) and
they will be very handy for making cards and game boards.
Print the boards on full-sheet labels. Don’t cut them
until after you mount them.
These boards are larger than 8.5 x 11, so you will have to
reduce them somewhat to fit on a normal page. Experiment
to maximize your printer’s full printable area.
Board, Step 2: Heavy Card Stock:
Next, you need to apply the labels to heavy boards. Find
something decent that won’t warp. Corrugated cardboard is
okay, or tagboard from a shirt box. For better boards, you
can visit your local framing shop or art supply store, and
see if they have any small scraps of matte board. Or just buy
some matte board or illustration board.
Stick the labels to the boards. Don’t cut them yet.
Cards, Step 1: Paper
You can print the cards on plain white paper and cut
them with a guillotine cutter. Pick a paper thick enough that
the ink doesn’t show through.
Board, Step 3: Clear Contact Paper (optional):
Cards, Step 2: Printing
Clear contact paper (for lining shelves) will make your
boards almost waterproof. This is especially wise if you are
using an inkjet printer. Cut sections of this stuff, larger than
the boards, stick them down carefully, and then proceed to
trimming. Or, if you want “wrapped edges,” you can cut the
boards first, and then apply the contact paper. In that case,
cut it about four inches larger than the boards (two on each
side), and miter the corners so that it will wrap properly.
Print the card fronts file and, if you wish, the card backs
file on the back. Card backs are a matter of personal taste,
and they are not really required. But they do look nice.
Board, Step 4: A Good Guillotine Cutter:
If you don’t have an awesome guillotine paper cutter,
use the one at the local copy shop. Or get one.
Trim the boards using the crop lines. Pretty easy.
Cards, Step 3: Cutting
Perfect cutting doesn’t matter much on these cards, because they are only shuffled once. This means you can just
eyeball it and do pretty well.
If you want more precision, do this: make your first cut
down the interior of every sheet, both ways, hitting the crop
marks as closely as you can. Then lock your cutter depth and
cut all the cards to the same exact width, and finally to the
same exact height.
When you lock your backstop, you will probably not hit
the crop marks exactly on every card. That doesn’t matter.
You care more about getting a uniform height and width
than about hitting the crop marks exactly. That’s why cards
have margins.
Learn More with Videos!
James Ernest’s YouTube channel has how-to videos for
boards, cards, counters, and more. Find links to all these
fine videos, along with articles about game design and other
fun stuff, at: http://cheapass.com/howto
Fish Cook is © and ™ 2013, 2014 James Ernest and Cheapass Games: www.cheapass.com