Hibachi Review: Chaos & Cooking in a Family-Friendly Food Dexterity Game
Compete to complete recipes in a chip-flinging kitchen showdown
💎 Rated 7.0/10 on BGG w. just 928 ratings💎
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Hibachi. The chip-throwing looked a touch gimmicky, but it turns out there’s more going on here than I thought. It’s a party game on the surface, but scratch a little deeper and it can get quite tactical…
📊 Quick stats
💡 Designer: Marco Teubner
🖨️ Publisher: Grail Games
📅 Released: 2021
🧑🏻🤝🧑🏿 Players: 2-4
🎂 Age: 10+
⚖️ Weight: 1.57/5
⏱️ Time: 45 minutes
🧩 Game Overview
The chef’s hands blur across the grill. Flames leap, spatulas clash and ingredients fly. Dinner at a teppanyaki restaurant is part meal, part spectacle.
Hibachi tries to bring some of that sizzling chaos to your game table.
At its core, it’s a game about gathering ingredients to complete orders. But unlike most set collection games, here you’re physically tossing poker chips onto the board to claim what you need. The board is the grill, with bowls showing various ingredients as well as four action spaces offering strategic bonuses.
Each of your six chips has a unique value and you throw them facedown, aiming to land them on specific bowls without leaning over the board’s edge. In a four-player game, you’ll throw three per round one at a time in turn order.
Once everyone’s done throwing, the Head Chef (first player) chooses the order in which bowls resolve. Chips on each ingredient are flipped. Players can then sell a matching ingredient card for the total value of all chips on that space.
Buying ingredients is where things heat up. If any matching ingredient cards are available, the player with the highest chip total in the bowl gets first pick, but at a steep price: the full value of their own chips. Next in line pays their total for whatever’s left. Bid low and you risk missing out. Bid high and your wallet thins fast. Managing your money is key.
Then comes the cooking phase. In turn order, players complete recipes by handing in the required ingredients. If you’ve picked up any chilli cards — consolation prizes for invalid throws — two of them can be traded in for any one missing ingredient. Turn order is critical here. Once a recipe is completed, it’s gone and not replaced until the start of the next round. If you’re late to cook, you might go hungry.
That’s why claiming the Head Chef role is powerful. You decide bowl resolution order and cook first. The bonus action space that lets you take the cute soy sauce first player token should be a battleground.
The first player to complete three recipes wins immediately. Otherwise, play continues until someone does.
For the finer details, here’s our usual G.A.M.E. breakdown.
🧠 G.A.M.E. Analysis
🎲 G - Gameplay
(pacing, downtime, intuitiveness)
Hibachi is a game of two halves. The chip-throwing is the big draw, but it’s over quickly. What follows — the cleanup, selling and buying — is far more procedural.
The Head Chef is meant to guide this phase, but in practice, if you’re playing with new players, the teacher will have to quarterback it. And if a lot of chips land in bowls, it can bog you down. Ironically, the more successful your aim, the more arduous the admin becomes. It can tiptoe into tedious.
I’ve taught this to two groups now and the buying/selling rules always need repeating. It’s not that the rules are hard. It’s just a fiddly phase to track cleanly.
⭐ Score: 14/25
🎨 A - Art & Theme
(visual appeal, thematic coherence, component quality)
The theme is light, but makes complete sense. Nothing here feels pasted on. You’re gathering ingredients, fulfilling orders and trying not to screw it up. It all fits together nicely.
The artwork is functional, if a little dated. Despite releasing in 2021, the colour palette feels more old-school Euro than modern production. It’s all quite dark. That said, there’s a new version out this year that looks a lot brighter.
The anthropomorphic animals on the box and money add some charm, but they’re entirely cosmetic.
The chips are proper poker-style chips, nice and weighty. The tactile element they bring to the game is ace.
⭐ Score: 15/25
⚙️ M - Mechanics
(design elegance, balance, novelty)
I’d say that Hibachi isn’t as light as it first appears - there’s real edge to the tactics if you’re paying attention. The BGG weight rating of 1.57 undersells it somewhat. It’s closer to a 2, particularly with experienced gamers.
The best and most ingenious part of the game design is that you can manipulate the market deliberately. In one game, I needed meat and saw another player needed it too. I threw two high-value chips in the bowl to their one, bought the only two cards and left them hanging. I paid through the nose, but it won me the game. That kind of cutthroat move makes the game more interesting than the cozy cover suggests.
There’s also a brutal catchup mechanism. When the chilli cards run out and someone needs one, whoever has the most loses all of theirs. So you can’t hoard chilli cards and have to watch the dwindling draw pile like a hawk.
The party-game energy masks a game that actually rewards planning. That’s a definite strength.
⭐ Score: 19/25
😄 E - Enjoyability
(fun factor, replayability, emotional response)
There’s no denying this game is a hoot. The hilarity of terrible throws that end up on the floor. The hands-on-heads moments when someone misses the bowl they desperately needed or is shunted off a prime spot by somebody else’s wayward chip.
Everyone was laughing and smiling. It’s just a shame the clean up/market phases drag a bit and suck some of the momentum out of that fun.
You could play this multiple times and it won’t get stale, so the replayability is pretty high.
Both groups I showed Hibachi to very much enjoyed it and said they’d like to play again, which says a lot.
⭐ Score: 22/25
🔨 Final Verdict
Hibachi isn’t perfect, but it brings something fresh to the tired world of food-based set collection. There’s a tactical undercurrent bubbling through it that will appeal to seasoned gamers and it bridges the gap nicely between party game and something more.
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