Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Cooking Under Pressure
As I get older, my taste in gaming and themes shifts. License to Grill is a game I probably wouldn’t have given a single look ten years ago. But now that my grilling skills are more critical to my identity as a “middle-aged white dude with a beer belly,” there’s something about the theme that just works for me. Sure, it’s a stereotype that every dad-type out there is a wannabe grillmaster, but in this situation, the stereotype hits a little close to home.
License to Grill is a tetromino placement game for up to five competing grill masters. For some reason, they all have to cook on the same grill top. Just roll with it; the lore here isn’t what’s important. You’ll have to take every step of the way seriously, from prepping your dish and seasoning it to throwing it on the grill and saucing it, all the way to letting it rest for just the right amount of time before serving it. Each step must be timed just right to put out the best dish possible.
While tetromino games aren’t my favorite genre of board game, this one had enough unique bells and whistles to make me want to try it. So… is the juice worth the squeeze?
The Heat is On
The real charm for me with this game is in its simplicity. Every turn you take is lightning-fast and simple. First, advance your recipes. Each recipe has cubes to track how long it spends preparing, grilling, or resting. Then, you take two actions. You can grab a new recipe from the supply and put it in your prep area, season a recipe in your prep area, move a recipe from your prep area to the grill, sauce a recipe on the grill, move a recipe from the grill to your rest area, or finally serve a completed recipe to the table. It sounds like a lot, but it’s essentially four actions that move your recipe to the next phase or two actions to leave it where it is to score a few more points.
No matter your stage, you’re fighting with different boards to fit your recipes where you want them. Your preparation and resting areas are personal, so you’re only wrestling with your own recipes there. However, the central competitive regions of the board are the grill and the tablecloth. The grill features two distinct zones, one for meats and one for veggies. All players must place their recipes on the same grill, meaning there are advantages for you to put that unwieldy Hawaiian pizza in an inconvenient spot to box out others from having grilling space. Similarly, the tablecloth is where you’ll put your finished recipes to serve them. The tablecloth also has limited space, and importantly, placing a finished recipe on the tablecloth gives you bonus actions based on where you put it.
Competing for space in a tetromino game is nothing new, even though the theme of placing items on a grill is quite well done. For anyone who has been the grillmaster at a big barbecue or cookout, you’ll know the feeling of rearranging things like Tetris to get everything on the grill at once. My favorite bit of interaction, though, comes from the temperature knobs on the grill. When you place a recipe on the grill, you can crank the heat up or down one space. This will affect the rate at which ALL players’ recipes cook, meaning you can use it to overcook someone’s steak or crank it down to make someone’s burger take much longer to cook.
Grillin’ Me Softly
The mechanics are simple enough that this game’s real selling points are its theme and components. I can safely say every grillmaster out there will get a kick out of this game. If you’re a serious grillmaster, you’ll appreciate how the mechanics match the real-world food items being presented. Skewers, for example, take longer to prepare and season than most things. Pineapples cook and get overcooked fast, so you must pull them off quickly. Quiche takes forever to cook in its cast iron skillet, but it’s worth many points if you get it right. Outside of that, each recipe card has an appropriate dad joke that will make you giggle or groan, depending on your relationship with bad puns.
The components here are also excellent. The tetromino pieces and score tokens are basic cardboard punchouts, but the box itself comes alive as a game piece. The box doubles as the grill board with a lid that lifts to easily store components underneath, making it a very efficient use of table space. There are big plastic knobs that attach at the bottom of the grill board, letting you physically turn the dials up and down when adjusting the grill temperature. Furthermore, the tablecloth where you serve your recipes is a literal tablecloth (in miniature, of course) that folds neatly back into the box. All these little flourishes add to the immersion of the experience.
That being said, this is one game where I wouldn’t recommend springing for the premium edition. The premium edition has a large tin box that the standard game box goes inside. This tin box also has the grill board on it, so I happily put my temperature knobs in the box for my first play of the game. Upon finishing, I realized the knobs wouldn’t come out of the lid, meaning I now had a game box to stack on my shelf where the knobs made it uneven, and I couldn’t stack anything on top of it! Not to mention, the tin lid tends to warp and not sit perfectly even, which can make tile-laying an annoying experience. If you’re going to grab the game, the cardboard grill top featured in the box itself is a better experience.
Closing Thoughts
This family-friendly crowd-pleaser will delight parents with its dedication to theme and goofy humor. Kids will enjoy it, and it’s accessible enough to families that I wholeheartedly recommend the standard edition to anyone looking for a game in this genre. Sylvain Plante and Joe Slack, this game’s designers, are making quite the name for themselves in the family-friendly board game space, as they also nailed the theme and feel for Mayan Curse, which just recently delivered its crowdfunding campaign.
For me, this is likely a game I’ll be keeping at my parent’s house for when I visit. It’s the right level of light gameplay that they can tolerate, and it has a theme that appeals to them. My sniff test for whether a game is worth keeping on my shelf is whether it does anything better than things I already own. For me, there’s just not enough room on my shelf for another tetromino game that isn’t doing anything revolutionary. It helps that I don’t have kids, so I’m mostly judging it for an all-adult audience of heavy strategy board gamers. I sold my copy of Isle of Cats earlier this year because I felt it wasn’t strong enough compared to Planet Unknown as a tetromino-laying game. If I wanted a similar mechanic with a more family-friendly theme, I’d lean toward the anthropomorphic critters of Wild Tiled West. However, some may take issue with the violence of that game for kids of a certain age.
For those who resonate with the theme and are missing a tetromino game in your collection, License to Grill is a fine gateway to get into the genre. It will be especially palatable to those who get into the theme of it and want to embarrass their kids with horrible puns. That’s not a slight against the game—I LOVE a terrible dad joke. But if you’ve already got another tetromino laying game in your collection or you’re not sold on the genre, License to Grill won’t set your world on fire. It’s not a fine steak; it’s more like a solid hot dog. But who doesn’t love a good hot dog hot off the grill now and again?
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