The humble hamburger has an almost mythical place in Western cultural history. From cheeseburger rain and adventures in White Castle, to an angry Samuel L. Jackson and a family sitcom in a burger shack, you don’t have to look too far to get a burger fix in popular culture. Why, even the Smithsonian thinks it’s the quintessential American meal.

So, to the team here at Rule & Make - an indie tabletop games developer based in Australia’s sunshine state of Queensland - the idea of publishing a game based entirely on the art of burger-making just made sense. That and Matt Parkes, who designed Burger Up, had come up with a very simple and neat layer-stacking mechanic made it even more appealing. And yes, we all love a good burger...

For those not familiar, Burger Up is a card-drafting, puzzle-matching, and hand-management light strategy game that challenges up to four players to build the biggest, most epic burgers they can from a shared marketplace of ingredients. Each chef is racing against the other to build amazing burgers and fight for that all-important customer dollar. Don’t just take our word for it, some of the creations our fans have already come up with are genuinely epic!

A typical turn plays out across four phases. You start where all good burger chefs start — at the market, buying additional ingredients to add to your hand and help you along your way to burger stardom. Your next phase is all about placing ingredients, up to three, on any two of your buns. Phase three asks players one simple question: have you successfully completed a burger order placed by an eager and waiting customer? If yes, great! Complete the burger and claim your reward. Finally, it’s time to clean up and refill the market for the next player, discarding and drawing up to four ingredients.

The game ends when there are no more top bun cards left to fulfil the remaining orders. At this point, play continues for one final round until it reaches the first player, at which point the game ends. We like to think of this point as our representation of the restaurant closing down for the day; even burger chefs need a break sometimes, too! We’ve found it’s an intuitive way to end the game, giving players a sense of closure as they watch the orders deck thinning. In terms of game balance, once the orders deck runs out, there’ll likely still be a couple of pending orders left. This gives all players a chance to finish up on their in-progress burgers before the game finally ends.

If there’s one pro tip we’d give our future burger creators it’s this: it’s not necessarily the best plan to hold back on placing your ingredients only on burgers that match a pending order exactly. The top bun requirements can be an additive, meaning ingredients not mentioned in the burger requirements are allowed, so it’s typically safer to put down ingredients even if it doesn’t match a requirement in the hopes that a matching top bun will show up eventually. Bigger, in most cases, is better.

That said, there are a few top buns with strict requirements such as “no meat”. These can throw a spanner in the works, so it’s best to reserve one of your work-in-progress burgers for these occasions. Lastly, we recommend that you use the spatula whenever you can since the loss of two points is most often made up by the burger you are then able to score.

As you can tell by the description above, the core mechanic for the game is the puzzle-matching element. The theme and the systems we used work together really well, and we think do a good job of symbolizing the effort a burger chef takes to construct their masterpiece. In practice, due to how the ingredient requirements pan out, it can lead to some hilariously disgusting or amazingly tasty looking burgers, which is analogous to sometimes, even with the best intentions, a chef can make duds or masterpieces. Burgers as art!

When it came to its development, the game came together rather quickly. Matt had the game out of design and into a playable state within a week, though it took a further three months to transition from ‘playable’ to ‘fun’. It’s an important distinction, and one we try to spend a lot of time perfecting, especially when working with submissions from other local designers. The next step is harder still; going from ‘sometimes fun’ to ‘consistently fun’, which requires a whole stack of playtest and balance work to ensure it met our requirements: an accessible game that is quick to pick up, with high replayability and thoroughly enjoyable, to boot.

We’ll be the first to admit, however, we’re not trailblazers. The food-game genre has certainly had a bit of a renaissance in the last few years, from Food Chain Magnate to another locally produced game in Sushi Go (shout outs to fellow Aussie designer, Phil Walker-Harding). Games about food, perhaps, have an edge over other genres due to how relatable they are. Not everyone will get the chance to fight in a zombie war, but everyone has to eat, right?!

Designing and publishing a food game also offered us a nice change of pace, especially given our previous flagship games were both strongly on the “gamer” end of the spectrum. We went through some nervous lead-up weeks when we worried if a game with a more casual theme, even one as universally understood as burgers, would ever appeal to our fans. But, it was also exciting and even liberating to work on a game with such a simple premise, and we’ve definitely been relieved by the initial positive feedback from the market. We’re very much looking forward to our partnership with Greenbrier Games to ensure as many people can turn their hand at burger creation as possible.

While it’s been a labour of love for the team here, we’ve had an absolute blast bringing this game through from idea to playable product. We’ve been humbled by the positive reaction from people who have played the game already, and we can’t wait to see more epic burger stacks being created the world over in the months to come!

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About the authors: Alistair is a software engineer by trade that fell into games publishing with long time colleague, and friend, Allen Chang. Together they founded Rule & Make where they put their passion for tabletop gaming to good use, first creating accessories before publishing their own games. David, a passionate fan of burgers, is R&Ms PR guy helping to bring our little Aussie game company to the world. Burger Up is the 5th game that Rule & Make has published.