Gap Closer Games

Your goal in Rival Restaurants is to be the first restaurant to reach 20 popularity points and be crowned "The Wiener!" Players earn popularity points by buying and trading ingredients and using them to "cook" (complete) recipes. The more advanced the recipe, the more points it is worth. Each day, players go through three phases. Players collect their income for the day and decide where they want to go. Turn economy is crucial because players are not allowed to move for the rest of the day once their location is chosen. After that, players have one minute to purchase as much as they want, but only from the location they are in. Players can also trade/swap with anyone in the game, not just the people in their location. Finally, any player who has all the ingredients needed for their recipe can cook it and collect popularity points. Additionally, each player controls a chef equipped with their own "chef power". Chef powers are asymmetrical and allow players to bend the rules to their advantage. The base game of Rival Restaurants features twelve chefs and in addition each player must choose a restaurant to play at at the start of the game, with each restaurant having a unique level-up structure with rewards for reaching 3, 7 and 12 popularity points . Finally, players can also choose to purchase "action cards", that is, development cards that are usually single-use.

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In the quest to be called “The Hippest Spot in Town,” aspiring chefs and restaurateurs must do everything they can to become “The Wiener!” to be crowned. In Back for Seconds, the very first expansion of Rival Restaurants, players can enjoy 8 new chefs, 6 additional restaurants and 9 brand new action cards. The biggest addition to the Rival Restaurants universe, however, is… the Event Deck. The event deck contains 15 event cards. Events are triggered every other day and affect all players. Players see events a day in advance so they can prepare for them and strategize. The Event Deck is sure to spice up the competition as players are forced to adjust their strategy on the fly.

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Illiterati is a real-time, cooperative word game where players work together to form words and bind books. Each player starts the game with five letter tiles and a red burnt book that shows a condition that player must fulfill to recover that book, for example, using 8+ tiles with at least 3 green symbols, creating words that are all animals, and so forth. A library of three random tiles is placed in the center of the table. The game takes place in three-minute rounds and before the round starts, each player draws seven letter tiles from the draw bag. Once the countdown starts, players can talk and trade letters as much as they want with each other and the library to try to achieve their goal. Once the time is up, if the library contains too many letters you will trigger a burn event. Turn all these letters over, remove one from the game and throw any excess letters into the discard bag. If you burn too many letters, you lose the game. If you haven't burned any letters and you've achieved your goal, turn over your red book and pull out a blue soaked book to give yourself a new goal. At the end of the round, you draw an Illiterati Villain card and resolve its effect. If you previously drew this rogue - and the deck contains five copies of five rogues - then all previous effects of this rogue also resolve into a chain attack. Rogue attacks often strip letters from words, meaning you have to create new words with what's left during the next round to avoid burning another letter. Once all players have completed two books - or three or four, depending on your difficulty level - you draw another book, the Final Chapter, with all players having to complete this challenge in the same round, for example by using 12+ tiles and creating words in which all your vowels are the same color. If all players complete this goal in the same round, you win; if even one person fails, another villain attacks and you draw new tiles to start a new round. You can discard up to seven tiles at the start of a round and draw again, but you must draw a second Illiterati Villain card that round - and if the Villain deck runs out, you lose.

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