License to Grill: A Flaming Good Time!

I hope you’ve brought your appetite, tongs, and grill spatula! It’s time to fire up the only grill in town and fan the flames of competition. You are competing against your neighbors in a backyard grilling competition, but there’s only one small grill. So, jockey for elbow room as you grab food from the cooler and get cooking!

License To Grill is a polyomino tile placement game from designers Sylvain Plante and Joe Slack and published by Greater Than Games. It’s for three to five players 14 and up and takes between 30-45 minutes.

Setup

Prep always seems to be slightly different the first time you fire up a grill. In this game, you first need to install the knobs.

If you’ve got the Premium Edition, the metal box is now the grill known as the GTG-9000 (named after the publisher in the style of a grill model).

From there, sort the food tiles into their separate types: Meat, Veggies, and Both. Shuffle the red Meat and yellow Both recipe cards to form the Meat Cooler deck, then shuffle the green Veggie recipe cards to form the Veggie Cooler deck. We found that placing the corresponding tiles with their recipe cards makes things easier in the long run.

Flip the top three cards from each deck to reveal the possible recipes for drafting. Then, lay out the serving tablecloth, folded to the proper size based on player count. It’s marked at the top so you know where to fold to have the proper space.

Place the tan cubes within reach of all players to mark their recipe cards. Place the single-point can tabs in one pile and the five-point bottle caps in another. Each player takes a player board. It’s time to start cooking with gas!

Gameplay

At its core, License To Grill is a polyomino-tile placement and space management game with an action economy.

On your turn, you can only choose two of the many actions:

• Prepare – Take a recipe
• Season – Season a recipe that’s on the Prep side of your player board
• Grill – Place the tile on the grill
• Sauce – Sauce the food on the grill
• Rest – Remove the tile from the grill and place on the Rest side of the board
• Serve – Place the tile on the tablecloth

Maximizing A Recipe’s Points

Each recipe card has multiple trackers on it: Prepare, Grill, and Rest. The Prepare track shows how many turns the recipe can be on the Prep side of your player board before you have to throw it away. Different recipe cards may have a Season bonus underneath the Prepare track for additional points.

Each of these trackers advances at the start of your turn. The Prepare and Rest trackers always advance by one. The Grill tracker is variable based on the settings of the grill.

Much of the game is based on how you and your fellow grillers manage the grill.

Fan The Flames

Certain types of food are meant to be cooked hot and fast, like steaks. Others, like brisket, are meant to be cooked low and slow. And that’s a problem when everyone’s cooking different foods on the same grill surface.

The grill in License To Grill is split into four sections. There is the Main Grill (split into a Meat and Veggie side) and a Warming Rack (also split into a Meat and Veggie side).

Obviously, Meat and Veggies go on their respective sides. The yellow Both recipes can be placed anywhere (even straddling the two sides). Players battle each other for space on the grill. A big cut of meat (like the aforementioned brisket) is going to take up a lot more room than a little bit of garlic.

When a player places a food tile on the grill, they can manipulate the heat settings using the temperature knob. Players can increase or decrease the heat by one when placing a tile.

Careful management of the heat is key: It can help you cook a big hunk of meat faster than anticipated, or it can turn your (or a competitor’s) recipe into ashes.

In one game I played, the grill was so full that another player drafted the smallest available recipe and placed it while raising the heat to maximum. This forced other players to pull their recipes before they wanted to (or in one case, lose the recipe entirely).

During your turn, you can use a free action to move a recipe from the Main Grill to the Warming Rack or vice versa. So if you’re concerned about someone cranking the heat on you, you can always shift that valuable steak to protect it.

Serving, Scoring, And Bonus Actions

Players choose whether they want to optimize their recipes to serve the most delicious, highest scoring food, or just get four recipes done well enough and onto the table.

You’ll want to pay close attention to the spots on the tablecloth when you serve, too. There are certain spots marked with icons representing each of the actions you can take on your turn. When serving a recipe you may cover these spots, which allows you to take the corresponding action immediately, for free. It’s a great way to fight against the tight action economy.

When you serve a recipe you’ll add up all the points from the trackers and any applicable bonuses or penalties, then take the corresponding number of victory point tokens in the form of can tabs and bottle caps.

When a player serves their fourth recipe, it triggers the end of the game. Every other player gets one more turn, then everyone counts up their points. Whoever has the most points has won the backyard grilling competition!

Impressions

It’s not often that these two interests of mine intersect. Barbecue and board games? I’ve never seen it before. That’s why I knew I had to check out License To Grill as soon as I heard about it.

I quite enjoy the thematic aspect of License To Grill. There are plenty of quality details for even the most seasoned backyard pitmasters and kings of the grill to enjoy. There are recipes that allow for plenty of seasoning before the food hits the grill, and others allow for sauces to be applied during the cooking process, just like on our backyard smokers.

To honor the many dads that are grilling enthusiasts, each recipe has a pun-filled tagline that adds laughs to the game. Silly? Absolutely. But as a dad joke enthusiast, I got a kick out of it.

Nearly everything about License To Grill is tight. You’re up against time and tight on space even before your fellow players start upping the temp on the grill. It can feel frustrating as you watch your hard work go up in smoke on the grill or spoil on your player board as you try to juggle everything.

If you don’t love barbecue or grilling, and you’re not a fan of playing games with a lot of moving parts and tight parameters, this game might not be for you. But if you do enjoy the heat of competition and want to craft the perfect grilled food, (and appreciate a few dad jokes in your strategic cut throat game) License To Grill tastes just right.

You can get License to Grill directly from Greater Than Games, on Amazon, or you can ask for it at your friendly local game store!

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Greater Than Games provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of License to Grill for this review.

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