Cheese Factory Review — Make the best cheese, win it all

There is so much value to having a game that you can quickly get on a table, easily explain, and start playing. My criteria tends to be that the game needs to be lightweight in terms of tokens/cards/board, the rules are maybe a sheet or two, and within 1 game, you feel like you don't need to reference the rules again.

Cheese Factory, by Jason Anarchy Games and artwork by Tiny Snek Comics, fills this niche extremely well, with maybe a few home rules, it's a perfect game to fill 30 minutes. Let's dig in.

Cheese Factory is a card collection game in which players compete to get to 20 points of cheese first. Granted, the cheese is no where close to real cheese, and I'm fairly certain time machines are not used in cheese production, so those hoping for a cheese simulator should look elsewhere, or try this, because it's hilarious using Goart Milk to make Marbo Cheese with your chef, who also happens to be a hilarious looking possum.

The artwork is bizarre and minimal, thanks to Tiny Snek Comics. Everything has a bit of humor injected into it, which is great, because it makes cards memorable, the chefs cute, and it's very approachable for folks of all ages. Also, Goart Milk just makes me laugh, and I can't figure out why. Goart.

On game setup, players create a "market" in front of them that consists of 3 tracks: Ingredients, Recipes, and Machines. They draw a hand of ingredients, and on each turn take 3 actions, which is where some of the strategic depth starts to show. Will you take a card from the market? That'll cost you 2 points. Want to use the power of your chef to take a risk and guess a card a player is holding? Once per game, and if you miss, well, sorry? Use that awesome machine you have that cancels out an ingredient? 1-2 points. Make a cheese? 1 point, but make sure you have the ingredients.

It's not much more difficult than that, and also the source of some criticism. The game, while fun, has some elements that are kind of imbalanced. For example, the rules bring up the power of a Cheese Fire, which allows you to dismantle an opponent’s machine...but there's only 2 cards in the whole deck. With such low odds, it's not worth it, especially when a player gets several machines running at once, the game becomes more of a "race to 20" scenario. The Chef powers feel this way as well. They are one-time use powers that, in my case, I either didn't use or when I did, I failed, essentially wasting a point I could have used to either acquire ingredients, make cheese, or get a new machine.

As you can see, the artwork, packaging, and quality of the cards is excellent. For our testing, we took the game out into "the field", which meant we'd have to deal with dropping cards, trying to comprehend each other in a loud setting, and of course, the fear of getting liquids on the cards. Happy to report that all of these happened, and didn't affect gameplay.

Moving forward, I would love to see some edits to this game. Make it chaotic. Allow players to destroy more often. Make the Chef powers either useful more than once or make them more breaking. Of course, you could house rule some of these. In the Kickstarter edition, there's a method for making your own cheeses, so it's not too far of a stretch to create some more cheese fires, curd explosions, and non-flammable tokens (they're fire extinguishers).

Come for the flavor and art, and stick around for a few rounds of the game. As I mentioned at the top of this review, this game is meant for quick play, either on the go, or maybe in between games on a heavier night.