Sold initially at the Indie Games Night Market, Joseph Z. Chen’s Flip Stack Burger Shack has all the markings of an indie darling: its not-quite-smooth discs look great on the table, the gameplay is tactile and amusing, and it even comes in a bag. (All the best indies come in a bag.) But what I least expected from it was a cerebral puzzle that reduced my brain to onion jam.

Sandwich artistry.

Picture this. It’s your first day on the job. The burger shack down at the beach is your haunt, and there are already people lining up at the window. The orders are coming fast and hot. Classic burger! Tomato grilled cheese! Diamant deluxe! Lavender burger! Your assistant begins flinging ingredients your way. It’s all you can do to flip the piles onto the proper buns.

This isn’t quite how Flip Stack Burger Shack plays — nor does this particular shack deserve the highest food safety rating — but it’s close enough. Drafting from shared stacks, players take handfuls of ingredients, flip them this way and that, and slop them into something resembling an edible hamburger. Ideally before their coworkers can snipe the order out from under them.

Let’s get the quibbles out of the way. For a game about flipping burgers, Flip Stack Burger Shack is a strangely deliberate event. When you’re trying to assemble a particular sandwich — let’s say an Oklahoma — you’ll be staring at a diagram. In this case, a bun, patty, cheese, and onion, topped off with another bun. But building that burger is tougher than it looks, especially when the stacks begin to accumulate some elevation. At any given time, you might be staring at a single ingredient, some lettuce, the stack that was replenished right before your turn, but then ever-increasing stacks that might reach a half-dozen or more ingredients at the same time. Those slop piles can be useful, but they also tend to be tougher to use. This requires the titular flipping and stacking, often to separate out the necessary ingredients before they arrive atop the correct sandwich.

Or maybe you could chuck the whole thing into the composter and, via culinary magic, produce a more desirable ingredient from the bag. Sayonara, entire heads of wilted lettuce; say hello to a single sliced tomato.

Either way, this process is anything but rapid. More often, Flip Stack Burger Shack is thinky. Ponderous, even. With four players, the downtime between turns threatens to become bloated. Like unrinsed lettuce or a burger patty left too long in a surfer’s hatchback.

Handy burger diagrams.

But with the right crowd of players or the right player count, whichever lets you move at a steady clip, that same thinky edge makes Flip Stack Burger Shack an unexpected treat.

I’ll give an example. Most burgers need buns. Easy. Most burgers also need patties. As a result, it’s a relatively safe bet to nab extra buns and patties. But what happens when the easy pickings have been nabbed? Now the game shifts into riskier territory. With some clever acquisitions from the ingredient counter, not to mention a few timely flips, it’s possible to head off rival sandwich artists.

Those flips, by the way, are handled with perfect ease. Any time you pick up a stack, whether from the market or your own plates, you’re free to grab some or all of the tokens, and then you’re also free to flip them as you see fit. This doesn’t solve every problem; indeed, it’s surprising how often you’ll need multiple maneuvers just to lever a tomato out from under an ill-placed slice of cheese. But it provides some truly pleasant tactility. It helps that the tokens are wood. One of the benefits of being a small-batch production is that the whole thing’s aesthetic is perfectly minimalist, from the painted tokens to the receipt-book burger diagrams. Flip Stack Burger Shack isn’t the most innovative title in the world, but it feels lovely to handle.

That handling is the core of the entire experience. Some games are about big ideas. Others are about sequences, or engines, or fancy math. This one is about the joy of moving things, shifting and rotating them, feeling their grain on your fingertips, and doing your darnedest to keep the right stack in your mind’s eye.

Even from a distance, these burgers are handsome.

And, well, that’s all there really is to it. Flip Stack Burger Shack is another indie market title that, like last week’s Imps, will hopefully draw enough attention that it gets picked up for wider publication. Just don’t report the shack to the food inspector’s office. I’m pretty sure none of these burgers are gluten, meat, or dairy free.

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