Food trucks, like roll-and-write games, went from unknowns circa 2013 to oversaturated by 2021 to fresh all over again in this the year 2026. At least that’s the hope behind Chicken Fried Dice, a chuck-and-scrawler and food truck simulator from Ashwin Kamath and Rob Newton.

How does it perform? We’ll wait in line together.

Ah, my dream job. (This is a lie.)

When Chicken Fried Dice opens, you have a food truck not unlike the rolling disaster from Jon Favreau’s Chef. In the language of dice, that means your options are limited, confined to a few rerolls, the ability to “chop” a die to divide a large number into two smaller numbers, and dousing an ingredient in sauce to make it seem like something else entirely. Ah, the secrets of the trade. I always suspected that if I slathered a bread crust in non-gluten barbecue sauce, I could legally label it GF.

Those tools are essential. On the surface, Chicken Fried Dice is another roll-and-write. You roll some dice, you write down their digits.

But what sets it apart from the competition is how thoroughly you can knead those rolls. For one thing, this is a simultaneous game. Everybody begins by chucking a handful of dice into a shared pot, then fishing them out one at a time. It’s possible to work fast to secure the best ingredients for yourself, but this is rarely easy. See, for instance, the aforementioned methods for altering your rolls. Getting what you want is often possible, but may require some trimming and/or a dash of luck.

I have never resented an anthropomorphic animal more.

Even more persnickety, though, are the customers lined up outside your truck. I hate them. Everybody hates them. At their most basic, each customer has a list of ingredients they want in their meal. Say, peppers, broccoli, tofu, and more peppers. The first problem is that these represent portions. Each color has to match, of course — bring on the sauce — but each successive digit must also increase, or at the very least match what came before. This turns every order into its own ramen bowl of competing portions, ingredients, and custom instructions.

Naturally, providing customers with their desired meal is how you score points, but there’s so much more to it than that. Customers are willing to stick around between rounds, but the point-earning stars they’ll award your truck diminish over time. Worse, the picky jerks may leave a tip, but only if certain spaces meet their approval. Sometimes this isn’t such a bad thing, like when a number near the bottom requires a low digit. But what about when the bottom-most space demands a 4? And the order is five stonking ingredients long? And the customer doesn’t intend to stick around for more than a few minutes?

As with the best roll-and-writes, Chicken Fried Dice very quickly becomes a game about identifying and enacting one’s priorities. Not every customer will get served, so choosing the best clientele is a must. Those meager tips likely won’t let you improve every station of your food truck, so it becomes necessary to shore up your weak points. Depending on who you feed, little bonuses become available. Free ingredients, various flavors… I’m not sure what’s happening here, because it seems a lot like we’re carving haunches out of satisfied customers to feed the next group, but it does make for some nice combo-building. As your food truck transforms into the renovated sandwich wagon from the latter half of Jon Favreau’s Chef, it becomes possible to serve more and better meals.

Chuck and pluck!

The whole thing is a delight. The race to nab dice works in part because it’s harried but not overly punitive. Barring the occasional bonus, players are only allowed to grab five dice, so it’s rare to find yourself under too much pressure. Upgrading your work stations offers tangible improvements, and we have yet to play without someone showing off the name they invented for their truck. The complexity level can be adjusted, with two modes for using the bonus “flavors” provided by customers, whether a simple cluster of four tracks or a more open-ended picnic minigame. The dice-chopping has even provided a nice way to get my twelve-year-old to think about algebra beyond the confines of her math class.

Oh, and the solo mode is nice. Every truck has a reverse side that shows a different puzzle boss to beat, sort of like the uppity food critic from Jon Favreau’s Chef. I haven’t seen them all yet, in part because the prototype wasn’t content-complete, but the ones I’ve tackled have struck a nice balance between putting up a challenge and affording the player a measure of control over the rival trucker’s moves.

Is it a perfect game? Oh, I dunno. It’s a little airier than I prefer, a little more limited, especially when it comes to things like the upgrades. More often than not, it’s possible to upgrade the entire truck in those five rounds, making the game feel more boxed-in than some of my favorite exemplars of the genre. Chicken Fried Dice is a light game, but not so light that there isn’t some crunch mixed into its rice bowl.

There are five solitaire bots. Or there will be. The prototype only had a few of them.

The short version is that Chicken Fried Dice is something I would play with my sister’s family. They play plenty of games, but require a curated middle ground, neither too light nor as brain-burny as The Anarchy or Fliptown. This is that sort of game: silly but not off-putting, cutely thematic, mathy but not frustratingly so, breezy without zoning me out. To sum it up with a quote by John Leguizamo from Jon Favreau’s Chef: “I’m putting a little corn starch on my huevos, man.”

A prototype copy of Chicken Fried Dice was temporarily provided by the publisher.

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