dicepool Book Club, March 2026
What You Need to Play
- The What Should We Have Tomorrow? source material
- A deck of cards
- Pen and paper/text editor/voice record
In March, we played What Should We Have Tomorrow?, a solo adventure where you prepare and cook for your loved ones over the course of a week. In the game, you base your chef on whoever your little heart desires. I created an amalgam of my favorite chefs and went with a crusty brunch cook. You also create who you're cooking for, and what type of kitchen you're in.
What Should We Have Tomorrow? uses playing cards as its game mechanic. Since it was a single item for the mechanic. It made a lot of sense to me and I liked that I didn't have to switch back and forth to dice/cards/etc. When you set up your pantry, each card corresponds to an individual ingredient. The black cards are dry goods, and the red cards are your fresh or refrigerated goods. You also use the cards to determine the daily weather and mood. This helps to generate question prompts later in the game.
In a former life, I was a breakfast cook, so I found this game to be very enjoyable. I liked thinking about how my pantry ingredients could play together and I had fun thinking of a few outlier ingredients to throw in for an extra challenge. In the game, there are three main play arcs: Shopping, Research, and Talking. Each arc has a different aspect that it adds to the game. For example, you would have a hard time moving forward without shopping, so I spent my first three turns building up my kitchen ingredients. When Shopping, you will jot down notes on the places that you visit, get super detailed if that's your jam. Researching helps you understand your ingredients and loved ones, and Talking allows you to talk with your loved ones and potentially change the mood of the turn.
As you move through the game, you will use ingredients, create leftovers, and eat a meal with your loved ones. If you make your loved one's favorite meal, you will get bonus points. When you eat, chat, and spend time together, you will answer question prompts. My favorite question was, "How will you improve this dish the next time you make it and what suggestions do your loved ones have?" I am always asking people I cook for how I can improve, so I appreciated this question and gave myself the feedback that I really wanted. Much more convenient than real life.
Finally, you clean up and plan for tomorrow. There is a smiley face/frowny face element in the game that made me giggle. If your fresh ingredients go bad, you get a frowny face for wasting produce. You repeat the cooking/eating process until you have completed six days worth of a meal (think breakfast OR dinner, not both). When you come to day seven, you look back on what you have created and you rest. Instead of cooking, you get to order out, go out to dinner, have your loved ones cook for you, or you have a communal meal. You finish your journaling and decide if you are done, or if you want to continue cooking for another week.
I loved that the book provided sample Ingredient Lists, including TWO magical list options. Have you ever wanted to cook dragon? Why not try it out? Overall, the rules were easy to understand. The hardest part of the game, for me, was coming up with food ideas when I got ingredients that didn't really work together. I made a few goblin dinners, in that they were mostly snack plates and slightly feral. I feel like this is a fun game to run through if you are in a cooking rut.
This is not a short game though! Most of the solos I have played through are an hour to three hours max. I felt like this could have done with a few two hour sessions. I could see spending up to ten hours really fleshing out everything so you had a super satisfactory ingredients list and fun cast of characters. Really get into the meat of the game.
Book Club was mixed on this game. It was the least attended session that we've had so far. I think that if we knew that the playthrough needed some extra time, that would have helped set expectations. We all agreed that this would be a little intense for a first solo, unless you happen to be really into cooking.
My game wish list is small for this one, I would like the Talking and Research sections to be more impactful or to be removed, as I found they didn't add much for me. The sample Ingredients Lists leaned heavily Asian, which was delightful, but could be a sticking point for more literal folks trying to create their own ingredients list with other ingredients. All-in-all, I loved this game and was a little sad that it didn't resonate as well for the book club.
What will you have tomorrow?