The Order of the Oven Mitt is a board game you can eat after playing

We would describe ourselves as avid devourers of cardboard here at Tabletop Gaming, but sometimes we’re looking for a game to consume that doesn’t taste like laminate and involve us having to order spare components online, y’know?

Well, stop sucking on that die like a neverending gobstopper and scrape that mayo off your meeples, because indie game designer and cook Jenn Sandercock has come up with an entire cookbook of recipes that double as playable board games.

That’s right – you bake or make all the pieces for the games out of standard ingredients, play the games and then eat them afterwards. Or during, if you’re a particularly sore loser.

Sandercock has been working on her edible games for around five years, collecting them into the Edible Games Cookbook, which is headed to Kickstarter on June 20th.

The collection includes both sweet and savoury options, with some of Sandercock’s past projects including Gingerbread Friends – a trivia-based game where correct answers mean eating gingerbread lids, with other prizes hidden underneath – and Patisserie Code, a cryptic puzzle game set in World War I France where the patisseries act as secret codes. There’s also the frankly hilarious J-Wobbler, where the board is a slab of jelly and players have to wibble the tray around to move a jawbreaker onto squares with gummy bears inside. The reward? Jelly and gummy bears, of course.

You can get a taste of the cookbook right now, because Sandercock has made one of its recipes available for free as a sample chapter.

The Order of the Oven Mitt is an abstract chess-like game made of a gingerbread board and cookie pieces, where the pieces are moved in the classic knight L shape. The aim is to land on ‘sacred squares’ and eat them, with the person that eats most winning – although, everyone wins really and becomes a knight in the Order of the Oven Mitt.

Gameplay variants are included, as well as advice for vegetarians, those with allergies and more to help customise the recipe to suit their needs.

From the look of the preview chapter, the cookbook looks to be a beautifully-made exploration of game design – with the benefit that, even if a game isn’t for you, it’ll still be delicious to eat. We can’t wait to get our teeth stuck in later this month.