Tips on the Top Chef Game

Basics

• Two things are essential for beating this game: time management and knowledge of ingredients. Throughout the entire game, you are on a clock to make the best meal you can. But even with ample time, situations can arise that cause Anna, your cook, to falter and stutter, wasting time. Make sure you are always doing something---never let time slip by without accomplishing something. In the same vein, always stick with one station before moving on. In the game, you can move from cooking station to cooking station and complete the tasks located there--placing the correct ingredients in the correct slots. However, if you start at a station and then move on, you will not be fully awarded points for that initial station until you go back and complete it. Staying in one place until you have completed the task will help you rack up as many points as you can and manage your time wisely.

  Also, know your ingredients. There will be times when the game asks you for a red ingredient, and you can simply put in a red onion. But there are other times when you are asked to put in a red ingredient and a spicy ingredient, so instead of putting the onion in the red slot and not have anything for your spicy slot, you can put it into the spicy slot and slip, say, paprika into your red slot. Mix and match, but know what ingredients you have, and what can go where.

Combos

• Create combos! This also involves knowing your ingredients and utilizing your time. Once Anna creates a combo, bonus points are awarded to your score, which will help with the judging. Combos are always useful; at certain levels they are necessary. To create a combo, simply place an ingredient on the cooking surface, and before it's done cooking, add another ingredient to the surface that will complement the first. Adding mozzarella cheese onto a cooking tomato, for instance, will give you a combo and bonus points.

  Don't stop there, however. Keep adding ingredients that work well together for larger and larger combos. Just because you achieve one combo doesn't mean the rest are nullified for those ingredients. If you place bacon onto your tomato and cheese, then you get another, larger combo. But, as these ingredients only cook for so long, make sure to do all of this mixing quickly. If the tomato finishes cooking before you can add the cheese, then if you add the cheese, you won't get a combo. Manage your time.

Power-Ups

• Use your power-ups! Power-ups are a point of the game designed to help you out, so use them! At the beginning of each level, the game offers you a certain number of power-ups, depending on the level number and difficulty. Once you move up in the game, you will receive more power-ups of different, newer kinds. As the power-ups are awarded at the start of each level, use them up before the end--they do not roll over into the next level, and once you lose them, they're gone.

  There are two main categories of power-ups, with many kinds of power-ups within each grouping. The first is the ingredient shuffling power-up, which allows you to shuffle your ingredients if you don't have any that you can use. If you've run out of the proper kinds of meat, for example, then you can use the meat shuffling power-up to switch around your ingredients and obtain new ones---ones that will hopefully be useful to you.

  The second type of power-up is the cooking power-up, and this is widely encompassing. There are power-ups that allow your experience, intuition and skill to raise up for 30 seconds, which will help you decide what ingredients to use if you become stumped. The skill power-ups make Anna cook faster. The experience power-ups highlight ingredients that will give you combos, allowing you to gain more points. And finally, the intuition power-ups help you realize which ingredients should go into which cooking slot if you become stumped. Overall, skill gives you more time, intuition helps you match the ingredients to finish the level and experience helps you match ingredients to make combos and get more points.