Борщ (Borscht)

About this board game

Борщ (Borscht) is a 20-minute card game for 2–7 players, released in 2024, in which players gather ingredients, trade products, and cook their chosen borscht.

At the beginning of the game, each player chooses a recipe. Your borscht might be made with pears, beans, or even fish, giving the cooking challenge a different ingredient focus from the start.

Finding some ingredients is easier than others. Potatoes may be easy to find and inexpensive, while prunes require more searching in the market. On your turn, you can manage the products in your hand and use the market to improve what you have.

• Exchange several products from your hand for one more expensive product from the market.
• Exchange several cheaper market products for one expensive product of your own.
• Simply draw cards from the deck.

The main action in Борщ is cooking your dish. To do so, lay out every ingredient listed on your recipe, then add sour cream and dill to taste. You can also use pepper to make your competitors’ borscht more spicy.

With its ingredient recipes, product exchanges, market choices, and seasoning options, the game turns the search for the right ingredients into a compact cooking challenge. Decide when to trade, when to draw, and how to complete the borscht in front of you.