Get Beefy

You are actors vying for the lead role in Being Chud, a musical about the enormous life and times of Cameron “Chud” Chudthorpe: glutton, yodeler, and Ig Nobel prize-winning genetic engineer who invented the gene that makes animal flesh taste and smell like barbecue sauce.

Being triple-threats, you nailed your auditions. The only problem is none of you is beefy enough to portray the Chud. Therefore, the director has decided that whoever among you can gain the most weight will win the role.

Like Robert De Niro bulking up for Raging Bull and Renée Zellweger plumping for Bridget Jones’s Diary (and very much unlike Christian Bale emaciating himself for The Machinist), you must engorge — by eating a plentiful yet balanced diet of steak, fries, pizza, and canned spinach.

A scoring formula applied at the end of each round determines how good your diet is for weight gain. If, at the end of a round, you have the best diet, you earn a star. Whoever earns the most stars wins the role of Chud.

Dump the pieces in a pile in the middle table. On your turn, roll the die to determine how many to take from the pile. Of the pieces you take, add half to your own diet and distribute the remainder among your opponents.

As you wreck some of your opponents' diets by imbalancing their collections, make sure you don't inadvertently imbalance your own collection as well, nor overlook an opponent's gains and give them an easy path to win.

A round ends when there are no more pieces to take from the center pile, at which point scores are calculated. The scoring formula rewards players who have collected a lot of food, and more importantly, collected it evenly.

To win, you must plan ahead and eat strategically to prevent your fellow actors from becoming beefier than you while you optimize your own diet. A little luck won't hurt either.