Hot and Fresh ideas for Hot & Fresh

I was chatting about this game with Nando today and I have some new ideas for it. Better jot them down before I forget!

I wasn't ever really happy about the system in which players obtain orders to deliver. There was a sort of track, where Order cards were turned up, and players would take orders from the track to deliver. If they stayed on the track too long then they got pushed off the bottom and went to the 'stale order' pile, and you could deliver one (no tip) for a Kudos marker from the boss. That was pretty lousy, and it was intended to be just a placeholder until I thought of something better. Today I thought of something better!

I think Order cards will be drawn like Tickets in Ticket to Ride- when you arrive at the store, as a free action, you may either draw 1 face up Order from the Order Rack, or draw 2 (3?) Order cards from the face down deck and you must keep at least 1 of them. Any Orders you don't keep are placed face up in the Order Rack for any player to take later. There's limited space in the Order Rack, so if it's full maybe you think twice about drawing 2 face down cards, because that means you'll have to keep them both. As a turn action a player could do the same, which I presume means you'd draw face down, and keep a card that is near another card that's already in the Rack, then you'd draw that one too so you can deliver both in one trip.

I think that change alone would probably be a decent idea, but when chatting about adding interaction to the game I thought of the following... Ovens. Suppose that there's a limited number of ovens, maybe 1 fewer than the number of players. Before an Order can be delivered, the appropriate pizza must be 'baked' in an oven. This process consists of taking the appropriate Pizza card from a stock of Pizza cards and placing it in an oven slot on the board. After some amount of time, all cards in ovens advance to the next slot. After 2 or 3 slots in the oven, the card will come out onto the shelf where any player may take it to deliver one of their orders. I think this might interject some player interaction as well as some degree of forward thinking. An important point might be that the pizza card distribution could be set, for example, more people would want plain or pepperoni than want olives + green peppers.