Naughty magic students have used spells to bleach the food ingredients needed for tonight's dishes, disrupting the chef from cooking dinner. The poor old chef can't undo the spells because his vision is blurred, so the kitchen elves need to use magic potions to re-dye the bleached ingredients and try to protect them from the gluttonous magic garbage bin and further attacks from naughty students.
In Magi Kitchen, five wooden ingredients are placed in the middle of the table and the eighty cards are dealt out evenly among the players; cards show either a bleached food item (that is, a white carrot, white cucumber, etc.), a dye, a garbage can, or a student.
On a turn, a player turns over the top card from her draw pile and places it in a personal magic pile. If both a bleached ingredient and the matching colored potion are visible on players' magic piles, then players race to grab the proper wooden ingredient; whoever does so claims the magic piles showing these items and places them under her draw pile. If a rainbow magic potion is revealed, then it matches all bleached ingredients showing on magic piles and players can grab any of them. If a magic hungry garbage can is revealed, players instead race to cover a magic pile that shows a bleached ingredient, thereby protecting it from making its way to the trash; as a reward the player places the magic pile under her draw pile. Finally, if a naughty student card is revealed, everyone must race to perform the magic gesture shown on the card; whoever is the last to do so must maintain this gesture until the next student card is drawn.
The game ends when one or two players have run out of cards in their draw piles, and whoever has the most cards wins. Magi Kitchen includes advanced rules in which the active player, before revealing her card, decides whether to play on her own magic pile or that of her left- or right-hand neighbor.