Before the second class had even ended, I had the idea to make a game centered around running a restaurant and serving customers. I also remembered playing Legendary, a Marvel deck-building game, a couple of times in high school in which you had a villain deck and at the beginning of each turn you’d pull a villain from the deck and add them to a track- and players would work together to try to defeat the villains before they could successfully move all the way down the track.
These ideas stewed in my head for a few days while I tried to organize a time to meet with my partner, who had yet to respond to my messages (turns out they dropped the class without telling me). With only a couple of days to go, I decided it was finally time to get started on my own. I decided that there would be 3 main resources (food types) that would be used to serve customers: meat, vegetables, and grain. I then made the cards for the customer deck, with each card requiring a combination of 1-3 food types to successfully serve before they made their way to the end of the customer track and turned into a “Failed Customer” Additionally, each customer successfully served gives you a number of Stars (used to calculate scores at the end of the game) and cash that is used to buy more food tokens at the beginning of the round. I had considered making the game collaborative, but eventually decided to make it competitive. With not a lot of time to work with, I decided to limit it to 2 players for the time being, but hope to make it 3-4 for the final version.
I also added randomly drawn “Prep Cards” that would give various benefits, along with ways to sabotage the competing players. I decided that players would start with 1 of each food type, 3 cash, and 3 prep cards. At this point I started to do solo play tests, where I played both sides. I immediately realized that it was way too easy, with failed customers being basically impossible due to the starting cash and the steady income from serving customers. I made several adjustments over these solo playtests, adjusting the amount of starting cash, food, and prep cards; the prep card effects; the customer costs and rewards; and the amount of starting customers. I also ended up increasing the length of the customer track from 3 to 4 spots.
After a lot of trial and error I landed on starting conditions of 1 of each food type, no starting cash, 2 starting prep cards, and 3 starting customers. I then did a playtest with a friend to get a better feel of the competitive nature, and realized that the game was severely lacking player interaction. Because of this I added some more prep cards that allowed you to steal from or sabotage the other player, but I’m hoping to add even more in the final version. I also hope to work on the balance some more, as there’s an ongoing issue of one player having an incredibly easy time serving customers while the other player ends up in a hole where they can’t keep up. Another way I’m hoping to improve both player interaction and balance is by adding various upgrades that players can buy (but only one player can have each type of upgrade, meaning they have to buy it before the others) to augment their playstyle. These upgrades may take the form of benefits such as having a choice between customers, being able to substitute certain food types with others, having an extra table in your restaurant, etc and would hopefully also improve balance by giving a reason to save up your cash instead of just buying as much food as you can afford. Lastly, I’ll probably change the name to something more original as the current name is similar to “Plate Up!”
