Perfect Plate

A week on the line.

You run a kitchen for five days. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, then a critic with demands. Drag food onto the plate, cook a real dish, hit the number on the ticket. Stock the pantry between services. Friday is a long way off and you only get four hearts.

604 dishes, all of them plates a cook would recognize by name. A ticket is a row of empty seats: a protein, a bread, sometimes one exact thing. Fill the seats and you've cooked something. You can pile on whatever else you like, but food that has no business in the dish rides along for nothing.

Savor is the number printed on the food. Kick is the multiplier, and only the dish sets it. A heap of expensive food with no dish under it stays at 1.

Seasonings are your build. Cheap jars, mean jars, off-menu stuff that shouldn't be for sale. Some grow as the week goes on, and a $5 jar bought Monday can be worth more by Friday than anything on the shelf. You hold five. They fire left to right, and the order matters more than you'd think. The good stuff comes out for the weekend, so if you've been saving, Thursday is when the rack stops being a shelf and starts being an engine.

That's the actual game underneath: the ticket wants 62,000 and you're building one plate worth ten of it. When it lands, the room goes quiet. There's a stamp.

Seventeen critics. The Carnivore drove here for meat. The Doctor's chart says no sauces. The Adventurer read the specials already and wants something this week has never cooked. Miss what a critic wants and your Kick stays at 1, whatever's in the rack. On ordinary nights a table sits instead. The big table gives you an extra seat. The long table trades away a send for two more.

Every week is a seed. Finish one and the game hands you a code like CLASSIC-Z1X9. Anyone who enters it plays your exact week: same walk-in, same shops, same critics in the same order. Post the code and race your friends. Tonight's service is the daily, one shared week for everyone, with an emoji grid to prove where you died and a streak for showing up.

Ten kitchens, each with a house rule. Saturday hours if you already closed the place. Cover 1 if you like starting broke. OVERTIME if you closed every kitchen and still want to get hurt.

Tomo is the tomato. He talks. You can shut him up in Options.

Made for people who liked Balatro and also like dinner.