Pasta Chef

How to play Pasta Chef

Pasta Chef puts you in charge of a stove with three sauce pans, two pots of boiling water and a rail of orders. Starting an order puts its sauce in a free pan and its pasta in a free pot.

The pasta looks after itself: spaghetti, penne and tagliatelle each have their own cooking time, stay al dente for a few seconds and then go soft. The sauces are the real job. Every pan has a heat knob — off, low, medium or high — and its temperature drifts toward the knob, shown on a thermometer beside the pan with the sauce's band marked. Tomato sauce is happy left on medium. Cream sauce splits if it gets too hot, and pesto blackens at anything above warm, and no knob setting sits inside their bands, so you have to nudge the heat up and down to hold them there.

A sauce only cooks while it is inside its band, and once it is done it has to stay there until its pasta is ready to plate with it. Too hot for too long and it burns; left to go cold, it congeals. A ruined sauce or soft pasta means starting that order again. Plate an order the moment both are ready. Diners who wait too long leave, and three of those ends the night. There are three services, each with more orders, more cream and pesto, and less patient diners.

Objective

Get through three dinner services with fewer than three diners walking out.

Features

• Three sauce pans with four-step heat knobs
• Temperature bands you have to hold by nudging the heat
• Pasta with an al dente window before it goes soft
• Sauces that burn when too hot and congeal when left cold
• Three services, each fussier than the last

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