Pizza Party

Pizza Party is a cooking game about making one pizza properly, then doing it again faster. Every ticket at the hatch asks for a size, a coat of sauce, a set of toppings with counts, sometimes one thing on the left half and another on the right, and a bake: pale, golden or well fired. Nothing is a button press. You stretch the dough by dragging in circles until it reaches the size ring, you spread the sauce by swiping until the coverage meter fills, you sprinkle the cheese by dragging, and each topping is dragged from the tray onto the pizza, where it snaps to a spot on a quiet grid so the finished pizza is even enough to cut.

The oven is where the game gets its nerve. A pizza slides onto the stone and the bake meter starts climbing through pale, golden and well fired before it goes past the last band and comes out black. Pull it, cut it with two swipes across — straight through the middle, square to each other, or the slices come out lopsided — and hand it over the hatch while the guest still has patience left. Seven things are scored on every pizza: the size, the sauce, how even the cheese fell, whether the toppings match the ticket and sit where they should, the bake, the cuts and the wait. The chef behind the counter has an opinion about all of it, and so does the guest.

Twenty nights open up the kitchen a piece at a time: olives on the second night, large pizzas on the fourth, half-and-half tickets on the sixth, a second oven on the eighth, a delivery scooter with a tight clock on the tenth, a longer peel that bakes quicker on the twelfth and a cutter wheel on the fifteenth. Each night ends with a chalkboard report worth one to three stars and a handful of in-game coins, which buy a cool marble slab, a copper ladle, a cheese shaker, a new oven stone or candles for the tables to keep the guests calm. Play with a finger or with the keyboard, in portrait or landscape, and the night you reached is kept in your browser.