A hand of cards, unlock fanfares and an 8-hour route: our sushi incremental's fourth playtest
The fourth playtest of Neta said everything was too smooth: no special moments, packs too often, no reason to study combos. Five Claude Code sessions added a hand of single-use ingredient cards, a ladder of unlock moments in every city with a fanfare, and retuned the route to about 8 hours. Part 15.
What we asked“A fourth playtest, in the player's words: numbers are smooth and levels are too easy; the game should take about 8 hours with a good amount of time in each city. There is no special event: in Cookie Clicker, unlocking a new type of thing feels great. Packs are opened too often. And there is no combo study: every pack gives three cards, each upgrades its ingredient and lets you experiment with that ingredient once; if I want lemon, I should get it from a pack, and it can be used only once too.”
What happened
- Session 1: every pulled card became a single-use token in a hand of 6, with a board to play tokens into a new recipe, and packs about every 8–10 minutes
- Session 2: a six-step unlock ladder in every city, each step with a 3-second fanfare and a NEXT goal
- Sessions 3–5: retuned the route on 8 seeds per change, city by city, to about an hour per city for the best player and more for a casual one
After part 14 the numbers were right and the game was boring. The fourth playtest:
"Numbers are smooth and levels are too easy. There is no special event in the game; everything is quite smooth. In Cookie Clicker, when you unlock a new type of thing it is very good. The packs are opened too frequently. And there's no combo study: if I get a shrimp, I can try a new sushi with shrimp. If I want to use lemon, I should get it from the packs, and it can be used only once as well."
Play it
The first pack opens at once and the chef walks you through your first dish. Open full screen (saves your game).
1. A hand of cards
Every card you pull now does two things: it levels up its ingredient, as before, and it goes into your hand as a single-use token. The hand holds 6 and sits next to the buttons.
To invent a dish you play tokens onto the board: a topping (required) and up to two accents. Forms you've unlocked and plain rice are free. The board predicts the price from the rules you know, and "+?" means a rule you haven't found would fire. Making it spends the tokens. Dishes you already know are made from stock forever, without tokens.
The cap of 6 is what turns it into a study. You can keep a yuzu until a fatty fish comes along, but you can't hoard. When a pack would overflow the hand, you choose what to drop before you leave:
Packs became rarer too: about one every 8–10 minutes instead of three in the first four minutes.
2. Moments worth waiting for
In our simulation of Cookie Clicker's first hours, a new kind of building arrives at about 2, 9, 18, 31, 53 and 100 minutes. The gaps keep growing, and each new building starts cheap, which is why it feels like an event. Neta now has the same ladder in every city: six steps, each one changing what you can do. A step can be a new form, a new upgrade line that starts cheap, the room growing, a manager arriving, the city's own twist switching on, or a local surprise.
Each step stops the game for a three-second fanfare (tap to skip), then points at where to use the new thing. Between steps, a NEXT goal on the top bar gives you something to chase, and the goal bar marks every step. Each city writes its own ladder. Fukuoka's ends with a baseball win and the Dontaku festival:
3. About 8 hours
Retuning for a longer game took three more sessions, and two lessons:
- Three runs aren't enough. Tuned to 80 minutes on 3 seeds, the cities took 81 to 145 minutes on 8. Luck in packs adds a long tail that 3 runs miss, so every change is now measured on 8 runs at once, in parallel.
- Each city inherits the last one. Making Tokyo shorter leaves every later city with a smaller BOOK multiplier and fewer cards, so they all got slower. Each later city's costs and goal are now scaled together to keep the same starting position.
| City | Best player (bot) | Casual player (bot) |
|---|---|---|
| Tokyo | 61 | 86 |
| Osaka | 61 | 96 |
| Toyama | 61 | 97 |
| Kanazawa | 59 | 101 |
| Sapporo | 60 | 119 |
| Fukuoka | 70 | 146 |
| Route | 5.9 h | 10.8 h |
Median minutes over 8 runs. A real player falls between the two bots: about 8 hours.
What it cost
Five sessions: the hand ($5.89), the unlocks ($5.55) and three retunes ($2.62, $3.35, $1.52), $18.93 in total.
Still weak: the casual bot spends every coin on upgrades and so opens a pack only every 12–18 minutes after Tokyo, and 3 of its 8 runs don't finish; cheaper packs didn't fix it, because the best player gains even more from them. Fukuoka's spread is wide (24 to 104 minutes).
Next
A free pack with some unlock steps, so packs keep coming for a player who never saves for them. Then another playtest.
Give your players a hand
- Copy the skill below into
.claude/skills/sushi-crafting/, or download it. - Make experiments cost something the player collects (single-use cards), with a small cap so they plan but can't hoard.
- Space your unlocks with growing gaps, and give each one a moment on screen.
The skill that made it work
The crafting skill, updated for the hand: a new recipe spends the single-use tokens it uses, so players study combos without experimenting for free. Copy the rules below, or download it with its references.
- Rules, not a table. Each card has a few axes (umami, fat, acid, salt, sweet, aroma, delicacy, texture) and 2–4 tags from a fixed list of about 12. Every synergy and clash refers only to tags and axes, so the player can learn it once and use it everywhere. At most about 5 hand-written special combos, as rare secrets.
- A dish is small. Form + rice + one topping + up to two accents (a preparation, a sauce or a garnish). Like Cafeteria Nipponica's base plus one or two ingredients, or Atelier's three trait slots: few slots, many cards.
- Bounded score. Quality is 0–100: Taste (40) + Harmony (40) + Form fit (20). Price multipliers (dish level, customers, shops) live outside it, in the economy. Grades read like letters (D to S) and stars.
- Clashes cost, empty slots don't. An empty accent is 0; a clash is −10 to −20. Diminishing returns: the second copy of a tag counts half, the third nothing. Fat and umami past their cap turn "heavy" unless something cuts them.
- Ingredients are stock, not unlocks. Each owned card gives a stock of portions that refills over time (its level raises both the cap and the refill rate). Making a batch of a dish uses one portion of each ingredient per plate; the dish sells until its batch runs out. Refill speed, stock size and batch size are upgrade lines. Infinite free ingredients make the choice meaningless (Minecraft can do it; an incremental can't): variety must come from the numbers, so when the best ingredient runs dry, the second-best dish earns while it refills. A bad dish wastes stock and sells for 30–50% of the price (Breath of the Wild's Dubious Food).
- Every attempt teaches a rule. After making a dish, show the three sub-grades, a green/yellow/red chip on each card (helps, neutral, hurts) and one line naming the main reason ("Acid cuts fat", "The sauce drowns the delicate fish"). Inventing is played from a hand of cards: every pulled card goes into a small hand (about 6) as a single-use token, and a new recipe spends the tokens it uses (the topping, and any accent), while unlocked forms and plain rice are free. The player studies combos (save the yuzu for a fatty fish) but can't experiment for free or forever; known recipes are cooked from stock, never from tokens. On the board, show the price predicted from the rules the player already knows; undiscovered rules that fire are a surprise bonus on top, so no try is blind. See [references/feedback.md](references/feedback.md).
- Few choices on screen. Show only what the player owns and can use now: no black silhouettes of locked cards, no empty slots for things not yet earned. Three options beat thirty.
- A journal of rules. The first time a synergy or clash fires, add a rule card to the journal ("Acid cuts fat: kabosu, yuzu or sudachi on fatty fish"). Discovered dishes are saved to the menu with their recipe, so repeating one is one tap.
- In an incremental, the player cares about the number. No customer preferences or wishes to satisfy: customers are the crowd that eats and pays, and their reactions scale with the price (a gasp and a big coin for an expensive plate). The goal of inventing is a dish as expensive as possible. Show the price building up like a Balatro hand: base, then each multiplier (ingredient level, each rule that fires, the city bonus) counted up one at a time with a rising pitch, bigger effects for bigger results.
- Names that sound real. `[best-synergy word] [preparation] [topping] [form] (with [accent])`, like "Aburi Salmon Nigiri with Yuzu" or "Zuke Maguro Nigiri". Bad dishes get joke names from a table ("Soggy Regret Roll"). Names are deterministic: the same recipe always has the same name.
- Duplicates level the ingredient. A second copy of a card raises that ingredient's level (Clash Royale, Marvel Snap): more value per plate, more stock, faster refill. Every dish using it gets more expensive at once, so every pack pull raises a number.
- Ground it in real sushi. Each rule cites the chef practice behind it in the data file (Sushi University, Michelin, chef interviews), and the tooltip says it in plain words. Don't invent fake Japanese words.
- Measure it. Score every possible dish and report: the best 10, the share of dishes per grade, that every accent helps somewhere (+10 or more) and hurts somewhere (−10 or less), that every topping has at least two good preparations, and that no single dish beats the second best by more than about 15%. Fail the check if any card is useless or dominant. Check the bench UI in a real browser at 720 px wide and on a phone.
Save it as .claude/skills/sushi-crafting/SKILL.md in your project.
