How to Play

The goal, setup in brief, employee cards, the seven phases of a round, and how you build your company structure and choose turn order.

Overview

You run a fast food chain. You hire employees, train them, market burgers, pizza and drinks to the houses of the city, and sell to the customers who come to your restaurants. The game ends after the bank runs out of cash for the second time, and the player with the most cash wins (Game End and Scoring).

Cash is always public. Everyone starts with $0 and only a CEO.

Setup

The full checklist, with the numbers for your player count, is on the Setup page. In short:

• Lay the map tiles at random, put drink suppliers and houses on the printed spots.
• Fill the bank with $50 per player and the employee tray with the cards for your player count.
• Each player takes a chain (menu, milestone tray, 3 restaurants, 3 drive-ins), any CEO card, and secretly puts one of their 3 bank reserve cards face down by the bank.
• In reverse turn order, each player places a starting restaurant or passes; those who passed then place theirs in turn order (starting restaurants).

Bank reserve cards

Your reserve card decides how much cash the bank gets the first time it breaks, and how many work slots every CEO has afterwards (Breaking the bank).

Card	Cash added	CEO slots after the first break
	$100	2
	$200	3
	$300	4

A high card makes the game longer, a low one shorter — and you don’t know what the others chose.

Introductory game

For your first game the rulebook recommends:

• no bank reserve cards and no milestones;
• all three drink suppliers on the map;
• $75 per player in the bank instead of $50;
• no salaries (skip Payday);
• the game ends the first time the bank breaks.

For a second game, keep these changes but add the milestones.

Employee cards

• A Entry level: the ▶ in the top-left corner means you can hire this employee.
• B No ▶: this employee can only be trained from another one.
• C Action: what they do when they work (Working 9–5).
• D Range (top right): how far they may travel from your restaurant, by road (D1) or by air, ignoring roads (D2) (distance).
• E Training options: the employees they can be trained into. None listed: they can’t be trained.
• F Work slots : how many employees you may play under them (company structure).
• G 1x: you may have only one employee of this type, counting those on the beach.
• H Salary: you pay $5 for them every Payday, working or not.

All employees and their training paths are in Cards & Components. The menu shows the training paths too.

A round

Each round has seven phases:

1. Restructuring: choose who works this round.
2. Order of Business: choose turn order.
3. Working 9–5: each player takes one turn and uses their employees.
4. Dinnertime: houses with demand go out to eat; restaurants are paid.
5. Payday: fire employees and pay salaries.
6. Marketing: campaigns add demand to houses.
7. Cleanup: throw away unsold food, take your employees back.

Restructuring

All players do this at the same time:

1. From your hand, put the employees you want to work this round in a face-down stack below your CEO.
2. Put the rest in a face-down stack above your CEO: they are on the beach.

Then everyone reveals and lays out their company structure. In the first round you have nobody to play: your CEO works alone.

On the beach, employees do nothing, but you still pay their salary and you may train them. They don’t count as “played” for milestones.

Company structure

• Your CEO has 3 work slots (2 or 4 after the bank first breaks). Each holds any one employee.
• A manager (black card) in a CEO slot adds their own work slots. Each of those holds one employee without slots.
• So with 3 CEO slots you can have at most 3 managers working at once.

If the employees you revealed don’t fit, all of them go to the beach and you play the round with just your CEO.

Work Planning variant: to make planning easier, place your cards face down in the exact slots they will take instead of in a stack.

Most actions are optional. These are mandatory once the employee is in your structure: placing drive-ins (Local and Regional Manager), changing your price (Pricing, Discount and Luxuries Manager), cash bonuses (Waitress, CFO) and salary discounts (Recruiting Manager, HR Director). As a rule, Dinnertime and Payday actions are mandatory, Working 9–5 actions optional.

Played employees are public once revealed. Claim any “First … played” milestone as soon as you reveal.

Order of Business

1. Take the turn order markers off the track, keeping their order.
2. The player with the most open work slots in their structure chooses any free position on the track first, then the next most, and so on.
3. Ties: whoever was earlier in turn order chooses first. In round 1 everyone is tied.

With fewer than 5 players you may only choose positions up to the player count. The First Airplane Campaign milestone counts 2 extra open slots.

Then Working 9–5 starts with the first player in turn order.