The newest fad to hit face book and my space are virtual social networking games. The newest one of these games is called Cafe World and is created and operated by a company called Zynga. There are some hints that will make playing Cafe World easier and will result in higher scores and faster advancement from one level to another level.
Once a player starts playing Cafe World, the start up kitchen and restaurant includes three stoves, and two serving counters. The restaurant also comes complete with four basic tan tables and four basic brown chairs. You are given a set amount of coins to start with, so you can make your first dishes. You, the owner of the Cafe World restaurant are asked to name your cafe and you become the chef. You are then allowed to hire one of your Facebook or MySpace buddies as a waiter. Being that all of my friends are too busy to be bothered, I am sure to undo the notice that goes to them that they have been hired. They probably aren’t interested in playing anyway. I found a few tricks that will help new players.
1) A lot of people add tables and chairs. This will result in your one waiter that you are given on startup, not being able to keep up and customers will walk out of your cafe. They have very little patience, and will wait only about 40 seconds to be served before leaving. So making sure your virtual waiter can handle the customers is very important.
2) Start out making fast, simple dishes that don’t cost a lot. Hamburgers take five minutes, and nachos take three, the least amount of time. Until you can get some food on your serving tables, your first ten or so customers are going to walk out, and your rating won’t be so great. But serving nachos first, puts some food on the serving tables fast. I started with massing about 60 servings of nachos before moving on to cooking hamburgers. These are the best to start with. The next best item to cook is the Chunky Fruit Salad.. Although the name is repulsive, it takes 15 minutes to virtually cook. However, you only get one coin for serving one portion. The great thing about the Chunky Fruit Salad is the fact that it serves 100 people. Massing about 1000 servings of Chunky Fruit Salad, will probably feed your customers for about 10 hours till you can get back to the virtual game. At start up with three grills cooking at the same time, fifteen minutes per each Chunky Fruit Salad, each one serving 100 people, it will take about . Just don’t do what I did, and forget after the first fifteen minutes, to cook another batch of the fruit salad.
3) Be prepared to spend several hours a day on Cafe World until you build up your food stash on your serving tables. The game continues to feed virtual customers, even when you are signed off, so keeping enough food on your three serving tables is extremely important. It takes time to build up this game. But by using the correct foods to begin with an d not overloading tables, you can level up rather quickly, so your time on the game will be less.
4) Probably the major key to playing Cafe World, is to make sure your waiter doesn’t have to walk far to serving tables or to customers tables. The more he walks, the more likelihood that customers won’t be served in the short 45 to 60 second time frame before they walk out, giving you a bad thumbs down rating. Be sure to place your tables so the waiter doesn’t have to walk around the table. The tables should be facing the serving tables, and faced forward towards the serving tables, with chairs behind the table. That way, all the waiter has to do is grab a virtual dish off of the serving table, turn around and serve it. One must also remember that the waiter spends time clearing the tables. He clears and serves food in the order it occurs on the game, so making sure he can do all of his virtual work is important. In addition, I also place the chef’s area and grills where she can simply turn around and place food on the serving tables. That way, she can get back to her virtual cooking. Also, in case there is no food on the serving tables, this ensures the quickest delivery so the waiter can earn you points with virtual food.
5) I waited until I received an extra waiter before adding extra chairs and tables. I noticed that it appears the game is set up for each waiter to serve no more than four or five tables at a time. It seems customers start walking out at this point, even if tables are vacant. One must remember that each waiter has to not only serve the food, but clear the tables, and he does an awful lot of virtual walking to get this done.
6) I am not sure how the entire process works, however if you ever lose ratings, it seems that customers start walking out right and left. I think it is a combination between number of tables and your rating. I have found the higher your rating, the more customers stay. This is why it is important to keep food on the serving tables, and only up tables when you have another waiter.
7) You may want to upgrade your restaurant with new chairs and tables, but the best strategy seems to be to concentrate on food on the serving tables. As the game progresses, you can add serving tables and grills. This provides for variety in virtual foods that can be cooked. The only advantage of upgrading your restaurant’s chairs and tables, is the added customers you can have, but again only after adding another waitress.
8) It is important to remember not to cook more food than you have serving tables. For instance, if you have four stoves, but only three serving tables, you only have three choices of virtual foods you can cook. If you cooked a fourth and your serving tables were full, you would have no where to place the fourth virtual food. You would then have to delete the fourth food, which results in wasted points you spent cooking the food. For instance, I now have four serving tables and eight grills, so I can only serve four different types of foods. I therefore try to cook two dishes of each of the four so there will always be variety in virtual foods. After all, he wants to visit a restaurant with only one or two choices?
9) I have seen a lot of beautiful cafes that my friends have. Furniture and decorations are expensive. The only advantage of buying these items is that you get added experience points, which result sin added waiters, chefs, grill, serving tables, and additional dishes. At the beginning of the game, tiles, carpets, flowers, and wallpaper seem to be the cheapest way to add beauty to your cafe. But be sure to always leave enough coins to cook additional dishes. I had a friend who ran out of coins, and had to wait a week to earn enough back. At that point, the only way to earn back coins is to visit the people on your restaurant buddy list. If you don’t’ have anyone, you can wait for the daily 500 coins the game adds to your coin bank.
10) Once you have built up your basic food servings to last for a few hours, your next virtual food choices should include apples, onion soups, spaghetti, pies, and chicken. There are one hour dishes, which seem useless and there are 2 to 3 day dishes which also seem useless. The chance that you won’t have to play Cafe World every day, takes a long time to achieve. These 2 day dishes are still a long way out for me. Apples have a two hours turn around, onion soup takes four hours to cook, the pies take twelve, and the chicken takes twenty four hours or one day. After compiling enough food, I suggest having a couple of chickens cooking. They serve 800 per each being cooked then served.
There are several methods to use when playing Cafe World. You can calculate food cost to actual servings. You can calculate the number of points of each virtual food to the cost and servings. However, I simply opt at choosing to keep my serving tables loaded with food. By not having enough virtual food, my rating slipped and I had to remove some tables to up my rating. When ratings slipped, it seems that you are not allowed to have a lot of tables. When this occurred, I removed some of the tables, left six and my rating increased. So be sure to never be left without food, especially when you get to a higher rating.
This is not a game for someone who is looking for an occasional game. It takes quit awhile to build up your restaurant and will probably take several times a day playing until the restaurant is built up. I have been playing for three weeks, and still have to attend to the restaurant a couple of times a day. But at first, I was playing four to five times a day. Being that I am ready to return to the real world of work away from home, my virtual restaurant at Cafe World will have to be self sufficient very quickly.
Enjoy playing Cafe World by Zynga. I would highly recommend it to people looking for a fun game, but only for those who have a lot of extra time on their hands. Perhaps some of these pointers will make your Cafe World upstart a bit easier than mine was. Happy playing!!
