Spanish Diner: Take the Order

How to play: you are the only server in a Barcelona taberna, and every customer orders in Spanish. Every line on screen is something to read, and all of it is the game.

Take as long as you like. There is no time limit and nothing to beat the clock to: a shift is 10 questions, and it ends the moment you answer the last one. One question is up at a time, and while it is up the whole room stands still — nobody comes in, nobody orders and nothing drains — so you can read it as slowly as you need. How long the shift took is recorded on the end-of-shift card, and your fastest run at each level is kept.

First, the door: when a party comes in she sets off across the room and a row of four lines appears; pick the one that asks how many they are (¿Cuántos son?) — she says it when she reaches them, with a hello in front of it, as one utterance: ¡Hola, bienvenidos! ¿Cuántos son?. Watch what is being counted: ¿cuántas personas? counts people and ¿cuántas botellas? counts things, so ¿Cuántas botellas quieren? is asking something else entirely. Watch the -s as well: ¿Cuántos son? is “how many of you” and ¿Cuánto es? is “how much is it”, and one letter is all that separates them. Say the wrong thing and they will tell you so — and nobody sits down until they have been asked, so a queue you leave unanswered is a queue that keeps waiting. You can choose her line while she is still crossing the room; she says it when she gets there, and they answer with Dos personas. Once they have answered she comes back for them when she is free, shows them to a table and leaves the cards on the cloth — you never choose the table and you never send her, but every trip she makes for the room is a trip the counter is not being cleared. She cannot carry cards and plates at once: she puts the stack down on the counter to pick up a dish, and goes back for a fresh one when the door needs her. So a queue left standing while you run food is a queue that will cost her a walk before she can even say hello. Second, the table: they read for a while — nothing drains while a card is open — and then close them and call ¡Perdone!, and that table starts flashing with a ? over it. She goes across on her own and asks ¿Ya han decidido?, and their answer appears in a speech bubble above the table and is spoken out loud — something like Quería una ración de paella, por favor. Each customer has their own voice, so the young man in the hoodie and the woman in the suit do not sound alike. Tonight’s card comes out below the floor at that moment, and goes away again once every order has been answered — like the row at the door, it is only there while there is something on it to pick. Find the dish they asked for and tap it: she sets off there and then — she collects it from the counter and carries it to the table that ordered it, because the game knows whose order the dish answers. The one pick is the whole answer; two tables ordering at once are just two picks. Her tray holds 2 plates, so you can line up two deliveries and she does one lap of the room — and food comes before the door: she answers the queue when her hands are free, so keeping the tray loaded is you deciding that the tables matter more than the people waiting. Third, the bill: when the plates are empty they call ¡La cuenta, por favor! and the order goes up on the kitchen rail — you can see the receipt sitting there, at the right-hand end of the counter — and she settles it herself: the slip says which table it is for and what the food came to (mesa número tres · veintisiete euros), and she carries it over, says the figure out loud and they pay. There is nothing to tap — the bill is automatic, like the routing of a plate — so the money round is something you watch rather than something you do. A slip takes a plate’s place on her tray — her hands hold 2 things, plates and bills alike — so settling up costs you a delivery, and a table waiting to pay is a table the next party cannot have. Tap a table with nothing on her tray and they will say their order again — that is free, and it costs you only the seconds it takes to listen. Put the wrong dish down and they say so (Esto no es lo que he pedido.), your run is broken. That is the whole cost, because nothing is timed. You cannot lose a shift: nothing ends it except answering its last question. A run of correct dishes pays a bonus on top of the bill, so a shift is made by reading well rather than by running about. Every order dresses the dish properly — un plato de cocido, una ración de jamón, una taza de café — and the counter with its article is printed on each tile, because the gender is the thing English speakers get wrong and the thing you will end up knowing. Watch el agua when it comes round: it is a feminine word that takes the masculine article anyway, because la agua cannot be said — and it is still el agua fría, never frío. The Server row on the setup card is who is working the floor — the same five people who work Experdize Dining, and each of them sounds like themselves where your machine has more than one Spanish voice on it.

If you hear nothing at all, your machine has no Spanish voice installed — which is less likely here than in most of these games, because Spanish is one of the handful of voices nearly every operating system ships. The game deliberately stays silent rather than hand the words to an English voice, which would read jamón as “jaymon” and paella as “pay-ella” and teach you a pronunciation you would then have to unlearn. Everything is written above every table, so the shift plays perfectly without it. To turn the sound on, add Spanish as a language in your operating system’s settings with its speech or text-to-speech component, then restart the browser — the game picks the new voice up on its own, and the grey line over the floor disappears. The say-it rows are written for a Spanish ear rather than a Latin American one, so cerveza is written “thehr-BEH-thah”; across the Atlantic the same word is “sehr-BEH-sah” and neither is wrong. The Level row is where on the Diner lesson tonight's shift sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. A level's shift is played at the reading difficulty the lesson level has reached: the early levels keep the table numbers' numerals and a half-speed door, the help thins as the levels climb, and from the level that reaches the sim's hardest rung the words stay as hard as they get while the door keeps tightening. A level is only offered once you have reached it; play a wall tile at any level and that level's shift deals. The Difficulty row is how much of each line is written: Principiante writes a say-it-like-this and the English under every sentence, Intermedio writes the sound alone, and Avanzado gives you the Spanish with nothing under it. New game reopens that card, so both are asked for at exactly the moment a fresh shift is wanted.