Business · 2-minute race
You’ve got one pizza shop, a rival across town, and exactly two minutes. Hire cooks and drivers, set your price, open new shops, and make as much money as you possibly can before the buzzer.
Pizza Stan is a fast, funny little business game. Orders pop up from houses and offices all over town — a couple of pizzas here, a giant office party there. Your kitchen cooks them and your drivers deliver them. But there’s a rival pizza shop competing for every order, and if you’re too slow or too expensive, customers call them instead. Everything you spend comes out of your final score, so every hire is a bet: will this cook earn back their wages before the two minutes are up?
It’s the same town and the same orders every single time you play, which makes it a pure skill race — the leaderboard rewards a better plan, not luck.
Three coloured status lights at the top tell you what needs attention: your kitchen (are pizzas backing up?), your delivery (is anyone free to drive?), and your price (how do you compare with the rival?). Green is good; red means fix that thing.
Make the most money you can in two minutes. Your cash at the buzzer is your score — and since everything you spend is subtracted, the trick isn’t spending the most, it’s spending it at the right moments.
Pizza Stan started as an experiment: could a management game be simple enough for a young kid but still have real decisions underneath? The first version had a hidden flaw — extra shops didn’t actually do anything, because there was one shared kitchen behind the scenes. A sharp-eyed play-tester noticed the new shops just sat there, which led to rebuilding it so every shop has its own kitchen and its own line of pizzas, and so you can literally watch which one is falling behind. The traffic-light HUD came from the same place: a 7-year-old shouldn’t need a spreadsheet to know they need another cook.
Shops now have their own kitchens and queues, cooks spread across them automatically, and orders route to whichever shop can serve them fastest.
The rival now changes his price to compete — undercutting you when he’s losing and getting greedy when he’s winning — and you can watch his delivery cars drive out.
Replaced a wall of numbers with three green-amber-red gauges for cooks, delivery and price, and added the ability to let staff go to cut payroll.