How to play
You run a little kiosk on a sandy Finnish beach for the month of June. Every morning you see the weather forecast: rainy, cloudy, sunny or a heatwave. The forecast is usually right, but not always.
Buy ice cream, berries, sugar, cups and ice cubes to suit the forecast. Decide the juice recipe – how many handfuls of berries, spoonfuls of sugar and ice cubes go in each cup – and set the prices for ice cream and juice. Then open the kiosk and watch how business goes.
The people walking along the beach decide whether to stop and buy depending on the weather, your prices and the kiosk’s reputation. Their thought bubbles tell you what they think: too pricey, too sour, the line’s too long – or yum! Happy customers build your reputation and sometimes leave a tip, and a kiosk with a good name gets more people walking by the next day.
Some supplies spoil overnight: ice cream and ice cubes melt, and some of the berries go bad. With your earnings you can buy a freezer, a beach umbrella, a sign and a second counter.
Scoring
The summer lasts 21 days. Your score is the summer’s earnings in euros: sales and tips, minus the money spent on supplies. Money spent on upgrades doesn’t lower your score.
When the summer is over, you can buy seven more days with the same kiosk with tokens, once a summer. Your money, stock, reputation and upgrades stay, and the new days’ earnings are added to your score.
Tips
- In a heatwave, put more ice in the juice; when it rains, none at all.
- Sour juice needs more sugar, watery juice more berries.
- Don’t buy too much ice cream before you have a freezer, as half of it melts overnight.
- If lots of people think “too pricey”, lower your prices. If the line is always long, you might raise them.
- Weekends and Midsummer Eve, Finland’s big summer holiday, bring more people to the beach.
