All Ideas

SommSim

Microsoft Flight Simulator for sommeliers. SommSim is a browser-based simulation game where you work the floor of a fine-dining restaurant as its sommelier — reading tables, running the cellar, and pairing wines against the kitchen's courses while the dining room fills up around you.

How it plays

• Overcooked-style pressure — service starts calm and escalates. Tables grow larger, parties arrive faster, and guest patience burns down like a candle at every table. Let one burn out and the party walks.
• Tile-based top-down floor — navigate a hand-drawn dining room between the host stand, the cellar, and four tables, dodging runners and bussers who will knock the bottle right out of your hands.
• Real pairing knowledge — every dish that hits the pass draws from a wine pairing database built from Court of Master Sommeliers examination study: classic matches, regional logic, and course-order service rules. Serve a transcendent pairing and the score shows it. Pour clumsy and the table remembers.
• Chase the service — 60 pairings, 3,000 points, or the 20-minute clock: whichever goal lands first ends the shift, slot-machine lights and all. High scores live on the marquee.

Why it exists

Wine study is memorization until it's muscle memory. SommSim turns the flash cards into floor pressure — the same reads a working sommelier makes on a Saturday night, compressed into a twenty-minute arcade shift. It's a game first, but the pairings underneath are real.