DISH PIT WITCHES

Thank you to everyone who supported the community copies! dishwashers of the world unite <3

Dish Pit Witches is an all-caps, zine-style yell about how food-service workers rely on each other to survive their job---and about how the food-service industry squeezes value from its workers while giving as little as possible back.

Dish Pit Witches has a strong, clear aesthetic and thematic black and white illustrations throughout. It's also really unambiguous whenever it wants to communicate something, and this makes it extremely easy to read.

Dish Pit Witches does curse a bit (it's about working food-service,) and it's probably going to have the strongest resonance with people teen and up, but its engine is super easy to understand, and I think it could be run with some modification for any age.

At its core, Dish Pit Witches has you problem-solve small catastrophes, slowly accumulating stress from your failures, and quitting if the built-up stress ever pushes you over your limit. It never clearly defines its setting, so you can go as wacky or as bleakly realistic as you want, but the game flows neatly from shift to recovery period to shift, catching you up in its mechanics.

There's no real escape for the PCs (short of hitting maximum stress and quitting, which the game designs to feel like a failure,) but characters level up at the end of every shift, slowly acclimating to the environment.

Basically, it's a really effective simulation, but not one that has to be soul-crushing unless you want it to be.

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who has worked in food service and gotten out.

This is fucking superb, a critique, a game, and an object lesson in tight, elegant design wrapped up in one. The layout is clean and readable, love the use of bold in paragraphs to draw my eyes to relevant mechanical declarations.

The teamwork/stress rules are awesome, they pull me into the space effectively enough I flashed back to working as a pizza boy. The recovery/game structure reinforces this, making for a nice (by which I mean: evocative) loop.

One thing I think might be worth including is a sort of permanent stressor optional rule where something like a critical failure may drop your tolerance by one - because my experience working retail/food was similar in that I sorta tallied up major frustrations and let the minor stuff slip until I finally had to or could bounce.

This is so hackable, I could see using this underlying system for say, selling shoes (another terrible job I once had).

This game is awesome and one of my favorite kitbashes from GoonJam!