Suya is meat grilled on skewers and sold at the roadside at night. The mai suya is the one at the grill, and tonight that is you. Three racks on the coals, four cuts, two people at the counter and a line behind them. One pair of hands.
There are no swipes. You tap the racks, the fan, the piles and the people, or click them with a mouse. Each tap takes your hands a moment, so you cannot do two things at once. On a keyboard, Space or Enter starts a night and opens the next one. The rest is taps.
Tap an empty rack and pick a cut: beef, chicken, kidney or liver. A rack holds one cut and has one timer. Chicken is the slowest. Kidney and liver are quick, and quick to burn.
When one side is done the rack says TURN. Tap it. When the second side is done it says PULL. Tap it again and eight portions land on that cut's pile. The bar under the rack shows how long you have, and goes red near the end. Leave it too long and the whole rack burns. A burnt rack takes one more tap to scrape clear.
The fire drops all night. When it gets low, everything cooks at half speed. Tap the fan to bring it back up. Fanning scores nothing. It only keeps the grill working.
Two parties stand at the counter at a time. Each has a ticket: how much (₦500 is one portion, ₦1k is two, ₦2k is four), which cuts, how much pepper, and an onion mark if they want onions. MIX means any two or more kinds, your choice. A party can be up to four people, and each of them gets the same parcel.
With empty hands, tap a party and their whole order is cut from the hot piles into your hand. The label under them says what the tap will cut, or NOT ENOUGH HOT if the piles cannot cover it. You can also build a parcel yourself, one portion a tap, by tapping the piles. A parcel holds four portions at most. Made the wrong one? Tap the parcel in your hand and it goes back on the piles.
Once you are holding a parcel, three chips show at each party: none, yaji and onions. If the ticket has an onion, tap onions first. Then tap the pepper they asked for and the parcel is wrapped and handed over. One tap on yaji is a dusting. Two quick taps is plenty.
A pile that nothing has landed on or left for about half a minute goes cold, and nobody takes cold suya. The thin bar under a pile shows how long it has. Lay a rack of the same cut and the cold portions ride along, and come back hot when you pull it.
A party's patience starts running when they join the line, not when they reach the counter. When it runs out they leave, and the next party in the line loses a little patience too. The line holds six parties. Anyone who arrives to a full line keeps walking, and that counts as leaving. Customers come faster as the night goes on, and each new one is less patient than the last. Five leaving ends the night.
You press Start with a hot fire and nobody at the counter. You lay beef on the first rack and chicken on the second. The beef asks to be turned. You tap it. A few seconds later it says PULL. You tap it again and the beef pile reads 8.
Two people step up. Their ticket says ₦1k, beef, one pepper, no onion. Your hands are empty, so you tap them. Two portions of beef come off the pile and into your hand.
Three chips appear. You tap yaji once. The parcel is wrapped and handed to the first of them. That is 30 points for the parcel, 10 for each of the two portions, and a tip of up to 30 that depends on how much patience they had left.
You tap the party again, tap yaji again, and the second person is served the same way. Now the whole party has eaten, so you get a bonus of 25 a head: 50 more. With both tips, that one party is worth up to 210 points. The chicken, meanwhile, is asking to be turned.
Mai Suya is one of our own games, not a traditional one. The spot is real enough. Suya comes from the north of Nigeria and is sold all over the country. Mai suya is Hausa for the suya seller. Yaji is the pepper he dusts it with.
A mai suya does not cook to order. He lays a whole rack, turns it, pulls it, and cuts each order from what is already hot. The game is built the same way, which is why the piles matter more than any one customer.
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one of the games in the Arcade.