There is a “world” where your initial real estate allows you to design and furnish whatever kind of restaurant you want – from something resembling what you might find in the Tuscan countryside, to a ‘50s style diner, to a seafood restaurant along the coast. The game’s layout will be familiar to anyone who’s played FarmVille, CastleVille, and so on. “You earn rewards by cooking and serving dishes to the customers in your restaurant.”

“ChefVille is a restaurant and cooking game,” explains Jonathan Knight, its General Manager. Zynga’s impressive team of fifteen company chefs, headed up by Executive Chef Matthew Du Trumble, creates all of the recipes used in the game in the process of serving 4,000 meals a day to the company’s employees. More importantly, from my perspective, ChefVille seems like the first Zynga game that fully takes advantage of the company’s own internal culture, in this case around food, in the midst a larger community that, just like Zynga employees, loves good food made from fresh local ingredients.ĬhefVille also represents a tighter integration between social gaming and real life, because the rewards of playing include unlocking up to 50 recipes that are emailed to players for use at home. It quickly became the most popular game on Facebook.

Not a lot of things have been going right lately for Zynga, the big social game-maker headquartered at 8th and Brannan Streets, after a disappointing quarterly earnings report, a stock price falling below $3/share, and difficulties connected to its close integration with Facebook.īut a bright spot in the midst of all this was the launch of the latest game in its ‘Ville series, ChefVille, earlier this month.

Zynga cafe