Hi, I'm hakairyuousinn (my X account).
Chez Weeds is a plating game where you pick weeds by the roadside and serve them on French fine-dining plates to cut your costs. A plate sells for $180. The fewer expensive ingredients and the more weeds you use, the more you make. But if the critic notices the weeds, you refund everything. It's free and runs in the browser on phones and computers. No download, no sign-up.
How to play
First you pick weeds. They grow at the foot of a utility pole, behind a vending machine and so on. Press and pull to yank one out. You get 15 seconds, and the basket holds 12.
Then you plate in the kitchen. There are four shelves: Weeds, Main, Garnish and Sauce. Every weed costs $0. Beef fillet is $30 a slice and a scallop is $15. For sauce, tap for dots, drag for lines, and hold for a pool. There's no time limit on plating.
At the top you see two meters, "Weed risk" and "Looks luxurious." The whole game is staring at those and deciding whether to add one more weed or one more real slice.
Press Serve and you get stars, sales, cost and profit. Three stars keeps the full $180. Two stars takes $60 off.
I served a similar plate three times and got caught twice
On the released game, I served a scallop with two or three weeds three times, once each in Japanese, English and Korean. Caught, caught, passed.
When you're caught, you refund the whole price and also pay $30 in damages per weed. In the English run it was two weeds, so $60. Sales were $0 but I'd still paid for the scallop and sauce, so the profit came out at −$75.76.
The plate that passed got two stars, and the critic believed the plantain weed was baby spinach. Each weed has its own mix-up: dandelion becomes Provençal rocket and moss becomes Breton seaweed.
I added the damages on the evening of release day. Before that, getting caught only meant a refund.
The first version let you plate trash too
It started from a note on November 6. In the first version you put weeds and trash on a plate and the critic put a price on it. I built it, decided it wasn't right, and dropped it.
In the second version, you cut costs with weeds and try to get both stars and profit.
I looked at real French plates and rebuilt it again
After the second version I went through photos of plates actually taken at starred restaurants. The top image search results were mostly AI-generated, so I only looked at photos taken in the restaurants.
They were nothing like my game. The main item is small, and plenty of plates carry ten or more garnishes. Sauce isn't just a line: there are pools, dots and powders, often in several colors on one plate. Food covers maybe 10 to 30 percent of the plate, and the rest is empty.
The second version counted six or more items as a set meal, so the real plates would have been set meals…
For the third version I priced every ingredient per slice and let you draw sauce as dots, lines, pools and powder.
During development I recreated ten of the plates I'd seen inside the game and served them. All ten got stars. A salad of nine weeds alone got three stars, but it had about a 74% chance of being caught.
The scoring and tips are on the how-to-play page. If you get your cost really low, I'd love to hear how low.
▶ Play Chez Weeds (the day before, I also released a game about blowing glass into vessels)