How to play

What kind of game is this?

In Yum or Yuck!, you run a food truck and serve dishes to customers who come from all over the world. Every customer is the same round blob, so you can't tell where they're from by looking at them. Your only clues are a line in their own language and a gesture. Use them to figure out where each customer is from, then serve that country's famously weird dish.

By “weird” we mean dishes that look, smell or sound pretty wild if you didn't grow up with them. Every one of them is a real, long-loved food in its home country, so to that customer it tastes like home. Serve their own country's dish and they'll be thrilled. Serve another country's weird food and they'll storm off.

The screen

• Top bar: from left to right, your hearts (lives left, up to 3), R (which customer you're on, out of 8), and your score.
• The truck: the customer stands under the awning, and their line appears in a speech bubble. The text in ( ) under the line is their gesture. Customers also bow, wave and react as they talk.
• Dish cards: 4 dish cards and the “Ask for one more line” button. Each card shows only an emoji, the dish name and a short description, never the country.

Serving one customer

1. A customer walks up to your truck and shows their first line and gesture.
2. Pick one of the 4 dishes to serve. One of the 4 is from the customer's country; the other 3 are picked at random from the other countries.
3. Not sure? Tap “Ask for one more line” to see a second line and gesture. You can only ask once per customer, and then the button changes to “No more hints.”
4. After you serve, the customer either happily digs in or gets angry.
5. A results sheet shows where the customer was really from and which country the dish you served came from. If you got it wrong, it also shows the dish they wanted. Tap “Next customer” to keep going.

Points and hearts

Each shift, 8 customers come from 12 countries chosen at random. No country shows up twice in the same shift. Serve all 8 and it's “Closing time!”; lose all 3 hearts along the way and you're “Out of business…”. Either way, your total score is shown at the end. Get all 8 right without hints for the top score of 1,600 pts.

Countries and dishes

Here are the 12 countries, their dishes and each customer's first line. In the game, each line comes with a gesture.

About the dishes

• Natto (Japan): soybeans fermented with a special bacteria. It's sticky, stringy and has a strong smell. Often eaten over rice for breakfast.
• Surströmming (Sweden): salted Baltic herring left to ferment inside the can. It's famous for its overpowering smell, and people often open the can outdoors.
• Century egg (China): a duck egg cured in alkaline materials for weeks. The white turns into a dark, see-through jelly and the yolk turns creamy and green-gray.
• Escargots (France): edible snails baked in butter with garlic and parsley, a specialty of Burgundy.
• Casu marzu (Italy): a sheep's milk cheese from Sardinia, ripened with the help of cheese fly larvae. Its sale is restricted for food-safety reasons.
• Beondegi (South Korea): silkworm pupae simmered and seasoned. A classic street snack, also sold in cans.
• Balut (Philippines): a boiled duck egg with a partly developed duckling inside. A favorite street food.
• Vegemite (Australia): a black, salty spread made from yeast extract left over from beer brewing. Aussies spread it thinly on buttered toast.
• Hákarl (Iceland): shark meat that is fermented and then hung to dry for months. It has a strong ammonia smell and is eaten at a midwinter festival.
• Chapulines (Mexico): grasshoppers toasted with lime, chili and salt, loved in Oaxaca and nearby states.
• Rocky Mountain oysters (United States): bull calf testicles, peeled, breaded and deep-fried. A ranch-country dish from the American West, usually served with a dipping sauce. Despite the name, nothing about them comes from the sea.
• Haggis (United Kingdom): sheep's offal chopped and mixed with oats, onion and spices, then cooked in a casing. A Scottish classic.

How to read the clues

Each line is a greeting or catchphrase in the customer's language, and each gesture is a custom you might see in that country. Here's what to look for:

• The writing system: Hangul (Korea) and Japanese kana mixed with kanji give it away instantly. Chinese uses only Chinese characters, in their simplified form (like 谢谢).
• Accents and special letters: “å” and “ä” point to Swedish, “þ” and “ð” to Icelandic, and “¡” and “¿” to Spanish (Mexico). French puts a space before “!” and “?”.
• Three kinds of English: “G’day mate” and “No worries” are Australian, “Cheers, ta” and “Fancy a cuppa?” are British, and “Howdy, y'all” and “Dude” are as American as it gets.
• Polite words: the “po” in “Salamat po” is a polite word used in Filipino (Tagalog) when talking to someone older or respected.
• Gestures: a deep bow (Japan), kisses on both cheeks (France), a fist wrapped in the other hand (China), pinched fingertips (Italy), pointing with the lips (Philippines), tipping a cowboy hat (United States) and more. Some countries can be spotted from the gesture alone.

Saving

Yum or Yuck! doesn't save your score or progress, either in your browser or on a server. Reload the page and you're back at the title screen. A shift only takes a few minutes, so play as many times as you like.

Tips

• Try to answer without a hint first, and go for +200 pts when the writing or accents make it obvious.
• When it's between English-speaking countries, or countries that use the Latin alphabet, a safe +100 pts with a hint beats losing a heart.
• Rule out the dish cards that obviously belong to other countries to narrow it down.
• Down to your last heart? Don't gamble: use the hint.