Master game designer Greg Costikyan has posted a fantastic review of a new sim/tycoon game in which you run a restaurant. Sounds like a lot of fun!
Restaurant Empire gives you a good sense of managing a restaurant. You hire and fire staff, construct a menu, place tables, decor, and kitchen equipment, and open the doors. Over the course of a day, people wander in and order. As is typical in games of this type, each customer’s desires, wants, and reactions are tracked in detail, and you can click on any guest to see what he or she is thinking about (often, about the rudeness of staff or delays in their order). You can also see what peoples’ main complaints are, general level of satisfaction, and so on. You try to increase the popularity of your restaurant by upgrading the menu and decor (as profits permit), adding new recipes and deleting less popular ones, learning about businesses that can provide premium ingredients, and so on.
The main game is a series of well-planned, linked ‘levels,’ each requring you to reach some benchmark within a period of time to ‘win’ (e.g., make $15,000 in profit in a single month). The level system provides a ‘programmed learning’ approach–that is, you’re introduced to the details of game management over time–as well as a sort of backstory that provides a degree of motivation, and some characters (like your uncle, a retired restauranteur) who provide advice.