Station Bento: Now Selling On Board

🚃 Aboard the Kazamachi

A single-track private railway, 26.2 kilometers in all, threading through the mountain gorge: the Asagi Railway. This perpetually loss-making company has hired you, and you alone, as its sales planner. The president's order is plain: create income other than fares before the fiscal year ends. What you have your eye on is in-train sales of station bento aboard the Kazamachi, the sightseeing train that runs only on weekends. Standing in your way is Hemmi Masakuni, conductor of thirty years. Regulation Article 27: the sale of goods on board is prohibited. Ever since a scalding accident thirty years ago, in-train sales have not existed on this line. Meanwhile, beside the platform at the passing station, Mugiuda Chitose, heir to a rice farm, is waving with an armful of new rice. A legendary rice grown on mountain spring water, an iron bridge over the gorge, terraced paddies hung with drying rice. Every ingredient that could be sold is right there along the line. All that is left is to move the regulations, and people's hearts.

Characters

• Hemmi Masakuni (54): conductor of thirty years. Strict about timetables and regulations, never says anything vague. But he also keeps a window notebook in which he has recorded, over thirty years, what can be seen from which curve, and no one knows the line better.
• Mugiuda Chitose (24): heir to a rice farm who took over the Komagaeshi terraces. A former softball ace, confident in her voice, her nerve, and the taste of her rice. Every time a train passes she waves from the field, and she cannot shake the habit.

How to Play

This business begins with breaking down the wall of regulations, deciding what goes in the bento, and selling out the thirty boxes of the first run. Your weapons are Chitose's rice, the ingredients along the line, and Hemmi's window notebook. What to announce during the slow-down before the iron bridge, what to sell during the four-minute stop at the passing station. Train times cannot be moved by a single minute, so every idea has to be squeezed out of the timetable. The sales figures are honest: get it right and the boxes empty out, get it wrong and you have a pile of waste. Bring the people along the line into it, and raise this little railway's signature dish. Departure time is approaching.