# Life's A Dish

Premise

Life's a Dish is a game about cultivating and mutating cultures of bacteria. Some cultures are worth more than others, and one combination is special. It will cure THE ENEMY, a terrible disease. You have it, and you have 30 days to live. You must use the tools in front of you, turn your starting cultures into the perfect antidote.

Mutate and combine your life, sell it, and repeat.

The Disease

It goes by many names. The Lord's Plague. Silencia. Death. Once infected, most die within weeks. You, one of the final scientists still alive in London, have been tasked with finding a cure. Unfortunately, you're also infected, and your suppliers will not risk their lives to deliver the reagents you need without paying a hefty price. Find the perfect antidote, and you can kill it. But, you only have 30 days before it kills you...

Petri Dishes

Each Petri dish contains a culture, the life that will fund your research, and perhaps, yield the antidote you desperately seek. Petri dishes can be placed on the table (as pictured, or in machines that provide various mutations).

Cultures grow or shrink over time based on their genome, so watch out! They might just die on you.

Check-o-Matic

The Check-o-Matic is the first machine you might use, it tells you how close you are to a cure. When a culture has been graded, you can sell it at a higher rate than non-graded. (Unless you are very far away).

Reagents

There are eight (8) reagents that you can purchase. They go into the Genimagic (Below). Simply drag from the top to get a unit of the substance. They modify the genome in each culture. But sometimes they can backfire.

Descriptions

• Sulfur: Hot & Smelly (20 coin)
• Ice: Very Cold (20 coin)
• Lead: Makes you mad! (30 coin)
• Lithium: Soothing (40 coin)
• Sugar: Zoom Zoom! (40 coin)
• Lard: and how! (40 coin)
• Radium: Magnetic (40 coin)
• Iodine: Stabilizer (80 coin)

Genimagic

The Genimagic takes in Reagents and applies them to an inserted Culture. It applies them one at a time, and you can hit EJECT at any time to stop, but you can't go back. Each time you apply a reagent the genome is modified and mutated, so there is a chance that your effects are undone. (Part of the genome controls how often this happens).

The Genimagic shows the likelyhood of mutation (and perhaps even killing the Culture, so don't let that get too high).

Amalgamizer

The Amalgamizer has three slots. Two are for cultures, the other is for empty Petri Dishes. You can put one or two cultures in the top, and it will combine them in the second by taking half. For example say that you had a Red culture in the top left, and a blue culture in the top right: you can expect to get a purple culture. If you only put one culture in, it just moves half of the culture to the empty dish.

However, the newly created culture is mutated, so like with the Gneimagic it is possible to have unintended consequences.

Be warned. Your initial cultures are quite small - you would be wise not to split them while they're so young.

Coins

You can use coins to buy empty Petri dishes or Reagents. But the only way to make money is by selling you Cultures, and the more like the antidote is, the more valuable it is! (drag your cultures into the pneumatic tube)

Notes

We opted out of the audio category, as we used royalty-free background music.