The twelve products, pastel to empire

Império do Pastel has twelve products. The first one costs four reais and comes off the griddle in two seconds; the last one costs a few trillion and takes nearly a minute. This post is the whole menu, in order, and what happens between one rung and the next.

Act one: the street fair

Street Fair Pastel, Açaí Bowl, Stuffed Tapioca and Craft Burger.

This is the part of the game where your hand matters. Every cycle needs a tap to start, the cycles are short — two to six seconds — and the counter is deliberately noisy. It is where you learn that a product is not a number going up: it is one more griddle, identical to the one you already had.

Act two: the street

Food Truck, Food Court, Regional Franchise and National Chain.

The game changes scale and gesture. Cycles now run from eight to twenty-four seconds, tapping everything by hand stops being possible, and the question moves from “what do I buy” to “who do I hire”. This is where managers stop being a luxury.

Act three: the empire

International Franchise, Frozen Foods Plant, Food Holding Group and Culinary Empire.

Cycles of thirty-two to fifty-six seconds, and numbers that only fit on screen abbreviated. These four came later, and they came for a measured reason: without them the game ran out of things to discover too early. Today, seeing all twelve products unlocked takes somewhere around twenty-six hours of play, against a ceiling of thirty-six that we hold ourselves to.

Every rung is twelvefold

From the second product on, each one costs twelve times the one before it. The first jump is the only different one, and it is bigger: fifteen times.

Keeping that ratio fixed is what makes the curve readable. You never need to look anything up to know where you stand: if the next product looks absurdly expensive, it is exactly where it should be, and it is your empire that has not caught up yet.

The counterintuitive part: the new product earns less

Here is a number that tends to surprise people who have played idle games for years. The next product costs twelve times more, but produces, per second, only five to seven times more than the previous one.

In other words: per real invested, the new product is worse than the old one. Buying the next rung is not an efficiency upgrade — it is a raised ceiling. What pays the difference is the other two pieces of the game: milestones, which double production every so many units of the same product, and the manager, who turns a griddle that depends on your finger into one that works on its own.

That is why the interesting decision in Império do Pastel is almost never “which product do I buy”. It is “do I open the next product, stack units on what I already have until the next milestone, or hire one more manager”. All three are good answers, and that is what makes the choice worth anything.

If you want those pieces explained in detail, they are in the post on how the empire grows on its own. And what happens when you reach the end of this list is in what survives when you start over.