Ask someone to name this genre and they'll describe it instead: you know, like Overcooked. The design states cleanly even when the label won't — take a job one calm person could do alone, split it across a team who can't all reach it at once, and start a clock. What comes out is a production line built with deliberately too few hands on it.
The jam is always at the slowest stage, and the level's real job is to keep moving which stage that is. Overcooked's kitchens slide apart mid-service, rotate, or put a road through the middle — not out of cruelty, but because a stable pipeline is a solved pipeline, and a team that has found its rhythm has stopped playing.
The ancestor is single-player time management. Diner Dash (2004) posed the same queueing problem — seat, serve, clear, keep the patience meters off the floor — with one pair of hands and therefore one plan. Splitting those hands between people is the entire change, and it converts a scheduling puzzle into a communication one. Spaceteam (Henry Smith, 2012) proves the point by deleting the kitchen altogether: your panel holds the controls for somebody else's instruction, so the pipeline runs through speech and jams there. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (2015) does it with a bomb and a manual that the only player who can see the bomb is not allowed to read.
Nobody deals the jobs out. The game never says "you're the chopper", but thirty seconds in, someone is — roles condense out of proximity and out of who noticed the shortage first. The skill being tested is renegotiating them when the level moves: out loud, mid-service, without anyone dropping what they were holding.
Which is why a collapse has to be traceable. If the group can see that the fish went to the wrong counter and nobody was on plates, the failure is a story and the next run is better. If it can't, the level is noise and the room goes quiet. So author the disasters, and put them on a schedule that can be learned — a level that betrays you the same way every time is comedy, while one that betrays you at random is a coin toss with a timer attached. Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (Asteroid Base, 2015) makes the churn literal: helm, guns and shields sit in separate rooms of one ship, so the crew is permanently one person short of the station that currently matters. Hide a traitor inside a loop like this and you have social deduction, which is why sabotage there stings — it attacks work the group had already invested in.
The hard part isn't the theme, it's the headcount. The same level has to work at two, three and four players, and a player is not a unit of throughput. They're another body in a corridor, another hand reaching for the station you were about to use, and another source of intent nobody stated. Two people can hold a shared plan in their heads; four can't, which is the good part — but it also means a level tuned tense at four is unplayable at two, and a level tuned for two is trivial at four.
There is also no single-player mode worth shipping, because coordination is the game. Overcooked's answer is to hand a solo player two chefs and a button to swap between them: a decent puzzle about your own latency, and not the game the other three people bought. So you are left balancing a matrix of player counts, running a proper test pass needs three other humans, and the hardest cases are at the counts you can least often assemble. PlateUp! (2022) multiplies it again by welding a roguelite run on top, where an upgrade that keeps a four-cook kitchen alive can bury a pair several days into a run. Moving Out (2020) takes the other exit and lets the cargo fight back, which puts one foot in physics party games — when the sofa has opinions, the chore and the pratfall are the same event.
Type: Co-op chaos (a shared pipeline under a clock; the difficulty is coordination, not dexterity)
Core loop: Split the stages, work yours, call the handoffs, re-split when the level moves
Perspective: Top-down or isometric, one screen the whole room reads at once
Win / lose: Hit the level's target together; lose to the clock, or to a jam nobody called out
Session: Levels of a few minutes stacked into an evening; a campaign adds one cruelty at a time
Progression: Stars and new stages; the run-based ones bank kitchen upgrades between services
Design the jam before the theme. Kitchens, removal vans and starships are interchangeable skins over one question — which stage runs out of hands first, and can everyone see it happening — and a group that can see the jam will forgive almost anything else about your game.