Put simply, the object of the game is to make a pizza! Each of the four players is given three random ingredients and between the 12 items, you have to make a pizza but it’s not quite as easy as it sounds.

Pizza requires four players: two cooking slots, one charisma slot, and one body slot. The payout on pizza is based on the combined skill level of all the players on the table, so each station should be filled by the person with the highest skill for that slot. Some Sims like to go to a pizza house and find people to pizza with, while others prefer to make teams up out of their friends and go together. 

Once you have chosen your team of four, each Sim selects a position (based on skills) at the pizza making machine and awaits an automatically generated phone call. Each member of your team is given a set of ingredients and must contribute one of them towards making the pizza. To add an ingredient to the pizza, simply click on the image of the ingredient you wish to use. Once all of the ingredients are added, a small animation occurs and a completed pizza rises from the center of the table.

A successfully made pizza requires:

Dough Sauce Cheese Toppings (for a Supreme)

The catch is that ingredients come in several sizes and to make a winning pizza, all the contributed ingredients have to be the same size.

If all 4 players communicate with each other correctly on the desired pizza size, a piping-hot pizza will rise from the center of the oven and everybody's wallets will get a little fatter. However, if any of your crew makes a mistake, you'll get a burnt-up mess and you will have to start over!

When learning pizza it is useful to understand the abbreviated terms most Sims use for each ingredient. Ingredients come in three sizes, large (L), medium (M) and small (S).

These are your main ingredients. If you have a dough (D), sauce (S), and cheese (C) all the same size you can make a successful Plain Pizza.	These 3 ingredients are all toppings (T). There is no need to specify which topping you have. Add any topping to your plain pizza and you have a Supreme Pizza.

Example round 1:

In this example, Players 1, 2 and 3 have the ingredients to make a successful large plain pizza. They would each add their respective large ingredient while Player 4 adds a SC as it is a duplicate. This fourth "throwaway" ingredient will not affect the outcome of the large pizza.

Example round 2:

In this more complex example, all of the ingredients for a large Supreme pizza are present but since Player 3 holds two of the essential ingredients, the large Supreme cannot be made. However, with Player 1’s MC, Player 2’s MS, Player 3’s MD and Player 4’s MT you can make a medium Supreme pizza.

If there is no possible combination, the leader will normally add BURN or B (MD BURN or MDB) to the instruction, meaning to throw away that item in an incorrectly made "burnt" pizza, usually smalls or duplicates. These will be replaced in the next round, hopefully with a better set of ingredients. Some players prefer to burn anything except large pizzas, while others are happy to do any pizza for any payout. Make sure you know the other people’s styles before you start. It saves a lot of problems later!

Pizza-making is by far the greatest moneymaking activity within the game and many people take it very seriously. If you try to join a group of experienced serious players having never played before, then you are likely to get shouted at a lot if you mess it up. However, most good pizza houses have a few people around who will be happy to do a round with new players and you should ask in the room if anyone would like to help teach you how to play.

Most people play “Instant Message Pizza”, where everyone IMs the leader with their ingredients listed by size and the leader responds with which ingredient to play, but some prefer "out loud" or "Bubble Pizza" in the room for a greater challenge. A variation is Voice Chat, which involves each player with a microphone headset and something like Yahoo! Messenger in group voice chat mode running behind TSO. This can be hilarious fun and well worth a try if you can find people willing to do it.

Make sure you are fully green before you start a round. You will be able to continue making pizzas until your Sim’s needs drop below a certain level, when s/he will refuse to play any more. A useful tip to help extend your playing time slightly is for everyone to randomly during the round, click on your teammates and “Flirt” or “Compliment”. This adds a small increase to the fun motive, which helps keep that cutoff point at bay just enough to make a couple more pizzas.

A new addition to the game is an overwork penalty (OWP) where, after a certain amount of pizzas per round, you start getting penalized financially for making too many pizzas and flooding the market. This is an attempt to defeat illegal third party programs but most average players will not notice this in action. Taking a quick break from the machine or having each team member interact with each other will stave off the OWP for a bit if you encounter it.