YORKTON - Ever get a game to the table and everything about it was fine, and yet nothing stood out so it was ultimately rather bland – in this case like a very weak cup of coffee?
Well such experiences happen, and that was the case as The Meeple Guild sat down to Café recently.
Café came out in 2020 and is a 1 - 4 player game where players represent coffee companies that ‘grow’ the coffee on a plantation, send it to a dryer, then a roaster before finally ending up in a café to be sold and earn game points.
What that means in terms of game play is you will be moving a bunch of little wooden cubes around a tableau of cards you are building on throughout the game.
The game flows fine, but you soon find decisions are limited. You can’t do ‘C’ without first doing ‘B’ and for that you must start at ‘A’.
As for the cards you select, there are choices but again a quick realization comes that you need cards in the tableau with ‘cups’ as those are what give you action points. The more cups the more action, the more opportunity to get coffee to a café to be ‘sold’ and earn game points.
Cards with cups do have a cost but you have to have them.
There are cards with ships – no idea why ships – which can eliminate the cost of a cup, so those are good too, but I’d take a cup early over a ship.
The art on the cards is a mix. The cafés are quite nice, rendered in some detail in a sort of antique sepia tone. The beans, cups, ships etc are plain, uninspired, albeit functional.
Even the box, while sort of ‘Avant-garde’ doesn’t exactly draw one to grab it off a shelf, and the name Café helps not an iota in terms of drawing attention. This one would be easy to overlook in-store.
If a coffee drinker were to get this – say in a Christmas stocking – they’ll find an OK game experience that once on a game room shelf will become a pickle jar of games, easily pushed to the back of the shelf where you are likely to forget it’s there.
And yet – it was OK in spite of its overall blandness.
