Coffee Rush

• Designer: Euijin Han
• Publisher: Korea Board Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Asmodee USA (distributor)
• Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3HubPcQ

A cup of coffee sure is relaxing — for the customer. For the coffee shop, however, orders tend to pile up during peak hours, and it is no different today at Coffee Rush. Your goal: Complete customer orders to increase your ratings and be recognized as the best barista!

In more detail, each player moves on the ingredient board to collect the ingredients that they need to fulfill orders — and fulfilling orders boosts your rating. Orders that are not fulfilled in time become penalties, which subtract from your rating. If a player has fulfilled three orders, they may activate an upgrade that lets them acquire ingredients more easily.

The game ends once all order cards have run out or after a barista collects their fifth penalty card. The player with the highest rating wins!

To start the game, the Ingredient board and the Order Card deck are placed on the table. Each player gets their own Player board and things. The starting player draws two Order Cards and places them in slot 1, then takes 1 card for slot 2 on their board.  All other players take one card each for slots 1 and 2.  In reverse turn order, players place their Meeple onto an empty space on the ingredient board and take whichever ingredient is on the space they choose and places it in one of their cups. 

Players take turns, going through all of the phases before the next player goes.  The game continues until the end of the round when a player has 5+ penalty cards OR the deck of Order Cards is exhausted.  The phases of a turn are:

1] Activate Upgrades – you can discard 3 completed Order cards to activate an Upgrade tile – this will improve your future actions, and it becomes immediately active.

2] Move – You can move 1 to 3 spaces orthogonally on your turn, picking up an ingredient at each stop. You may not end your turn’s movement on a space with another meeple though you are allowed to pass through an occupied space.  Upgrades may increase the number of ingredients you pick up or you may be allowed to move diagonally.  You may also spend a Rush token to move one extra space (and get one more ingredient).

3] Pour Ingredients – Add ingredient tokens to the cup(s) of your choice; each player has 3 to use. Once an ingredient is in a Cup, it can not be moved.  Any unwanted ingredients are returned to the supply.  At any time, you can pour out a Cup, meaning that you discard all the ingredients in it.

4] Process Orders – If one of your cups has ingredients in it which match one of your orders, you complete the order.  Discard the ingredients and place the card face down to the upper left of your player board.  If you have completed a Specialty Menu order, take a Rush Token as a bonus.  Once you have completed all the orders you can, the next two players in turn order take a matching number of orders from the Order Deck, placing them on Tab 1.  If the deck of Order Cards is exhausted, flip the start player tile over to show that this is the final round of the game.

5] Turn End – All orders more one tab downwards.  Uncompleted orders in Tab 4 move off the board and become Penalty Cards.  They are flipped facedown and placed in the bottom left of the player board.  If a player takes their 5th (or more) Penalty card, they flip the Start Player tile over to denote that this is the final round of the game.  Otherwise, Tab 3 moves to Tab 4, Tab 2 moves to Tab 3, and Tab 1 moves to Tab 2.  The next player now takes their turn

The game follows this order until one of the two game-end criteria is met, and then the current round is completed.  At the end of the game, players calculate their rating:

• +1 Rating per completed Order Card
• +2 Rating per activated Upgrade tile
• -1 Rating per Penalty Card

The player with the highest rating wins, ties broken in favor of the player with the most completed Order cards.

My thoughts on the game

Coffee Rush is a nice family level game, which I managed to first enjoy at a coffee shop!  Not often that I get to match the theme of the game with the outing… Anyways, here, it is a simple-ish game of order fulfillment.  You start with only 2 or 3 orders, but don’t worry, you’ll soon get more as nearly every time someone else completes an order, you’ll end up with new ones in your queue.  It won’t take too long before you feel like Lucille Ball in a chocolate factory, well, except that you’re at a coffee shop…

The rules are pretty simple, and even a non-gamer shouldn’t have any problems picking up the rules.  The game doesn’t include a player aid, but it honestly maybe doesn’t even need it – that’s how easy it is to learn.  Start collecting ingredients, pour them into your cool transparent cups and strive to fill your orders as quickly as possible.

While there certainly is some time pressure in the game, Coffee Rush really doesn’t ask you to try to prioritize or strategize too much about which recipes to fulfill first.  As all the recipes move at the same speed (1 row down per turn), it’s easy to usually just look at your lowest orders and try to fill them.  And, if you can’t get the correct ingredients, just look at the next row up and go for that.  At some point, you won’t be able to get them all, and you will have to figure out which order to let through your board and convert into a Penalty.  But, on the whole, it’s not a hard decision.

The Upgrades give you a bit of a engine building feel – as you get to choose the order in which you upgrade your actions; but again, there doesn’t seem to be much of a decision here whether to do it or not.  Sure, you lose 3 points worth of completed cards to get an Upgrade tile, but the tile itself is worth 2 points – so it is only a net loss of 1 point.  Given the usefulness of the action upgrades, it’s pretty much always worth it unless you see the game ending in the next round or two.

There may be a bit of luck in getting Orders that are easier to fulfill – though the most difficult Special Orders (which require 4 ingredients) do give you a Rush Token as a reward for completing them; and that extra move often comes in quite useful.  As each card is worth the same regardless of the number of ingredients needed to complete them; a player who draws a lot of Ristrettos (2 ingredients needed) is likely going to do better than one who keeps getting special orders (4 ingredients needed)

On the whole, you’re just on your own in this game – there is not really much interaction going on here other than the fact that your incoming Order cards result from your opponents completing orders.  There really isn’t any blocking here as you can still get ingredients from occupied spaces – you just can’t end on the same space as someone else.  In the end, this means that nearly every ingredient is available – it’s just up to you to plot your course around the board to get the things you need.

The components are pretty sweet – that plastic ingredient tokens and the clear cups look great on the table, and it does give you the feel of constructing a drink (though you’ll have to suspend your disbelief as you place a white Steam token into a cup…).  I like the way that your “points” are depicted as Facebook-like thumbs up and thumbs down.  

The game plays quickly, and my most recent 3p game ended in about 20 minutes.  Coffee Rush is a nice light game, and as I mentioned earlier, it is accessible enough for non-gamers to pick up without too much trouble.  With its great bits and easy rules, this is a great game to use as an introduction to gaming or as an opener/closer to game night.   As I have a lot of coffee nerd friends, it will probably make the cut here as a game to keep around if/when I try to convert them to gaming nerds.  It’s too simple for my game group to want to play often (or ever again honestly)… but this will work well for newbies.

Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3HubPcQ

Until your next appointment,

The Gaming Doctor