A Nice Cuppa

• Designer: Scott Almes
• Publisher: Button Shy
• Players: 1
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Demanding jobs, unpaid bills, health concerns: modern life is filled with constant worry. Let your burdens drift away, if only for a moment, in the rich aromatic steam of your favorite tea.

A Nice Cuppa is the seventh game in Button Shy’s Simply Solo series. Designed by Scott Almes, the game tasks the player with managing Worries through careful card management across 8 turns. As Worries are revealed, they complicate your life and force you to become distracted. Focus on your tea to eliminate those pesky problems and soothe your shattered nerves. Once your tea is ready, evaluate how you did.

A Nice Cuppa is another 18 card game from Button Shy Games.  To set up the game, take the 7 numbered Tea cards, shuffle them and palace them in a row on the table, all with the Focused (colored) side up.  Then, shuffle the 10 Worry cards and place one facedown below each Tea card on the table. The three unused Worry cards are discarded unseen.

The game occurs over 8 rounds. In each round – do the following steps:

A] Choose a facedown Worry card and flip it face up.

B] From left to right, perform all the actions on face up Worry cards.  Each of these cards allows you to manipulate the order/position of the Tea cards.

C] Flip each Tea card over that is above a face up Worry card.

D] Remove each face up Worry card that is directly underneath a Focused Tea card.

E] Optionally, swap any two adjacent Tea cards

In the final round of the game (which you will know because there are no more face down Worry cards); you skip phase A, complete the other steps and then move into scoring.

At the end of the game, keep Tea Card #1 and each card in correct numerical order to the right of it.  Then based on the remaining cards, score the following:

• +2 VP for each Focused Tea card
• +1 VP for each Distracted Tea card
• -1 VP for each Worry card on the table

In the standard game, you succeed with a score of at least 6 points.  If you have chosen to play the harder game, you must score at least 8 points AND get all the Tea cards in numerical order.

My thoughts on the game

A Nice Cuppa is a challenging little puzzle of a game.  The rules are quite simple (the one card turn reference card is pretty much all you need once you learn the game) – but you’ll have a lot of things to accomplish in your eight short turns. 

The Worry cards come up in random order, and as you are never quite sure what will come up from the facedown Worry cards, you have to constantly be planning for all sorts of possibilities.   You have two main goals – first, to order the cards as best you can, and then to get the Worry cards off the table.  Interestingly, you don’t always want to get rid of the Worry cards immediately because the card manipulation actions on them might be necessary for you to get your tea cards in the right order.

Each of the Worry cards gives you a slightly different way to move the cards around, and things can get complicated if you’ve left yourself too many of them on the board at the end of a round. Figuring out how to manage the Worry cards and their actions is key to success.  When I started playing, my only focus was getting the cards into the right numerical order – as each one left standing at the end of the game was guaranteed to score points.  Now that I’m able to do that with some regularity, now the challenge is getting them all to the Focused side while I’m moving them to the right place.  My best score so far is only 10 points (out of the possible 14), so I still have plenty of room for improvement!

My games take 10 to 15 minutes now, and it did come in handy on a recent flight – the whole game fit in my pocket (I have a prototype set of cards so it doesn’t yet have the awesome card wallet that you usually get with these Button Shy games), and it fits on a tray table.  I’ve enjoyed my plays so far, and I think it will end up at work where I can use it during lulls in my day.  The game should be coming to Kickstarter later this year. 

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Maricel E. – I’m a sucker for card rearranging (is that a mechanism?). Games like Numbsters, Murderer’s Row or Elevenses really tickle something niche in my brain. It doesn’t hurt that these are usually small and portable and weigh almost next to nothing in my schoolbag. A Nice Cuppa is a terrific addition to my modest collection of soloable card rearranging games. I came for the art and stayed for the puzzle. I did have a bit of a kerfuffle understanding the rules – you can move any pair/group of cards when told to do so by the Worry cards and not necessarily pair/groups in numerical order – which made my games that much more challenging. But after confirmation from the creator via Dale, my subsequent games went more smoothly. I have not yet leveled up like Dale so I still just focus on getting the cards in numerical order over getting rid of Worry cards, but slow and steady wins the race. Oh, and did I mention the PnP was super easy to assemble? But who are we kidding here – I’m definitely gonna scoop up the published version when it comes out.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Maricel E.
• Neutral.
• Not for me…