Coffee Rush Winter

• Designer: Euijin Han
• Publisher: Korea Board Games
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3RVHsVD
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

As the frosty days grow shorter, your cozy café becomes the ultimate refuge for customers seeking comfort from the cold. In Coffee Rush: Winter, the high-stakes barista business returns with a seasonal chill, challenging players to balance the frantic pace of peak hours with the delicate art of crafting winter specialties. Fulfilling orders earns you precious “like” cards and points, but fall behind, and those disgruntled customers will leave “dislikes” that count against your final score. Whether the game ends because the order deck is depleted or a barista accumulates five penalties, only the player who manages the winter rush with the most efficiency will be crowned the top barista.

While fans of the original Coffee Rush will recognize the core “Overcooked-style” tension, this winter edition introduces several key differences:

• Modular Board Chaos: Unlike the fixed layout of the original, the ingredient tiles are now modular. You can set up with “Main board chaos!” or “Windy day” variants, randomly placing ingredients to ensure every game requires a new movement strategy.
• Seasonal Drinks: The menu has expanded to include winter-specific items.
• Component Changes: The game features thematic updates to its components. Fruit (depicted as orange slices) is newly added to the ingredients, and the Ice tokens are now shaped like Snowmen to fit the winter theme.
• New Upgrades: With the newly introduced upgrade tiles, you can now choose four out of six available upgrade tiles for each game.
• Scoring: Scoring has been revised so that points are now awarded as +2 for each “like” card and +5 for each activated upgrade, with a -1 penalty for each “dislike”.

To set up, place the board on the table and arrange the ingredient tiles face up on the board.  You can either use the suggested layout from the rules or do it randomly.  Construct the order deck based on the player count and put it near the board.  Each player gets a player board, 3 cups and the 6 upgrade tiles in their color.  The table decides upon which four upgrades to use in this game; all players take those chosen tiles and place them facedown on their player board.  Each player then draws two order cards, placing one in position one to the right of their board and the other in position two.  The start player gets an extra card in position one.  Finally, in reverse starting order, players place their meeples onto an unoccupied space on  the board, gaining the ingredient shown on the space they place on – and this ingredient goes into one of their three cups.  Each player also gets one cookie from the supply.

On a player turn, the same 5 phases are done, with two of them being optional.

1] Upgrade your board (optional) – if you have 3 like cards on your board, you can discard them to activate the upgrade of your choice. Flip the upgrade tile over to show the active side.  Each active upgrade token gives you a special ability that is in effect for the rest of the game.  Upgrade effects can stack. 

2] Move – Move your meeple 1-3 spaces orthogonally. Collect ingredients from each space you enter and place each one into one of your three cups.  You may pass through an occupied space but you cannot end your movement there. You may spend a cookie for an extra space of movement.

3] Fill your cups – Put the ingredients collected into your cups. Once placed, you cannot remove a single ingredient, but you can always dump out and discard the entire contents of a cup.  You can also decline to put an ingredient into a cup, in which case it is discarded.

4] Complete orders (optional) – If you have a cup that exactly matches the ingredients on one of your order cards, you can fill the order. Empty the cup into the supply and place the completed order card face down on your board as a “Like” card.  If this is a specialty order, also collect a cookie token. Finally, the next two players in turn order must draw a number of order cards equal to the number of your completed orders this turn and add them to position 1 in their order queue.

5] Flow of time – move all the remaining order cards in your queue down one step.  Any cards which started the turn in position 4 get placed at the bottom of your board as a “Dislike” card.  If you have 5 or more cards, this triggers the end game.  Play until all players have had an equal number of turns. 

When the game is ended, players calculate their scores:

• 2 points per Like card
• 5 points per activated Upgrade
• -1 point per Dislike card

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most Like cards

My thoughts on the game

This is a standalone spinoff of Coffee Rush – https://opinionatedgamers.com/2024/01/29/dale-yu-review-of-coffee-rush/ , and you are now serving drinks in the cold season.  The biggest change that I noticed was that the ingredients are now movable – so that every game requires you to work out the best paths.   This is a pleasant improvement as it keeps the start of each game fresh. 

The game itself still follows its usual trajectory of starting off nice and slow, giving players time to finish their initial starting orders, but then the speed on the incoming orders inexorably increases until it is an avalanche.  By the end of the game, you’re usually just trying to stay alive (i.e. I Love Lucy and the chocolate conveyor belt), hoping that someone else triggers the end before you do!

While there certainly is some time pressure in the game, Coffee Rush: Winter 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 an 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 6 points worth of completed cards to get an Upgrade tile, but the tile itself is worth 5 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, hopefully that extra action balances out the additional time/energy it took to fulfill the order.

The components are still sweet, just like the original version– 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.   

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 simply can’t end your movement 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 other major change for me is the scoring – essentially the Dislike cards are worth about half of what they used to in the original game.  Upgrades are a bit more valuable, and I think this is another good change as it incentivizes players to upgrade when they can, and this in turn should allow them to compete better as they’ll be better equipped to deal with all the orders.  Finally, it’s nearly impossible to end up with a low score with this change, and that just makes the game feel overall more friendly.

The game plays quickly, and our games still take about 20-30 minutes.  Coffee Rush: Winter is a light game, but it is NOT stress-free.  As the pace of the game accelerates near the end, you’ll be struggling to keep up!  The game remains 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.  

This winter, I am pretty sure we’ll be returning to play Coffee Rush: Winter with some warm drinks nearby to keep us toasty and cozy.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

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

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3RVHsVD