Coffee Rush

Coffee Rush is a family game from Korea about running a busy coffee bar. Customers order drinks, you collect the right ingredients to make those drinks, and hopefully you can serve them their drinks before they lose patience waiting and storm off. You will get more and more customers and inevitably someone will eventually have too many upset customers. That’s when the game ends and you compare points to see who wins. This is a game about people who have not had their morning coffee attacking you like zombies until eventually one of you gets overrun by the horde. The game can also end when the card deck runs out, but that would not be as cinematic. 

Everyone has a player board where your orders are tracked. New orders are added to the top row. When you complete an order, it is removed from the waiting zone and put face-down in a score pile. Every round outstanding orders are shifted one row down. If an order is shifted beyond the bottom row, it means the customer loses patience and walks away, while giving you a one star review on Google Maps. You lose 1 point. 

You get new orders when either of the players before you in turn order completes their orders. You get a new order for every order they complete. This is why the orders keep piling up. The tension keeps rising as you play. 

On your turn you move one of your pawns up to three steps on the ingredients board. You can pass through other pawns but may not stop in the same space as another pawn. You collect ingredients for every space you enter, and you can place them in any of your three cups. This is how you complete orders. 

Who ordered caramel caffe latte? 

Whenever you have three or more completed orders, you can trade them in (they are worth 1 point each) for an upgrade. An upgrade is worth 2 points, so doing this means you are sacrificing 1 point. Upgrades give you new powers, for example collecting more ingredients and being able to move diagonally. 

Coffee Rush is easy to get into and immediately relatable. There is some competition and blocking on the ingredients board, but it is not vicious. You are busy enough handling your own customers so you probably won’t bother with blocking others much. Anyhow you can only block the final landing space. Others can still pass through your space. The more effective way of attacking your opponents is probably completing multiple orders at the same time and giving them more orders than they can handle. Still, they just might manage, and score points for those orders. 

This is a nice game to play with casual gamers and it will also work as a gateway game.