Coffee Rush: quickly serve your customers in this Overcooked board game

What is a board game? Coffee Rush ?

Your little café is successful. A lot of success. A little too much even, since you have difficulty fulfilling the orders of all your customers. Be careful not to collect too many negative reviews!

Accessible from 8 years old, for 2 to 4 players and games lasting around thirty minutes, the game offers simple rules while requiring strategy to plan your actions… despite the urgency of the commands that pass by.

Published by Korea Boardgames, Coffee Rush is a game by Euijin Han, illustrated by Siwon Hwang, and sold at the price of €32.95 at Philibert.

How do you play it?

Each player is assigned their customers’ orders. From the simplest (ristretto) to the most complex (an iced caramel latte for example).

To honor these orders, you move your pawn onto the small squared board common to everyone. We have three moves each turn, and when we arrive at a square, we collect the corresponding ingredient (a coffee bean, a drop of milk, a tile of chocolate, etc.).

We then place these ingredients in our cups. But be careful, we only have three in total. We can therefore only prepare three orders at a time.

When an order is ready, we send it to the customer. To prepare an iced caramel latte, for example, you must place a coffee bean, a piece of caramel, a drop of milk and an ice cube in the same cup. For the ristretto, a coffee bean and a little steam are enough.

When the order is sent, the customer is happy, and leaves you a positive review on social networks (victory points at the end of the game). But customers are impatient, and don’t like to wait too long. At the end of each round, orders not yet fulfilled move down one notch in the queue, from 1 to 4. And once at the 4th notch in the queue, if the order is not sent, the customer leaves unhappy, leaving a negative review (minus points at the end of the game).

To help us, we can exchange positive opinions for improvements, allowing easier movement on the ingredient tray, or to collect several at once.

We play in turns, until one player accumulates 5 negative opinions, synonymous with the end of the game. Everyone counts their points and the highest score wins.

Why play Coffee Rush ?

We find in Coffee Rush the sensations of ultra-speed video games such Overcooked For example. However, we do not play under time constraints, we do not play under pressure.

But seeing his pile of orders grow as the game goes on, and seeing his customers become more and more impatient, increases his stress, it’s unstoppable.

You then have to know how to let go, let go of certain commands, and concentrate on others. Optimization is the key to victory. And planning above all, since you know exactly which ingredients you can collect several turns in advance, as interaction is almost completely absent between the players.

So much so that you should forget Coffee Rushif this is a criterion for choosing your games. A player could leave the table in the middle of the game, it would not change anything after its progress.

Let’s quickly talk about hardware. The illustrations of the drinks menus are really very successful… they are very appetizing, and make you want to taste them. The different ingredients and the cups are cute, with the corresponding shape (the coffee bean has the shape of a coffee bean, etc.). But we quickly realize that this harms readability (the cups are too small to clearly distinguish their contents). And was there really a need for all that plastic? Simple wooden cubes with appropriate colors (white for milk, black for coffee, brown for chocolate, etc.) would have done the job just as well. We go from a “wow” effect when opening the box to an unpleasant feeling of playing at play.

Despite that, Coffee Rushis a very pleasant game to play, if you don’t mind the lack of interaction. The rules are simple and family-friendly, the games not too long (even if a little repetitive at the end), but still require strategy, especially optimization and planning. And the urgency of the orders piling up and the risk of seeing unhappy customers really add to the spice of the game. A mechanic that we don’t see very often in board games, but which works quite well.

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