Coffee Rush Review

You’ve decided to open up a new coffee shop on the busiest street in town! In a wild coincidence, 3 other savvy entrepreneurs have decided to do the same! Well, the good news is you can all share the same supplier for the various exotic (and otherwise) ingredients you will use. The customers in this area have varied tastes and are all very aggressive online reviewers – please them and they will recommend your business well, take too long to get them their Coffee Rush and they will leave you a 1 star review that will see your business tanking!

2-4 Players | 40 Minutes | Designed by Euijin Han

Coffee Rush is published by Korea Boardgames, who I previously knew as the publisher of Coconuts – the game with the spring loaded monkeys! As it turns out, the world of Korean language boardgames is pretty much entirely run by Korea Boardgames, with them publishing most Korean localisations of popular western titles. They do however have their own lines of original games of which Coffee Rush is the latest to have made its way to international distribution.

How does it work?

Coffee Rush is worker movement resource collection game where you aim to fulfil as many coffee orders as you can with your available actions. Players will need to prioritise orders that are ‘older’, as they will cost points if you don’t fulfil them in time. Players take turns gathering resources and fulfilling orders until either one player fails 5 orders, or otherwise the order deck runs out.

Players begin the game with a few random orders and place their barrister barista somewhere on the board. A turn consists of – moving your barista around the board up to three spaces to collect ingredients, then assigning those ingredients to one of your three cups. After that, if any of your cups have ingredients matching one of your order cards, you can complete that order. It’s that simple! At the end of your turn, any uncompleted orders get ‘older’ (move down a row), with any on the 4th and final row dropping off to become disgruntled customers and bad reviews!

Any time a player completes an order, the two players to their left receive a new order in their top row. This means that when other players are doing well, you will get swamped with more and more orders you will need to keep up with.

There are a few other nifty mechanics that the game throws at you: Rush tokens (earned from delivering speciality orders) let you make extra moves on your turn. Each player also has a set of four bonus tiles they can unlock which are critical to keeping up with increasing numbers of orders. These give diagonal movement, and various extra ingredient gathering powers.

The game ends when one player fails 5 orders or the order deck runs out. At that point whoever has completed the most orders (minus failures) will take the Coffee Rush crown!

What do I think?

I’ve played Coffee Rush now 3 times at three and four players. The gameplay loop is simple enough that this gives me a good feeling for the game and each of those plays had a fairly varied outcome, somewhat determined by the starting conditions for each game.

The Good Stuff

• The artwork in this game is top notch! It does a great job of evoking a mood and theme appropriate to the style and weight of Coffee Rush
• In addition to the lovely artwork, the production of this game is also ‘deluxe is standard’ level. Especially notable are the super cute custom resource tokens for each of the 8 ingredient types, not to mention the tiny little coffee cups!
• I really like the realism of the new order mechanic. Orders being random and totally out of your control – both in what they are and how many you have to deal with just fits so well with this game.
• The order mechanic is also very stressful! You get this feeling of just getting new orders constantly and it makes the game feel frenetic, hectic. I think it’s perfect and really makes the game very exciting.
• There is a very fun feeling of everything just coming together at the end of a turn where you complete several orders – and this happens a lot!
• When you fill an order and your competitors groan because they have to take yet another order into their queue it is very satisfying. Of course, it’s probably mere moments till you get another order pushed onto you.
• Overall, the rulebook is good. The game has a simple ruleset which is easy to teach, and it’s quick to onboard new players and start playing a game of Coffee Rush.

The Bad Stuff

• The game can be a bit starting condition dependent. Players draw starting cards randomly from the main deck (there is a fixed start variant that mitigates this) and you can be stuck with a set of orders that can be hard to complete quickly, which will lead to compounding issues. Even if you play with the starting variant, as you gain orders during the game this issue can crop up. Of course, card draws are random but there were a few moments I noticed some players get consistently unlucky draws and fall behind as a result.
• Turns can slow down when someone is in a difficult situation (e.g. about to get penalties) as they try to see if there is any way to avoid the impending failure to make an order. Since there are a lot of options with movement on the board it can take a while to see if getting what you need is possible or not.
• Similarly, the last turn or two can really grind to a halt as people try to find the best move. Often in your last turn there is nothing ‘good’ to do but it can take a while to work that out conclusively.
• Low player interaction – I feel this is a drawback as this kind of abstract game I would a liken to Azul or something similar, where all the re-playability and interesting strategic decisions revolve around dealing with other players. Yes you can block in this game, but the scope of interaction is pretty much limited to that.
• While I didn’t play the game lots of times, it feels to me like the type of game that is great fun the first few plays but then could grow stale as you learn the ‘tricks’ that make it easy to be successful. The puzzle doesn’t really vary much so there won’t be depth or breadth in strategy.

It might surprise you (it generally surprises everyone) to know I don’t like Coffee. It’s gross as. I don’t drink it! I mention that here because, despite being disgusted by the subject matter of the theme of this game, I still find the implementation of the theme delightful, and fun to play. I think the chaotic nature and fast paced (mostly) turns in Coffee Rush make for a great experience and can see a wide cross-section of the gaming world finding this game fun. It really appeals to a range of different groups – offering analytical gameplay, simple rules, beautiful bits, and a fun theme. It’s a great package! If you are keen to give it a go, keep an eye out for it at your local game store!

The copy of Coffee Rush used for this review was provided to The Boardgame Detective by VR Distribution.