Coffee is one of my little luxuries, one of those daily pleasures that helps to make life just a touch better. I would hardly describe myself as a connoisseur, but I have certainly got to the stage where I prefer to buy the beans from specialist suppliers and then grind them at home before partaking of a morning brew. I know the chap who owns my roastery personally, and last summer he even let me roast my own batch of beans, a surprisingly high tech affair which involved a laptop and graphs and readouts, together with beans and heat. It was a Kisinga bean, the flavour of which remains my favourite.
Although theme may often seem to be arbitrary in a game, for a design about defeating the zombie hordes could probably just as easily be about fending off soldiers or aliens or viruses, it is still part of the whole gaming experience, and my slow but secure move into solo gaming has brought Saashi’s Coffee Roaster ever more into my field of vision. Initially self-published but latterly picked up by dlp and Stronghold and packaged in a second edition, this game has begun to edge its way into the mainstream and is starting to become a regular fixture in the solo landscape. So is it a weak-willed cup of motorway filter coffee or instead a full-flavoured, intensely complex concoction transferred directly from bean to palate?
The box itself is well designed, for the game comes with a multitude of tokens to represent beans, moisture, flavours, sweetness and other things besides, and a plastic tray holds all of these components in their own places, meaning that playing the game eventually becomes a simple affair of opening the box and selecting a starting bean, of which more later. The boards are thick and solid, clearly designed to stand the test of time, and double sided to represent easier and standard levels of difficulty. There is also the rule book, an envelope containing the information about the various beans, and a small set of score sheets. Lastly there is the rather natty coffee cup itself, which sits in a niche at the side of the main board, and upon which success or failure will play out.
The rules themselves are generally clear and easily understood, but there are a couple of areas which could be better explained and which could benefit from a little more clarity. Nothing is omitted that is important, but there are some details that are either less specific than they could be, or whose intention could be clearer. The various bonus tokens, especially, can take a little while to understand, and even then there are certain questions that go unanswered and which are left open. In general, though, the flow of the game is easy enough to grasp, and, once taken on board, diving straight in after some time away is simplicity itself.
A full game of Coffee Roaster consists of three rounds of brewing, each of which involves its own bean and is itself influenced by what goes before. Beans for the opening round are divided into two levels, Beginner and Expert, the latter of which is available only after the player has achieved a certain score on any previous play. At the back of my mind are the words ‘legacy game’, and while this is a long way from that whole concept it is still a deft touch to realise that a previous success can have an effect on all subsequent plays. From that initial point onwards, a player’s score in round one determines the level of coffee bean that they can choose in round two, and the same occurs in round three. Keep hitting the high scoring targets and you are on your way to success, but that is certainly much easier said than done.
Each round begins with selecting the appropriate tokens for unroasted beans, moisture, flavour and sometimes other things besides, popping them all into the included bag and giving them a good shake. At the top of the board a red marker not only indicates how many rounds are left but also how many tokens should be drawn from the bag, and this number increases as the game progresses. Longer games can begin with only six tokens being drawn in the first turn, while as many as fourteen can be required at the end of the game, more if special abilities are used.
On each turn the player draws the indicated number of tokens from the bag and decides what to do with them. Flavour tokens may be used to trigger immediate special abilities or placed on the board for lasting bonuses, as well as giving the benefit of their own action, while beans slowly and surely begin their journey towards their final roasted flavour, usually in increments of one (a one-bean becomes a two-bean), but occasionally in increments of two instead (a one-bean becomes a three-bean), although unroasted beans only ever move up one level. Careful, though, because if your four-bean is not removed by some ability and ends up being roasted then it burns and still ends up going back into the bag. Beans can sometimes be split, combined and removed to try to avoid this fate but, as with all bag builders, the literal luck of the draw can make your plans go askew very quickly indeed.
Moisture and smoke can also mess with your progress, and there are sometimes defective beans to deal with as well, and as the rounds progress the aim of the game is to remove as many of these unwanted nasties as possible so that the final brew is as pure to the palate as can be.
At some point the decision needs to be made about when to stop the roasting process and instead switch to cup-testing, and getting this decision correct is critical to the final scoring. The temptation is always to go slightly over – just the one more round! – but underroasting can be just as damaging to those with aspirations to hit the higher levels of scoring. This, then, is the moment for nerves of steel, ironically for those without caffeine jangling through their veins, for tokens are drawn one by one from the bag and either placed in the cup or rejected.
Of course, if it were as simple as that then the game would be easy, barely a challenge at all, so there are some severe restrictions as to what can be done, which make any bonuses that might have been gained along the way very useful indeed. In its purest form the cup has ten spaces to be filled, but there are only three spaces in the cardboard tray for rejected tokens. Reject the first three tokens out of the bag, therefore, and you have no option other than to place the next ten tokens onto the coffee cup and score them come what may, so each draw is a decision of risk versus reward, even if some of these decisions are certainly easier than others. Thankfully the bonuses allow for a bit of wiggle room – a couple of extra slots on the cardboard tray here, a widening of options there – but never quite enough to make things easy, and each of them costs two flavour tokens to activate that could now prove to be useful.
Each cup, once completed, scores roast points based on how closely the total of the numbers on the beans tallies with the target levels on the coffee card, with extra points added for matching flavour tokens and skill (gathering sets of like-numbered beans), while points are subtracted for hard, burned and defective beans, and for smoke. Lack of flavour and empty spaces also cost points. Get a roast spot on and you can try a trickier challenge in the next round, but miss the target completely and you will only be allowed to develop your skills at the Beginner level. After three rounds for the full game you check your score against the chart and are considered anything from Apprentice to Master.
Coffee Roaster is very much a game of two contrasting feelings. It does what it does very well indeed, and I have had many gasp-out-loud moments when the final draw from the bag has proven to be exactly what I have needed, but it also needs to be said that the game does pretty much the same thing every time. Pick a variety of coffee to roast, go through some rounds trying to get rid of some tokens, choose when to stop drawing, try to get a decent cup of coffee. Because of this – or maybe simply because of my own lack of skill at the game – the early stages especially of each roasting can play out very similarly indeed, and it is possible to end up with no options at all about what to do, which seems, well, strange.
For example, moisture tokens are removed from the game when drawn, so if a player is drawing six tokens in their first round and four of them are moisture, two of them hard beans, then there is nothing for them to do but remove the moisture and roast the beans. In this way, Coffee Roaster has a peculiarly unengaging beginning, and the excitement definitely comes once the tokens in the bag have had some time to sort themselves out, and when abilities are being used to riff off each other, which can then allow for some crafty plays.
At the end of each roast, though, and especially when it comes to that crucial moment of deciding whether to go for another round of roasting or instead to go for the cup-testing, the tension can be very high indeed, frustration and joy supplied in equal measure in that final drawing. Rather than measuring out its excitement in equal amounts from start to finish, then, Coffee Roaster saves them up until the end.
Weirdly, this means that I want to play Coffee Roaster more when I play it and less when I do not. Somehow those opening few rounds have got into the back of my head and make me less likely to grab it off the shelf, but when I do I enjoy the excitement of it all. I know, I know, those first rounds are all about laying the seeds for what comes later, but even after ten plays I still find it odd that some moments can pass by with no real decisions for the player to make.
That doing-the-same-thing-every-time may also have an impact upon Coffee Roaster’s longevity on a gamer’s shelf, for the puzzle remains fundamentally identical in every game. Yes, the starting tokens change and the targets are slightly different, but the means and the mechanisms do not alter from game to game, merely the details. It certainly feels less malleable, less fresh every time, than certain other short solo games that I own. Play it intensively early in its life on your shelf, therefore, and I think that the shine might wear off it. This might not be the case for everybody, certainly, but for many after twenty plays or a Master Roaster result a new challenge might be in order.
Twenty plays is still pretty good value, though, and Coffee Roaster is an enjoyable and solid game, even with the reservations that I have mentioned. I imagine that this will be the kind of game that I stick with until I get a result which means that all the stars have aligned and which I think I shall never improve upon, and then I may well move it on. Having said that, it is a game that I am happy to have on the shelf and to have played, a clear and individual design with great tactile presence, a strong like rather than a love, and certainly something at which I am improving as I play it more. Just be aware that, like the coffee it depicts, it is at its best when fresh.
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