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IF you'd like to compete to be the best barista in town, or like the idea of serving cups of coffee or a latte or two.
Then Coffee Rush is the game for you.
THE RUSH
Coffee Rush is a game where you compete with 2 to 4 players to serve the public as fast as you can, to get the most points. You aim to do this without upsetting any customers as upsetting your customers would cause you to suffer imminent closure of your shop.
Throughout the game you generate orders and move your Barista (meeple) around the board collecting the ingredients needed to make the drinks to give to the customers. All this while not gaining more orders throughout the game turns, when your opponent(s) achieve their orders they give you more orders to fulfill. Sometimes however you want orders as this gives you access to upgrades that later help you out in moving diagonally across the board or allowing you to pick double the amount of ingredients in certain spaces.
All the while Coffee Rush is a fast paced game, but if you have a cool head and plenty of ingredients at the ready than you should be able to keep up with your orders, hopefully.
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR COFFEE?
Coffee Rush is a beautifully presented looking game, where I found that the layout of the boards and the compounds were very pleasing to the eye.
Every time I moved the meeple, to the ingredient space of chose, it was so nice to pick out the ingredient from the clear trays that were provided in the packaging and place them into the small clear cups. It put a big smile on my face every time I was also able to make an order with all ingredients able to sit in the cup provided, although making sure I had the correct ingredients for the order sometimes become a battle of wits in the fight to become your very own barista.
Just be aware if you are a barista with less dexterity and you are struggling to get the ingredients out of the trays and into the cups, to get orders out on time, I found it a lot easier to remove the ingredients from the trays so that it was easier to pick them up, as they are small.
GOTTA GO FAST
With the name coffee rush, it implies that you might be going around the board with your barista a lot faster than usual, however your meeple is quite slow initially – only 3 steps a turn!
To get those rush tokens, that enable faster/more movement, you can either fulfill orders that have the speciality logo next to them, or if you are unlucky, when you are unable to fulfill orders before your time runs out.
The rush in Coffee Rush is a great mechanic where if you have already some rush tokens they can be spent to move extra spaces in that turn, to collect those extra ingredients and get those
extra orders out on time. While normally a barista is only able to move 3 spaces a turn, getting rush tokens can give you that easy burst of speed to get orders done and give more orders (hopefully complicated ones) to other players as well.
I AM A FAST LEARNER
While completing your orders, on the start of your turn you are able to flip over, “use”, 3 of your complete orders to choose 1 of 4 upgrades.
These upgrades add another layer to coffee rush and to your barista as well, but can also depend on where you are on orders at the time.
The two favoured upgrades that I was going for at the start was being able to move diagonally as it made it a lot easier to get to the ingredients that I wanted to get to quickly. Double speciality was the other, where when your meeple lands on an ingredient that has a red diagonal ribbon, you are allowed to get double the amount of collected ingredients from that space. It was really helpful when I had a lot of tea orders to do that required collecting tea leaves for quite a few orders.
The other two upgrades were double ingredients on the corner spaces and double ingredients if you are standing on the same space as another barista. I would see this more effective in a 3 to 4 players as they are more baristas on the board, fighting for the same ingredients. Although 2 player games still have 4 baristas on the board, as you aren’t fighting one of them for ingredients, it seemed less effective to double the drops.
All these upgrades do give you extra points going in the end game so it is really important to keep getting orders complete and getting as many, if not all, the upgrades as possible.
HOW WAS YOUR SERVICE?
A overall conclusion, Coffee Rush is a game I have enjoyed playing over and over again.
I have had many laughs with my friends and my partner, and I believe if a game like this can have this much playability and is aesthetically pleasing to look at, then it is definitely a game I would have on me if I am away on holiday or a quiet evening in with friends. Over a couple of cups of hot beverages , I mean coffee of course!
