Café Barista

The initial concept for Café Barista (working title) came about from playing card games with my family during the 2018 winter holidays. The games we were playing left me wanting something less chance based and more player driven. My goal was to create a game that was simple enough to pick up and play without having to read a book of instructions, but still complex enough that it would encourage and allow for multiple play styles and strategies.

Instruction Manual

Basic Gameplay

Players act as café baristas at a coffee shop working to fulfill customer orders. These Orders are each worth an indicated amount of points and award the player with some type of bonus action for that turn. To complete an Order players use Food and Drink cards drawn from their respective decks. A third deck consists of Action cards that give players the opportunity to interact in a variety of different ways to slow each other down or combo their way to winning the game, first player to 20 points wins.

Food and Drink cards each come in 8 different varieties, as well as Wilds.

There are 4 decks, Orders (black), Actions (red), Food (yellow), and Drinks (brown).

Choices and Strategies

While designing the core mechanics of the game I wanted to focus on giving the players a sense of agency, which I felt was lacking from the games I had been playing.

With that in mind, each player’s turn consists of 3 choices, each choice has 2 options, they can draw a card or play a card. Meaning, in a single turn a player could draw 3 cards, or play 3 cards, or draw 1 and play 2, etc. When drawing cards they have 3 decks to pull from, Food, Drinks, or Actions. This level of decision making has shown in playtesting to allow for a good mixture of different play styles.

Finding the Fun Through Playtesting

It quickly became apparent in playtesting that the game felt similar to Uno or Monopoly, in that you almost hate each other by the end of the game. So far though, each game seems to end with people wanting to immediately play again. Which looks to be because they want revenge on whoever just beat them.

Leaning into the vengeful nature of the game started to inform how the Action cards were designed. Taking input from other game designers and players, the power base of each Action card was essentially doubled. Additional layers of player interaction were introduced with new Action cards like “You, And Them”. Making Action cards have a more significant impact on gameplay created more opportunities for chaining combos, or ruining an opponents chance to win.

Current State of Development

The game is in active playtesting within a few different groups of friends and game designers. The rules are largely locked down with only slight alterations being made to tighten up the gameplay.

The current design of the card is not final as the pictures used on all cards are not owned by me. A redesign of the current look and feel is underway. Going to be moving away from using photos on the cards and switch to illustrations with more identifiable features. The photos can be difficult to distinguish from a distance as many of the drinks and food look very similar.