Visit this charming café where capybaras oversee the counter,
hoping to turn customers into regulars with their delicious food, beverages,
snacks, and décor. Café Baras is a card-drafting, tableau-building game for both with kids and adults.
It is beautifully designed and has some nice strategic decision spaces with varied
ways to gain points. The goal is to play cards and serve customers using
tableau point-building opportunities and meet end-game goal challenges to ultimately
earn the most points and win the game.
The core of the game are the café cards, which have separate
information sets on the top and bottom that drive the two main actions players
take during the game. Gameplay works as follows:
- Players start with a hand of four café cards, seven dollars in coins, and one counter card, which is the Capybara Café boss that serves customers. Four café cards are drawn face up as a display for drafting cards during the game. Five Special Guest cards are randomly drawn and displayed for end-game point opportunities available to everyone. Next, players take turns choosing one of two different actions to take.
- Serve a customer. The bottom half of the café card has the requirements requested by the customer. For each food or drink type the customer requests that you can match with a food, beverage, or décor icon in your café’s card tableau, gain one coin. Then, discard the customer card. Draw your hand back up to 4 from the café card display.
- When a player serves a customer, can fulfill all food requests, and has one matching preferred décor, that customer becomes a regular and is placed under your Café Boss’s counter card.
- Once any player has three regular customers, everyone else gets one more turn and scores are tallied.
- Points are awarded for leftover coins, café cards, regular customers, and any Special Guest card goals fulfilled. The player with the most points wins the game!!
I am always on the lookout for games that are easy and quick to teach, work for a wide range of ages, and have an hour or less play time. This game will stay in my collection as one of my favorites in this niche. It won me over for theme, replay value, charm, and a nice balance of card play mechanics. For 2-4 players with 30-minute game time. ~Marsha