I bought Café a while back to add to my quick solo-able card puzzle collection, and finally got around to playing it after noticing and watching this video on BGG the other day (being a full tutorial and solo play-through in around 20 mins by someone whose videos I’ve previously found to be very good).
It’s got the Sprawlopolis (amongst others) thing of laying cards partially over the top of other cards, except (a) you can play cards (which are 3x2 grids) horizontally or vertically; and (b) you must cover up either 2, 3, or 4 existing squares – which is generally a painful decision because you’ll only play 8 cards in the entire game, and you’ll usually need to cover up things you wanted.
On each of the 8 turns you draw 3 cards (or 4 cards if the expansion is added), select and play 1 of them, discard the others, and then perform as many actions as you have visible coffee cup squares (up to 8; you start with only 1). Actions are growing beans; harvesting+drying beans; roasting dried beans; and delivering roasted beans.
The ideal card positioning will leave you with contiguous areas of the same type of square/icon for growing, drying, or roasting, as a group of adjacent icons of the same type can be activated together as a single action. So the better your arrangement, the more things you’ll achieve in your limited actions. But trying to arrange for things to be next to each other will constrain your placement options even further, making it even more likely that you’ll need to sacrifice something else good to do it. There are 4 types of bean and, aside from meeting the requests of cafes, you will score at the end of the game for only the 2 types you have the fewest of; so ultimately you want to produce the different types as evenly as possible.
Because it’s only 8 rounds, it’s all over quickly as well, so you can play it a few times in a short time-span. So I did that… and after 2.5 games, I decided I just wasn’t feeling it, and packed it away without finishing that game. I have other games about fulfilling constraints that I enjoy more than this. It probably also doesn’t help that I don’t like coffee, as otherwise I might be drawn in by the theme more. The very spartan art design does little for me (except for the box art which is lovely, darn it), and all the blank space only emphasises that the over-sized cards are much bigger than they need to be (I imagine that with the maximum 4 players it would actually, and needlessly, be a table-hog).
The puzzle is certainly tricky, but the real killer is that I just couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for it. This may be partly because this is an engine-building puzzle, and I’ve realised in the past that “engine building” just isn’t a thing I enjoy much in board games. I might try this again another time and see if I feel differently, and check whether adding the expansion cards helps; but I suspect this will go on the sell pile.
If a quick-playing card-laying engine-building puzzle game sounds like your cup of tea^H^H^Hcoffee though, check out the video I linked to. Lots of people rate this well, so it might very well be worth a look.