Coffee Roaster Review
Coffee Roaster is a solo, token selection and placement game around the theme of roasting coffee beans. By careful determination and pushing their luck, a player will attempt to eliminate excess moisture, extract the perfect flavor notes, and avoid burning beans in order to create the perfect cup of coffee. Players who want to learn more about different coffees and coffee growing regions (while pulling tokens out of a bag and making unilateral decisions about placing them on player boards) may thoroughly enjoy Coffee Roaster.
PeteSteele: Keegan, nice job on the thematic inaugural review of Murder of Crows for Corax & Coffee.
KeeganKing: Thanks!
PeteSteele: In keeping with thematic reviews this week, I thought I would write a review on a coffee-themed game.
KeeganKing: A good coffee-themed game? That seems like a tall order.
PeteSteele: Is that an intentional reference to a coffee chain that uses arbitrary size titles for some arbitrary thematic reason that really only causes anxiety and frustration in all but their most loyal customers?
KeeganKing: It seems a little bit early to give our readers cause to divide themselves into ideological camps, don’t you think?
PeteSteele: Are you telling me that we should support our readers in finding common grounds?
KeeganKing: I’m walking away. Just write the review.
PeteSteele: Coffee Roaster is a “premium“ (so says the front of the box) solo game by Saashi and was first published in 2015 in the United States by Stronghold Games.
In Coffee Roaster, as the lone player, you take on the role of (surprise) a coffee roaster. Through random token selection and carefully considered placement of a variety of these tokens, you will attempt to maximize your victory points in several categories by the end of the game.
Coffee Roaster provides a score pad where you can add up your roast points, flavor points, and skill points, and then subtract the minus points. Depending on your score, you will achieve one of 8 rankings, from “Apprentice Roaster” to “Master Roaster.”
Nobody could possibly accuse Saashi or Stronghold Games of skimping on stuff in this production. When you purchase Coffee Roaster, you will receive: 1 double-sided roast board, 1 cup-testing board, 1 double-sided thermostat encounter board, 1 red game round marker, 1 red roast marker, 1 black cloth bag, 103 bean tokens, 16 flavor tokens, 19 other assorted tokens, 5 cup tokens, 22 different double-sided coffee cards, 1 overview card, 1 information card, 1 score pad, and 1 instruction booklet.
The box also comes with an excellent storage solution: a clear plastic tray with an underlay that illustrates where each token is intended to go. Coffee Roaster is an exemplar for storage solutions, with one caveat: don’t store the game sideways (yes, I know—another controversial topic).
A game of Coffee Roaster has multiple rounds, each consisting of a Roasting Phase and a Cup Testing Phase. On each round of the game during the Roasting Phase (except during the first round), you will increase the temperature on the thermostat board, draw tokens out of the cloth bag, remove moisture tokens from the game, use immediate effects and flavor effects, switch out tokens based on the roast level, increase the roast level, and then complete a cleanup action. During the Cup Testing Phase of each round of the game, you will place tokens and unlocked bonus tokens on the cup board in order to maximize your score based on the requirements of the given coffee card.
You will always have an idea of which tokens can be drawn from the bag at any given time based on the tokens you have already drawn, the tokens you initially put in the bag, and the number of tokens on your board. But there is still a heavy element of luck. Just because you know you could draw a token you desperately need, it is no guarantee that you will. If you’re so inclined and have some entry level knowledge of statistics, you could crunch the numbers to determine the exact probability of drawing a given token.
Coffee Roaster feels less like a game, and more like a highly thematic, all-information-available, only partial-information-accessible, plodding, less-than-exciting, solo task with few meaningful options. Kind of like a partially-simulated and semi-hands-on educational experience about how the profession of coffee roasting is, indeed, difficult to do well. A fine message to get out into the hands of the public, but hardly enough to be a fully-fledged game.
SarahVasa: But I like doing solo activities and puzzles! I think I might like this game.
PeteSteele: Look, I certainly would never dissuade someone from liking something they genuinely like . . . except for people who put any kind of additives in their coffee.
KeeganKing: Aaaaand . . . you’ve just alienated 90% of our potential readers.
PeteSteele: Dude! I’m not done with the review yet. Get out. What I am saying, Sarah, is that I think there are much better solo games and puzzle games out there. So, unless you absolutely adore the coffee roasting theme, I don’t think this is a great experience for you, most people, and certainly not those who are newcomers to the tabletop gaming hobby.
Full disclosure: I tend to have a hard time getting on board the pulling-tokens-out-of-a-bag-at-random mechanic. Certainly this type of mechanic almost always has more flexibility than custom dice, but what this mechanic gains in flexibility, it loses in flow. Rolling dice and determining outcome tends to be a much faster and more streamlined process than selecting tokens from bags, especially when you have to pull out a specific number.
In Coffee Roaster, you slowly and painfully pull tokens out of a bag, making sure you have the right number, and then you sit there looking at them thinking to yourself, “well, this was essentially random and this is all that I have to work with . . . so . . . I guess I’ll have to make it work.” And sometimes you can, but sometimes you just can’t and the game just . . . happens to you in these moments. All this to say, by and large, the bag mechanic in Coffee Roaster just doesn’t work for me.
Even with all the things and stuff that come in the box, Coffee Roaster is certainly contained enough to be played on a reasonably sized cafe table, and the puzzle quality of it, if you don’t mind the randomness of the token bag, could lead to a player having a pleasant afternoon sipping their favorite beverage and puzzling through roast after roast of Coffee Roaster. And it certainly would be difficult to come up with a more thematic game to play in a coffee shop . . . aside from some sort of barista challenge game where the players play baristas who try to poison their unwitting customers wi—
KeeganKing: Dude!!!
PeteSteele: Sorry, sorry. What is meant to say is: if a passerby saw you sipping coffee and playing a coffee game in a coffee shop, they might think they were being punked. It could be a fun social experiment, but it is certainly a solo game, not a social one, and thus it is not really conducive to sitting down with a friend in a coffee shop and playing together.
I wouldn’t engage a player with this game other than to simply pull it off the shelf, open it up, and show them the nicely crafted coffee-themed components and, especially, the coffee cards. Those are definitely worth a look. But since it is a solo game, and a light puzzle activity, it is not exactly conducive to sitting down and engaging other people. If you want to enjoy and discover this game, I suggest you discover it on your own. The components are definitely worth looking at and knowing about if you are someone who simply enjoys knowing about games.
The rulebook is full of illustrations, including a wonderfully illustrated component list. There are a few typos, but what I found most frustrating about the rulebook was that in order to understand some of the iconography, I first had to flip to the back to read through an iconography glossary. I would have appreciated an iconography player reference card that players could place on the table next to the other components.
So, is Coffee Roaster worth the price tag? Well, in many ways, you’re paying for coffee education with decent artwork more than you are a game. All of the components and color tones are thematic with their browns and tans that remind me of burlap sacks that are often used to store and transport coffee beans. But as a game that I repeatedly saw in game stores with an MSRP of $44.95, I passed on it again and again for over a year. I finally purchased it for $30 when it went on sale. I am glad I have played and experienced Coffee Roaster for my 30 bucks, but it’s not a game I plan on keeping for much longer.
If I had a friend who absolutely loved solo games and puzzles, didn’t mind a heavy dose of luck, loved coffee, and was a coffee roaster who loved things that reference their profession, I would recommend it to them for $44.95. But I don’t think I have such a friend. While Coffee Roaster is marketed as a “premium” game and sometimes we pay premium prices for such games, there are many other premium games (at and above the price point of Coffee Roaster) that I would be much more willing to pay for at full retail price.
All this to say: if you like tabletop games, absolutely love coffee-themed things, would like to have these put together, and don’t mind a much, much heavier euro-style game, then I would highly recommend the game Coffee Traders (2021) designed by Rolf Sagel and André Spil and published by Capstone Games over Coffee Roaster.
If this game had been developed and marketed towards middle school or high school teachers as a teaching aid for geography, micro-economics, or anthropology lessons to help students understand coffee roasting production, history, and geography, then, within that context, we might have rated the game higher than we did.
As it stands, Coffee Roaster was clearly designed for, and marketed towards, the hobby game connoisseur. As wonderful, in many ways, as this production was, the flavor notes of the game just fell flat for me. It would’ve been well worth the designer’s time to continue roasting design ideas in their minds until the true aroma and flavor of this idea was fully developed.
But if you love solo games with an element of puzzle, and don’t mind reaching into a bag and pulling out some controlled randomness (optional: while eating a biscotti and sipping on your favorite prepared beverage), then this might be a game that you’ll enjoy. That being said, this game is not really for us, and thus we are giving it the Corax & Coffee Seal of Nonchalance. However, we do believe it can be played, somewhat thematically, in a cafe, so as nonchalant about it as we may be, we have awarded Coffee Roaster the Corax & Coffee Cafe Approved banner.
KeeganKing: Is the review done?
PeteSteele: Almost. Do you want to get coffee roasting equipment for the office?
KeeganKing: What office are you talking about? Our respective apartments? So, you want to put roasting equipment in our kitchens?
PeteSteele: Oh, I don’t think our partners would mind.
KeeganKing: Okay, my partner might mind, and your partner would definitely mind. I’m cutting you off from caffeine for the rest of the day.
PeteSteele: What about the KB90 La Marzocco espresso machine with fully integrated plumbing?
KeeganKing: You’re cut off for the rest of the week.
Coffee Roaster (2015) receives the Seal of Nonchalance and is Cafe Approved!