Café

Café is a 2020 economic card game by Portuguese designer Rôla and Costa, published by Pythagoras. It is for one to four players and uses coffee production as its precise subject. Rather than asking players to run a generic café, it traces an industrial chain: coffee beans are dried, roasted, packaged, and sent onward to coffee shops. The game’s framing refers to the twentieth-century growth of coffee-distribution companies, whose competition made efficient production and distribution networks especially valuable.

Play is built around a shared display of cards. On a turn, a player chooses a card, adds it to a personal tableau, and must place it so that it overlaps cards already there. That overlapping rule is central to Café: cards can cover some printed actions while leaving others visible, so a new addition changes both the available production sites and the spatial connections in the player’s network. The result is a compact tableau puzzle, not a map of cafés or a worker-placement board.

The production icons represent successive steps, and their positions matter because activations can use linked facilities. Players seek to arrange drying, roasting, packaging, and coffee-shop cards so that materials move through the chain effectively. Coffee is represented by cubes, which are advanced through the process and ultimately delivered. Card placement therefore has a double purpose: it expands capacity while also determining which actions can be triggered together. A poorly aligned tableau can leave a player with useful stages that do not connect efficiently.

Café’s scoring is tied to sales and to the development of a productive system, giving the final result a commercial logic rather than a purely decorative one. The game includes rules for solo play as well as its multiplayer format. Its relatively short playing time—commonly listed as about thirty to forty-five minutes—fits its small card footprint, but the overlapping-card restriction makes each acquisition consequential. Players are not merely collecting coffee-themed cards; they are deciding which parts of a supply chain remain exposed, connected, and capable of supporting later deliveries.

That focus distinguishes Café within coffee-themed games. Its mechanisms turn the commodity’s transformation into the game’s structure: inputs must be processed in order, production spaces must be arranged carefully, and deliveries convert the completed chain into points. Rôla and Costa’s design consequently makes the physical layering of cards a representation of operational planning. Every tableau records a route from bean handling to coffee shop.