Seize the Bean First Impressions

Seize the Bean has you run a cute little coffee shop…

…with the weirdest patrons.

You are a successful barista, so successful that’s it’s gone to your head, making you think you can run a coffee business better than your boss. In order to prove your skills to the world, you’ve quit your job to open your own café in the beautiful city of Berlin. The only problem is that all your friends — who are also successful baristas – did the same thing, too!

Seize the Bean Game Play

TL:DR Use worker placement to enhance your cafe and use deck building to attract and serve customers at your coffee shop.

Theme

I’ve played games about wine and beer so it’s good to play one about a drink I actually enjoy.

The things you add to your cafe make thematic sense. Certain decor attracts a certain type of customer and certain appliances allow you to fulfil specific orders.

Setup

The game all the different types of cards in different bags, there was a lot! I believe there are different customers you can add to change the game up so setting this up takes a while.

Components & Artwork

The components are really nice and I think are upgraded from standard ones? I’m not sure.

The coffee beans, sugar cubes and milk bottles are particularly nice.

The art for everything other than the customer cards is really nice, they are not.

Ease of Teaching

The game is easy to teach… However, there are too many symbols. I would like to see the number of symbols slimmed down. For example, there is a coffee bean, cafetiere and a bag of coffee beans that all mean pretty much the same thing. This could have just been 1, 2 or 3 coffee beans just to slim down the confusion.

Same with the customers, those eating various pastries could just have sugar cubes instead of various cake symbols.

Then you have what these coffee beans and sugar cubes reflect on those customers’ artwork. This would help a lot.

Seize the Bean Summary

This is a Hybrid game. Not a game that pretends to be a hybrid like Dune: Imperium which is just a deck-building game! (Cards place Agents, therefore it’s a card game.)

In one phase you place workers to take actions to gain ingredients and upgrade your cafe.

In the next phase, you use a deck-building mechanism to get new customer cards into your deck and add an amount to your queue.

It’s also a bit of a double-engine building game. You’re upgrading your cafe which will bring in different types of customers into your queue, all with different needs. These upgrades also allow you to meet these needs…

It’s very clever.

I know there are different decks which I believe make the game more or less mean/interactive but I’m not sure there is enough here to play the game again too often. It’s repetitive enough and I don’t think changing some aspects will help with that.

Still, it’s a good fun game to play, it just needs a little something special added to it to take it to the next level.

Jesta ThaRogue