Coffee Roaster Review - with Liz Davidson

[Music] hey gamers this is Liz Davidson from beyond solitaire and today I'm gonna be reviewing coffee roaster designed by Sachi and brats and publishing the United States if I stronghold games in a game of coffee roaster your goal as the player is to brew the very best cup of coffee and you're going to do that by roasting the beans in your bag and adjusting the contents of the bag until you think you're going to do well on a cup test which is where you draw coffee beans from your bag place them on each area of the cup and see what your total score will be your target score changes depending on which coffee you've chosen to brew and the game comes with several so you'll have several beginner intermediate advanced level brews to work on and you're gonna get a little bit of geographical information about each type of coffee as well as information about how to set your game up and what your target scores are on the back of the card so for example if I'm choosing to go for the el toro oaxaca this card's gonna tell me everything I need to know so the contents of my bag are detailed here so I know that I need to put in 13 0 level beans for totally new green beans for moisture one bad bean and then a certain combination of flavor tokens I also know what kind of point target I'm going for at the end of the game so if I could draw exactly 14 points worth of beans in my cup test then I will score 10 points I feel skip flavor points for having two green flavor tokens and a blue so basically what the game is about is knowing what you're going for what's in your bag and trying to do your best to make sure that on your cup test you draw tokens from your bag that meets these scoring conditions as well as possible so in this game my rice will start at 0 obviously and then I would place my token here for my turn marker right here on the 8 because there are 4 moisture tokens in the bag and how many rounds you have is determined by how many moisture tokens you put in I'm also going to put some smoke tokens out here so basically when you reach these thresholds these red markers you add smoke to your bag because well things are getting hot you're risking your coffee and you're also going to roast your beans twice in that round that you draw hence the red so you can get into some pretty dangerous situations if you are not painting careful so basically how each turn will work is that except for the first term where we know we're thermostats going to be you'll raise your thermostat by one draw the number of tokens indicated on your thermostat and then make adjustments as needed so for our first turn we would draw eight tokens it let's just kind of see it we draw I'll talk you through them alright so what's gonna happen with these is the moisture is automatically gonna burn off we're gonna put it right back in the box which by the way is very handily organised it makes it really easy to switch this stuff out so now we discussed moisture let's talk about flavor tokens flavor tokens lead to the game's biggest challenges because they are the pieces around which you have to make the biggest decisions so when it comes to a flavor token you can either leave it in the bag and hope that it gets drawn for your cup test because it does affect your score for example we know that for I'll turn Wacha we are gonna want some green and blue flavor token so we don't want to spend them all on the board however flavor tickets are also played for effects in the game both the ones that are marked here on the board and the ones that each flavor token brings the table on its own each of the flavor tokens does something special in the game for example red stands for the body of your coffee and what it allows you to do is combine two beans that wouldn't work great this turn because zero and zero is still zero but if I had two ones I could actually combine them to make a two for example or I could combine a one and a two to make a three the blue flavor tokens stand for aroma and they allow you to do basically the opposite you can take a higher level bean and split it into two lower level ones this is particularly useful if you've had a whole bunch of turns and you're starting to get these high level beans that you're worried about burning the highest number level for a bean is four and if you roast something beyond the four point then you have a burnt bean that goes in your bag and cost you points if you draw that during your cup test so you do not want to burn your beans the other type of flavor token is this green one it basically symbolizes acidity but what it allows you to do is preserve two of the beans that you draw on a turn put them back in your bag unchanged that's particularly nice if you draw flavor token on these levels where you roast twice because you don't want to burn a high level beam because you couldn't control how quickly that roasting ratcheted up however in order to get any of these effects you basically have to give up that flavor token forever and you give it up by placing it here on the board you do get bonuses for placing those flavor tokens but they are lost so you have to time it correctly flavor tokens can either be used for these one-time effects over here I particularly like the one that lets you get rid of a desirable tokens from your bag so if you draw a whole bunch of smoke or burnt beans and then have a flavor token you can use that flavor ticket to get rid of them but there are other bonus actions as well the other thing that you can do is place flavor tokens in order to save up for these bonuses for your Cup test so if you want to have a better end of the game with more options then these are tokens that you're going to be very interested in trying to acquire however you don't have enough flavor tokens to get them all and you do still need flavor tokens for your cup test generally so you have to make some careful decisions as you play and those decisions may change based on the coffee variety you're trying to blend so now let me talked about the flavor tokens let's talk about the beans zero beans are generally pretty useless although I always like to take one of them and put it up here because what it'll do is you leave a 0 and a 1 here you'll get the wild flavor token which is very useful the rest of these are going to get roasted and one that means is that each of the zeros is going to upgrade to one so the number value of coffee beans that you draw goes up each time that you draw them in some ways this is good because for example I know that I'm gonna need to get a 14 on my cup test to get the points that I want to get for my roast so right now there's only about 4 roasts in the bag at all and I need to get to 14 I know that I need to be roasting my beans however if I don't manage to do that efficiently enough and end up taking too many turns I can have too many high-value beans and end up with kind of a burnt tasting roast so at the end of a turn depending on what you do you return everything to the bag that you didn't play you adjust your thermostat up here and this I'm gonna draw nine tokens from the bag and basically do the same thing there's also a little bit of a pusher luck element to the game because you get to choose when to stop roasting your coffee so for example I might decide I don't want all those smoke tokens to come in our bag and stop on eleven but that's risky depending on what beans I've drawn and how much roast there actually is in my cup so coffee roaster is partially about luck but it's also partially about making smart decisions and be really aware of what's in your bag the game ends with the cup tests that I've been talking about so for the cup test you're going to take eight tokens that you might have learned from playing flavor tokens and then you're just going to draw tokens from your bag place them on the cup and then you're going to give yourself a score based on the total value of the beans in the cup if you draw something bad there is a tray that you can put three beans that you don't want on if you get the traced inch in token then you can dump a couple of other beans in the course of your cup test it should be noted that you will also absolutely need to have enough of beans left in your bag to fill your cup because otherwise you lose a bunch of points you don't want your roast to be too distilled down so that's coffee roaster it's actually pretty quick it's pretty simple but it does have some interesting decisions to make especially where the flavor tokens are concerned and when it comes to knowing it when to stop and go ahead and do your cup test so now for some final thoughts overall I really like coffee roaster and it's a solo game that I've spent a lot of time with I actually originally imported a copy from Japan with the old art and I'm happy to see it more widely available here in the States so first the good points one thing I really like about coffee roaster is its variety there's several different brews that you can go for and at several different difficulty levels so it's possible to have subtle variations from game to game as you sit down and play and this is one of those games that I find myself playing a lot of times in a row so having that variety is especially important for a player like me mechanically I also particularly love the flavor tokens especially deciding what to do with them when you happen to draw them from the bag because later tokens can be used for so many different things either the actual cup test as something that will get you a special bonus action or is a way to manipulate the beans that are in your bag you actually have a lot of choices as to how you want to approach flavor tokens and making those choices throughout the game it's really enjoyable fun intense and it's one of my favorite aspects of playing coffee roaster keeping track of what's in the bag is also really enjoyable part of the game for me I enjoy the puzzle of trying to increase my odds as much as possible of getting a high score and I also like the mental exercise of knowing exactly what's in the bag what I'm hoping to draw and having sort of a goal in terms of what kind of beans I want in there for my cup test and I think one of Coffee Roasters biggest selling points it's just that it's one of those games that is easy to set up easy to take down and quick to play so if you're looking for something that's light fast suitable for a work night something relaxing then coffee roaster is potentially going to fit that bill for you that said I do have some concerns about coffee roaster it's a game that I personally like but I also think that it has some flaws that you have to know about going in my first concern is that sometimes turns can feel a little bit dead this can either happen because you've drawn flavor tokens that you don't need flavor tokens that you can't do anything with or just all beans with numbers on them and you just increase the number throw them back in the bag and the turn is done so there are sometimes gonna be turns in the game where you don't feel like you have a lot of agency in terms of what's happening and you feel like you're very much subject to the luck of the draw from the bag because the game plays so quickly and the turns go by so quickly and there are other decisions to make this is something that you might not mind too much I don't really find myself finding it too much most of the time but if you want every single one of your turns to feel like you really did something and contributed to your game state then coffee roaster may frustrate you the randomness of drawing from the bag it can also affect your cup test so if you don't get good draws as you play and you don't get a chance to adjust your brew as you see fit that's also gonna affect your cup test you can always have bad drawers no matter how you've played your game but it can be very frustrating to feel like you didn't quite get a chance to do everything you wanted to do because of the drawers that you had earlier in the game and then have those drawers affect your test later so you don't draw any of the tokens as you want from your during that final scoring draw again because this game is so light and so quick and you could just try now to play it again it doesn't want to be too much but it's something that really might bother you the last comment I want to make about coffee roaster is it I'm not convinced that it's worth the MSRP full disclosure I imported this from Japan for 60 bucks a couple years ago and it was expensive it's a lot of money for the game that coffee roaster is but I just had to know because I'd heard so much buzz about it and I was so low game for viewers so of course I went for it the current MSRP here in the United States is about $45 and while I'm sure you can find a copy cheaper than then I'm still not convinced that is an appropriate price for this game coffee roasters a quick game it's a light game but I don't think it's a substantial game that justifies that substantial of a price of course people feel differently about game prices and your mileage may vary but I felt that it was worth noting but overall coffee roaster is a quick fun snappy game I really enjoy playing it and I'm so happy to see it more widely available here in the United States if it sounds like something for you it probably is because I find it very enjoyable and I rate it a 7 out of 10 happy gaming thanks so much for watching another diced our video if you enjoy our videos subscribe to the channel for more fun comprehensive board game coverage also consider joining us at one of our events come to diced our retreat a small intimate gathering where gaming is king join us for diced our cruise the largest board game cruise attended ice tower West in Las Vegas for gaming fun on the west coast or diced our East in Orlando in sunny Florida diced our conventions the friendliest gaming conventions on earth I'm Eric summer and you've been watching the dice tower

Channel: The Dice Tower

Views: 13,150

Rating: 4.9354839 out of 5

Keywords: board game, board, game, dice, card game, cards, catan, monopoly, tower, dice tower, vasel, review, tom vasel, vassel, settlers, gaming, GeekUsername: TomVasel, board game review, boardgame, uno, ticket to ride, apples to apples, educational games, educational, top 10

Id: --BliCl6AFE

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020