Seize the Bean

About this board game

Seize the Bean is a competitive café game for 1–4 players, with a play time of about 90 minutes. Set in Berlin, it challenges successful baristas to prove they can build the city’s best new café.

You begin with only your family and friends as customers. Each turn, you must prioritize limited actions to attract customers, improve your café’s decor, expand your product line, and restock the resources needed to keep your business running.

Before taking those actions, you have to serve a line of thirsty customers with different drink demands. Customers can provide special skills that let you manipulate your line, affect the city, or interfere with other players, creating opportunities to improve your plans.

• Serve customers while managing your available stock.
• Upgrade your café’s decor and expand its products.
• Use customer abilities to influence the line, city, and rival cafés.
• Build combinations of customers, upgrades, and products for reputation.

Keep enough stock on hand to satisfy your visitors, because impatient customers may leave bad reviews that threaten your café. Keep them happy, however, and you can form combinations with customers, upgrades, and products to earn reputation points from the central city pool.

In Seize the Bean, reputation determines which café rises above the competition. Play quickly and make every serve count: once the city’s reputation pool is empty, the endgame begins, giving everyone one final serve step to show how well their café engine works. The game was released in 2021.