Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
Humans can't get served in Monster Cafe, so you'll need to choose the right monsters to approach the counter in order to get the coffee you want.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Read the full game description
Humans can't get served in Monster Cafe, so you'll need to choose the right monsters to approach the counter in order to get the coffee you want. To start play, choose the five monster families that you want to use in the game from the twelve available, then shuffle those cards. Each player receives a hand of ten monster cards (twelve with two players), then chooses three of these cards to place face down to form their "back line". All of the other monsters form a face-up front line. On a turn, a player chooses one of their face-up front line monsters, moves it to the center of the table, then triggers its power. As soon as each player has only three monsters in their front line, the round ends and players distribute coffee tokens. Whoever has the most monsters of a particular family, with back-line monsters counting double, earns coffee tokens equal to the number of monsters of this family in the center of the table. After multiple rounds, whoever has collected the most coffee wins!