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?
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.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Open Drafting
Select cards or items from a shared face-up display.
Hand Management
Time and sequence a limited hand of cards to preserve future options.
Set Collection
Gather related items that become more valuable when scored together.
Worker Placement
Commit limited workers to action spaces before opponents occupy them.
Take That
Direct negative effects at selected opponents.
Read the full game description
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! In Seize the Bean, players compete to be the best new café in Berlin. Reputation in both Berlin (in real life) and the game is earned from people — all the diverse customers you'll serve. You start only with your family and friends, and you have to prioritize your limited actions each turn to attract customers, upgrade your café's decor, expand your product line, and restock your resources in order to get the most reputation of all. Before you can take actions each turn, you also have to serve a line of thirsty customers with various drink demands. As you serve them, customers offer special skills to manipulate your line, the city, or even other players. But make sure you have enough stock on hand or customers may get impatient and start leaving you bad reviews which could doom your shop. Keep them happy and you may be able to form combos with customers, upgrades and products, earning in-game reputation points (good reviews) from a central "city" pool. Be fast because once this pool of reputation is gone, the endgame is triggered, allowing everyone only a final serve step to see how well their engine works!