9th Jan 2025 - Coffee Traders

• Recent games

What can you say about Coffee Traders? I'd say it's a heavy Euro - one of those expensively-produced Capstone ones with loads of wood pieces. We soon discovered it's also Andrew-M's favourite game... but would it be to the rest of our tastes, or would we wonder what all the fuss was about?

Heavy Euro or otherwise, my choice of board games is heavily influenced by the theme. So I was bound to try this one sooner or later, although as far as coffee consumption goes, I'm more about the quantity than the quality. But the idealistic concept of helping out the little fair-trade guys in Guatemala and Ethiopia sounds sweet.

So you're doing all the normal Eurogame things like moving things off your player board, advancing on tracks, fulfilling contracts, collecting bonus tiles etc. Victory points are for doing nice helpful things for the little coffee farmers, but in order to get most of those VP you need to generate some money. There are lots of ways to get the points, but only a couple of ways to get cash - basically by selling coffee. So you've got to help them as much as you can, but also make sure they sell more coffee to you than to the other players.

It's nice and thematic, which is important in these games - to justify the complexity if nothing else. You have to worry about all the logistics of manning plantations and moving stuff around (with donkeys), and there are all sorts of different ways of supporting the co-operatives (aka. winning the game). And even for the coffee gurus among us, you will surely come away from this game knowing more about coffee than when you started - like Kopi Luwak, which was a news to me.

If you have not yet managed to bankrupt yourself from buying boardgames, then another interesting path to insolvency is available through Kopi Luwak, which is apparently the world's most expensive coffee. It is "matured" by being eaten by a cute mongoose-like creature called a civet, and dumped out the other end. In this game, amid all the evil battery-farming of the critters, your noble coffee trader can pick up the occasional rescue civet from the RSPCA or somewhere, and look after it in a nice humane way. It'll then leave you a lucrative little present before you release it back into the wild.

The civets provide you with instant (in gameplay terms) coffee, which is also treated as wild coffee in the game, in the sense that it can be treated as any other coffee type. But there are lots of conventionally-crapping animals to help as well, for which you get animal counters. And it wouldn't be a heavy Euro without wild animal counters (again in gameplay terms - all the animals are supposed to be wild in the other sense, apart from the donkeys).

So it's a nice thematic game with plenty of toilet humour and puns to counterbalance the heaviness. I've obviously given these equal coverage here, as I wouldn't want to give the impression that I just signed up for the low-brow stuff. But I did really enjoy it, and I would play again. My main learning for next time: Andrew is one of these players who spends the game lamenting mistakes he's made, but ends up winning comfortably. So I'll try that strategy next time. After all, it's that kind of game - everyone will make mistakes, but someone has to win in the end.

And it was both absorbing and low on downtime. So much so that I didn't even look round the rest of the tables. Some other games were also played at the club this week, but I've no idea what they were - sorry.

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