“An immersive game of combining tea flavours to make your perfect blend!”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/253185/chai
Playing Time: 20-60 Minutes
Weight: Light
Genre: Order Fulfillment
Designer: Dan Kazmaier, Connie Kazmaier
Players: 1-5
In Chai, you are a tea merchant managing a tea shop. Your job is to fill orders, which requires you to acquire differentkinds of tea (green, black, etc) as well as different kinds of flavoring (milk, honey, vanilla, etc) meant to disguise the fact that most tea tastes like swampy grass clippings.
It’s a small simple game, with a simple yet devious market mechanic that gets it on this list. The market is a tile board of 18 tiles (3 rows of six) that get more expensive left to right. You can only buy one KIND of item from the market, but you can buy all instances of that tea on the market that touch each other orthagonally. So you can luck into being able to buy massive amounts of what you need in bulk. But your purchases also risk making similar opportunities for your opponents.
Chai is a relatively fast and lightweight game. It’s got a warm cozy feel and is quick and easy to set up and play. But it’s also capable of being quite cutthroat, and it’s always funny when this game shifts into that gear, because when it does so, it still never loses that cozy vibe.
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