Coffee Roaster.

There are so very many board games – more than a thousand new ones hit the market every year, not including self-published titles or ones that don’t get published in English – yet there are few games designed with solo play in mind. More new games come with solitaire modes, typically asking you to beat some specific score, but truly solo games, ones designed from the start with the single player in mind. I’ve reviewed three in particular, Friday, the best I’ve played; Onirim; and Aerion.

One of the top-rated solitaire games on BoardGameGeek is a Japanese game known as Coffee Roaster, which has been out of print for a few years but which is coming back in a new edition this fall from Stronghold Games, now available for pre-order. I just obtained a copy of the original a few months ago, right before word of the new edition leaked, and it more than lives up to its reputation: It’s fun to play, suitably challenging, brings lots of replay value, and its theme is as well-integrated into its gameplay as any game I’ve seen.

Coffee Roaster asks you to do just that: You’re a roaster asked to roast three beans out of a selection of 22 possibilities, trying to maximize your score over the three roasts, but you have to do well enough with each roast to get to choose a more challenging (and lucrative) bean in the next round. It’s a brilliant press-your-luck game that gives you a slew of choices and multiple ways to try to max out your score, with every bean – tied to the physical characteristics of the real coffee beans the cards depict – offering a new starting point and different paths to scoring.

For any bean you roast in Coffee Roaster, you’ll start with some combination of tokens that you’ll place in the bag, usually unroasted beans (roast level 0, or green beans that have to be roasted once to get to 0), moisture tokens, flavor tokens depicting aroma or body or acidity, and probably some bad beans you have to work your way around as you roast. As the game progresses, you’ll pull an increasing number of beans from the bag in each round, roasting some, spending the flavor tokens to gain bonuses on the board or to manipulate the roasting process, and, at two steps, gaining smoke tokens that go in the bag and can screw up your final scoring. You decide when to stop roasting and ‘cup’ your coffee, drawing tokens to fill the ten spots on your cupping board – with three spots on the tray to hold beans you don’t want to score – and then add up the points on your tokens.

Each bean has an ideal total roast level that gets you the maximum number of points; you get fewer points if you’re too high or two low. You get points for drawing the key flavor components for that bean, up to ten points if you hit all four on an Expert level bean. You also get points for consistency, drawing at least three tokens with the same roast number on them. You can then lose points if you draw and place bad beans or smoke tokens in your cup, or if you don’t get any of the key flavor components, or if you fail to get ten tokens into the cup. As I type that, I realize it sounds a bit more complicated than it is, but the game has an inherent rhythm to it that makes it go very quickly once you’ve got the process down. You have a lot of potential options on every turn, but they depend almost completely on what tokens you draw from the bag on that turn – and earlier in any roasting process you won’t get to draw that many tokens, so your choices will be somewhat limited.

My 22-point Kona roast.

I have played a handful of times, with (of course) varying levels of success, but have found that getting the wild-card flavor token and the permanent 3-point token (which goes directly into your cup) are essential, while for some roasts you will want to get the extra tray, which lets you discard two extra tokens in the cupping process. There’s a Sweetness token – whoa oh oh, oh oh oh – that is required for some Expert roasts, but can otherwise serve as a wild token in the cupping process. Other bonus tokens let you redraw during the roasting process but the random aspect makes their value too variable. There’s one space on the left side of the board that lets you discard one flavor token to trash all smoke, bad bean, or burned bean (roasted past 4) tokens you have drawn in that round, a very powerful move that you can use just once per bean. It’s nearly always useful, but the question of when to use it becomes a key strategic decision among several across the game.

We don’t have the rules for the new version yet, just cover art, so I don’t know if the game itself is changing or if we’re just getting new images and, I would hope, an improved translation of the original Japanese rules, as the translation in the original edition omits key words or mistranslates others at a few places. It’s also a bit dear at a list price of $45, more than just about any solo game I know of, but I am hopeful that will come down after the initial release satisfies folks like me who’d been looking for the game for years. It is worthy of a bigger audience than it got the first time around, and while Friday is easier to recommend for its simplicity, I enjoyed this game even more.