Monster Cafe

The hustle and bustle of a crowded restaurant, filled with the usual clientele. They're stinky, rude and shovel in everything as fast as they can, getting grumpy if you don't give them exactly what they want. If you think that these sound like monstrous mannerisms you'd be right, because your customers are monsters. Unfortunately for you, is your job to meet their picky needs as the waiters of this bizarre cafe.

In this fun, small game for ages 8 and up, you try over a series of four rounds to get monster cards and tables with their favourite foods on to feed them. Any hungry monsters not fed at the end of the game scoring you minus points. At the start of each round four table cards are laid out (for a four player game) and each player can choose one of two actions on their turns: either draw a monster card which they put on one of the four spots on any table or choose to claim a table and take the table card and all the monsters with it.

At the end of the four rounds the winner is decided by whoever has the most points. You score points for each monster you own as long as you also own one of the two the tables of the food they eat; if you have both tables of that type then each monster that eats it score double. Any monsters which you failed to provide a table with at the end scores negative points.

This small game packs some surprisingly interesting decisions for a pocket sized deck of cards. Every turn you have to choose: you can take another card and hopefully increasing your score by making a table more valuable to you (or perhaps less valuable to your opponents), or play it safe and grab a table and the surrounding monsters you desperately need. After that decision you have to figure out if you are drawing a monster card, which table to put it on, a delicious balancing act between making it valuable to you but not too valuable that your opponents grab it before you have the chance.

While these interesting and complex decisions are nice, sometimes trying to suss out the best course of action while trying to make sure you aren't inadvertently helping another player can lead to people taking ages to decide, dragging out turns. This can slow the game down to a crawling pace, making it boring for the other players as you try decide what to do.

However,other players turns are tense, as you hope that they don't take that table that you have been hoping no one noticed that you desperately need it.

An interesting addition to the game is the dreaded lemon sorbet card which if you draw one,you must discard one group of monsters you own, for example you might have to discard all of your eyeball eaters. This can be a relief for less skilled players as they can ditch all the monsters that they can't feed and so will get rid of negative points. However, if you have carefully crafted an amazing point scoring machine of monsters and tables, if  you draw one of these it can be very annoying. This means lemon sorbet can be useful to balance the playing field between younger and older more skilful players, letting everyone have a chance. But in my opinion though, if everyone has a similar level of skill, I would suggest you just take them out.

This game is amazing as it is so easy to learn, with it taking probably only three minutes to teach to new players. This makes it great for younger or inexperienced board gamers, letting them get on with the playing, without having to listen to a 30 minute long rules lecture.

My last comment with Monster Cafe is that it is hard to immediately see who is in the lead due to having to calculate in your head the scores each time you want to see who is winning, leading to a slightly anti-climatic ending as you just find out who won without seeing the build up to it.

Overall I think Monster Cafe is a really good game that packs 15 minutes of interesting play time,
that is perfect for taking on trips or holidays. Although at some points it can slow, it is definitely worth it for the easy to learn, hard to master game inside. I would certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a good game for kids or for a game to take on holiday.