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Can you ensure a garam (hot) cup of chai (tea) is served to your ever-growing customers on a rainy day? Get ready to dive deep into running a chai tapri (tea shop) by ensuring that your customers get their specific chai and snack orders on time. Earn their appreciation for every correct order, but be quick as another player might steal a few of them away. Run the most successful shop, and be the wealthiest player at the end of the game!
Each turn in Chai Garam, players take one mandatory action, either selecting up to three ingredients from the display (tea leaves, additives, water, milk, godown power cards, etc.) or serving their cooked tea to the grid of customers in the central board and collecting money.
Additionally as free actions, players need to cook tea, compete for goals to improve their star ratings, attract customers to their own shops, or play a "Chai Garam" card to take a double action! The game continues until a special "evening" customer triggers the end of play or any player achieves five stars. At that point, whoever has the highest value from money as well as stars wins.
- Adorable components.
- Great components.
- Eager to play.
- Gameplay mechanics are not yet learned.
- Serving chai in India.
- India
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It is disrespectful of me to do something with my evenings.
- There is a special circle of hell for people who show up to a graduation with an air horn.
- I really appreciate El Paso, you know, taking pretty much that same experience but distilling it down to the essential moves and it's a quick I don't know how long it took us. Less than an hour.
- It's really hard and it can be really swingy.
- You don't always have to teach a new game. Sometimes it's good to go back to something you know people like.
- It is hard to teach because of the exact thing that I watched Don's face get confused about when you say you're in my garden. I'm in your garden.
- It is chesslike in that you just try to optimize your moves over everybody else's moves.
- It's a heavier game than I usually like, but I just think it's really clever the way it's put together.
- The timer fits the theme in this game. You're driving 50 miles an hour in traffic trying to fight off bad guys.
- Definite Spy Hunter vibes from this game.
- The dice represent nature, which screws up your whole plan for that magic.
- If you're going to play Twilight Imperium, you need to drink water, hydrate or not play.
- And so Gunnet is a game that was sent us specifically reached out to me, asked me if we wanted to cover and they were interested in us covering it on this podcast, which is a first first time.
- The core of the game is having the discussion of, okay, well, I'm going to give you this because you're going to act first and the first thing that's going to happen is we're going to drive the car to the left one space and then you're going to shoot.
- I usually don't like a game with a timer, but you know, the timer fits the theme in this game. You're driving 50 miles an hour in traffic trying to fight off bad guys.
- For a game that's seems like it's about making you feel stressed out for a brief moment and then that stress turns into moments of joy and glory. Like I think it accomplished that more often than it didn't.
- The other game is Rollin One, uh, which is a golf game. Again, small footprint. It's a small box.
- You take turns designing the course. So you take a number of cards that represent parts of the the you know the golf course and you put them together.
- The golf clubs are represented by dice. So there's a d20, d12, d10 and so on.
- And so there's actually some serious strategy to picking your club.
- I thought it was very clever and I think both of the games are pretty darn thematic.
- Make sure you are in the mood for the thing that you're going to partake.