In Front of the Elevators

In Front of the Elevators Deep Dive

What the Community Thinks About In Front of the Elevators

In Front of the Elevators occupies an interesting position in the small but charming world of queueing card games. Tabletoptiktok's Jamie calls it a really good time and a very clever game, highly recommending it, while Chairman of the Board, ranking it on a top-ten list, admires its tight design even as he questions how much strategic depth sits beneath the theme. What emerges is a game that succeeds brilliantly at what it attempts, a focused, thematic queue manipulator, while leaving different players with different assessments of how deep that attempt runs.

Core Mechanics That Define In Front of the Elevators

Queue Manipulation Through Card Abilities

The heart of In Front of the Elevators is a deceptively simple premise: players arrange people waiting in line across separate elevator queues, and only the first few slots of each queue score when the round ends. From the Japanese publisher Saashi and Saashi, the design hides a web of card powers beneath that simplicity. Jamie explains that every person on your cards can cut in front of a specific other character, so a card can leap ahead of whoever it targets, creating a constantly shifting line where early placement rarely survives to scoring. A cafe mechanic adds another twist: when three identical characters gather in a queue, they leave the line to socialize, removing themselves from scoring but granting a point to whoever collected them.

Blind Drafting From Family Piles

A second layer comes from how players acquire cards. Rather than choosing from hand, players draw from public piles, each representing a family, so you know which family a card belongs to, and thus whether it is yours or an opponent's, but not which specific character you are drawing. Chairman of the Board flags the friction in this: it can feel frustrating when your fate rests in someone else's hands, since an opponent might take your best card and bury it at the back of a queue. The blind draft ensures that even careful placement can backfire, introducing volatility into what might otherwise be pure tactical calculation.

The In Front of the Elevators Experience

A Lively, Charming Aesthetic

The game's visual presentation directly supports its queueing fiction. Jamie praises even the backs of the cards, calling the artwork great, and the families, defined by color, create an instantly readable identity. Each family has a coherent visual logic and a thematic reason for its cut-in-line powers, so a child wanting to stand near a grandparent makes immediate sense. The elevators themselves hold different capacities and point values, reinforcing the real-world intuition that smaller elevators fill faster. The tight integration of theme and mechanics means players feel like they are orchestrating a bustling department-store scene rather than shuffling abstract tokens.

Short, Snappy Rounds

The game's multi-round structure ensures it never overstays its welcome, with point values rising as pressure mounts while resets let trailing players mount comebacks. The drafting element, combined with the unpredictability of opponents' placements, means no two games play out identically. Jamie highlights the elegance of seeing which family a card belongs to without knowing the exact person, just enough information to keep the game flowing while leaving enough uncertainty that early-round plans often need revision.

What Makes In Front of the Elevators Stand Out

A Publisher With a Distinctive Voice

Saashi and Saashi have cultivated a reputation for tightly scoped, thematically cohesive designs, and Chairman of the Board notes that he generally gets on well with the studio's creative, distinctive output. The game exemplifies that approach: rather than layering many subsystems, it commits fully to the queue-manipulation concept, with every card, rule, and scoring condition pointing back to the central conceit of families maneuvering to board elevators. That focused vision is what lets a game with simple rules generate meaningful interaction.

Restraint That Sets It Apart

Compared to earlier queueing games like Guillotine and Beasty Bar, In Front of the Elevators deliberately reins in its card powers. Chairman of the Board makes the comparison explicit, noting that the abilities here are much more reined in than those games, with roughly ninety percent of the cards simply placing a character in front of another. The limitation is intentional: rather than chasing complexity through varied powers, the design achieves elegance through consistency, letting the board state emerge organically from accumulated small movements and prioritizing clarity and teachability.

Potential Drawbacks

Decisions Can Feel Obvious

The flip side of such focused design is that the decision space narrows once players grasp the optimal plays. Chairman of the Board observes that the choices can feel fairly obvious: if you pick up an opponent's high-scoring card, you simply bury it at the back of a queue where it has no hope of reaching the front. The game's clarity of intent, a strength for teaching, can become a weakness, since once players see that opponent cards should be sabotaged and personal cards advanced, some of the depth resolves into rote execution.

Chaos Can Outpace Control

The constant cutting in line and character removal create a board that shifts faster than planning can fully account for. Jamie frames this as part of the fun, since you can never be sure where a person will end up when you place them early. Chairman of the Board treats it as a structural concern, noting it is quite likely that a card placed at the front will be pushed back or removed by a trio before the round ends. For players seeking to construct a coherent plan, the heavy reliance on opponent interference can make individual agency feel diluted once the queues fill.

If You Enjoy In Front of the Elevators

In Front of the Elevators sits directly in the lineage of Guillotine and Beasty Bar, both queueing games where line manipulation drives the fun; this title refines the concept by tightening card abilities and integrating a family-based visual system. For more small-box card games with a strong sense of theme and quick, interactive play, the broader Saashi and Saashi catalog, including titles like Coffee Roaster, rewards players who appreciate how simple constraints can generate emergent behavior from a small rules footprint.