Game Synopsis

There are lots of thirsty people at the mela (the fair). Tapris (tea stalls) have dozens and dozens of customers waiting to be served. Can your tapri win over the crowd? You’ll need a variety of tea recipes and snacks at the ready to match the tastes of each customer. Every cup is a chance to advance your reputation and skill. Tea is not just a beverage in India. It’s a way of life - an emotion. Only the best brewers will stand out and succeed.

Chai Garam (Hot Tea) is an engine building game that celebrates tea culture in India. From a grid of customer cards, you’ll discover each person’s preferences. From the market, you try to gather the right combination of ingredients to make tea and match their orders. You’ll need water, tea leaves of the correct varieties (assam, darjeeling, kashmiri or nilgiri), maybe milk and sugar, and other special additives or aromatics to set your offerings apart. The size of your saucepan will determine how many cups you make. The more accurate your offering matches a row or column of customers, the more receipts you will earn and those receipts will help you move up the flavor track. Reach the top of the flavor track and your tapri will be declared the best in the mela!

Why We Love Chai Garam

Chai Garam celebrates good timing and selective precision. Nine customers fill the mela and tell you exactly what they are looking for. Certain customers may pay more. Others may allow you to collect a star and move up the flavor track. Timing is key, since you will see what tea or additives or equipment each player collects. If you race to collect a high value customer, you risk someone else getting there first. The challenge and pressure the game presents is whether to give the customers exactly what they want or make tea that is just good enough to get them to pay and send them on their merry way. It is the age old battle between instant and delayed gratification played out cup by cup, turn by turn. 

Running parallel to the needs of the customers are goals both public and private that will influence how you develop your tapri over the course of the game. A goal may push you to serve customers with similar color clothes, or customers in a specific row or column of the mela. You may decide to specialize in goals that require customers who all want the same tea or collect receipts from customers with different tastes.

To fulfill a goal, you might even need to skip over a customer or two, making them unhappy, and earning you negative points. If you make a customer too unhappy they will simply leave the mela! 

Chai Garam is not a game about building the most profitable business. Serving customers earns you money but money is not the ultimate goal in the game. Money will enable you to upgrade your tapri, unlocking abilities which will speed up the tea making process in some way. Money is is means to a greater end.

Chai Garam is a game about honing one’s craft and making people happy. You can even call on your Chai Uncle or Chai Aunty in the game to give you an extra action or to mollify unhappy customers. Every choice you make is made to honor and reward the idea of service.  The better and more efficiently you are able to serve the fine people of the mela, the more you will rise in the ranks. There is an art to the entire endeavor, a complexity to explore and discover well beyond the simple ingredients of water, leaves, milk and sugar. HOW and WHEN you combine them and WHO you are able to serve will tell the story of your tapri. Serving and satisfying others is the beautiful challenge brewing in every game of Chai Garam.

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Congratulations to designer Sidhant Chant

More information on Chai Garam at Mozaic Games

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