Cafe International (2015 Edition)

Café International is a meeting place where guests from many different nations get together. Here, guests may have a nice chat with others while enjoying a glass of wine or a cup of coffee and some pie. That is why you will often find guests from different nations sitting at one table.

If there is no seat available at the tables, guests may also sit at the bar. The purpose of the game is to bring as many people into the Café International as possible, according to these rules and by placing your small guests at the tables or at the bar in a clever way.

This game revolves around the placement of multi-national customers in a restaurant. The board shows many different tables, each with four chairs around them. The tables are grouped by nation, so the Chinese like to sit with other Chinese. However, some of the chairs are on the border between two nations, so a person from either place could occupy the seat. To further complicate this odd tile game, each of the people is either male or female, and tables must be gender-balanced. As the game progresses some tiles become unplayable...

Player score each round by seating guests at tables as allowed by these rules. They "record” their scores by taking the different colored chips (black=1 point, red=5 points, and blue=10 points). Players may also lose points when seating guests at the bar or having un-seated guests at the end of the game. Players make "make change” with their chips at any time when they earn or lose points so that the amount matches their gain or loss.

AWARDS & HONORS

• 1989 Spiel des Jahres Winner