Cafe International Review

Café International shows its age. Originally released in 1989, it was an early hit in hobby gaming, and even managed to win the prestigious Spiel Des Jahres that year. It’s a simple tile-laying game without much fuss or pretense, perhaps too simple for gamers today. But it has a certain charm that will endear it to family gamers. In spite of some questionable art choices, it manages to be the kind of game you can trot out at family reunions, where classic gateways like Catan might be a bit too complex.

The board shows a café filled with tables. There are four chairs around each table, and chairs between tables function as a seat for both. Each table has a nation’s flag, showing what nationality can be seated there. There are also 100 tiles, men and women of all of the different nationalities. The players are each given a hand of five tiles, and on your turn you can place one or two of them, following a couple of rules. First of all, a tile has to match the nationality of its table. Secondly, each table must maintain an equal number of men and women, so there can never be more than one more of either sex at the table. Whenever you place a tile you get points for the number of other people at the table, and that score doubles if it’s a single nationality at a table with their flag. If you can’t (or don’t want) to seat someone at a table, you can put them at the bar. There are twenty seats at the bar, but only the first five give positive points.

The tagline for the game is “All are welcome here,” and while that’s a nice sentiment it’s clearly meant a little sarcastically. As a game produced during the waning days of the Cold War, it reflects the ambiguous nature of international relations. We can all get along just fine, as long as this guy doesn’t sit next to that guy. It’s simultaneously optimistic and cynical, and that tension feels purposeful. It’s possible to create table with three different nationalities, but then the players get double points for seating customers with their own nationalities at the same table. Not only that, but if a player places the fourth customer and creates a full single-nationality table, they draw one less tile at the end of their turn. Since tiles count as negative points at the end of the game, creating single-nationality tables is a legitimate strategy. The message is clear: all are welcome here, but we might get along better if we stick with our own people.

Strategically, this is a pretty simple game. The best move is generally obvious, and there are a lot of turns where you only have one or two legal placements anyway. Of course you are at the mercy of the tiles you draw, a factor that increases as hands get smaller. This is mitigated by making everyone play with open hands. It’s a simple way to give the game some tactical richness, and it keeps it from being too capricious. It allows you to plan out not only your own move, but that of everyone else. The downside is that there are moments when the game is rather deterministic. I will play this tile, then you will play those ones, and then he will play those. In other words at times the player doesn’t really have much choice at all. The game also has a tendency to devolve into a race to draw the last legal tile, placing tiles at the bar and bleeding points until one person randomly gets the tile they need and ends the game.

In practice this ends up being less of a factor than you’d think. Café International is pitched squarely at the casual gamer market, and indeed kind predates the clean distinction between hobby and mainstream. If it were designed today it would have a couple more twists. One only has to look at something like Tigris and Euphrates, released not quite a decade later. This game feels much more like an evolutionary link, a step up from games like Scrabble, but definitely not as complex as modern gamers will expect. As such it has a laid-back vibe that’s helped by its short playtime and intuitive rules. It’s a slam-dunk for playing with non-gamers, and committed hobbyists will find it to be a nice change of pace.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the illustrations. The cartoony artwork, unchanged from its original 1989 edition, falls back on stale stereotypes to express nationality. That means that the French people wear berets, the Americans wear cowboy hats, and the Indians wear turbans. Most of it is pitched at about the level of the NES version of Punch-Out!!, something that most gamers will probably take in stride. But a couple of the illustrations, notably the Italian and Chinese ones, are uglier than others. How objectionable you find this is entirely personal choice, but I’m surprised that the tackier illustrations were unchanged. As it is, they feel somewhat tone-deaf and old-fashioned.

Many of the SdJ winners, like El Grande and Dominion, are regarded as some of the best and most important games of all time. Café International is definitely not up to that standard, and probably barely makes the cut of second-tier winners. By today’s standards it feels rather slight, but its smallness does provide it with some charm. It’s easy to enjoy its low-key gameplay, and not hard to overlook its flaws, creating a breezy experience where all are indeed welcome.