It’s the start of your shift and customers are already waiting so jump right in as the lines are getting longer and the food is getting cold! Welcome to the Cryptid Cafe, where a wide variety of guests with different appetites come to eat. Here you will find wendigos, chupacabras, yetis, sea monsters, and more, each ready and waiting with their order in mind. In Cryptid Cafe, players take on the roles of lead servers and compete to serve the most diners while also earning the most tips by the end of the shift. You’ll have to work smart and fast if you want to keep the orders going out and the guests happy all while dealing with the chaos of the kitchen as ingredients run short and other teams do their best to grab up your food for their tables. Sound like chaos? Welcome to the life of a restaurant employee in this monstrous portrayal of what it can be like to work in a crowded and popular eatery. No need to worry though… it’s not like anyone is going to bite your head off, right?

Cryptid Cafe is the re-imagined creation of Chip and Lennon Cole birthed from their original design, Harry’s Place. Not only did Chip Cole work on the game design, but has provided all of the colorful, attention-grabbing artwork. Cryptid Cafe is the first game released by Squatchy Games and is currently on Kickstarter at the time of this article. There is a retail edition and deluxe edition available through the campaign. For this preview, we are using a prototype so some elements may change, and stretch goals are not considered.

Before their shift begins, each lead server chooses a color and grabs their corresponding tray (a.k.a. Server Board), team of server meeples, and cards along with their starting bank of five coins. Servers will also receive a “Manager” card and an “I’ll have what they’re having” card. They then shuffle two random event cards into their customer deck and all leftover event cards are returned to the box as they will not be used for that shift. In the middle of the play area sits the Kraken, ready to prepare all of the necessary food. The food tokens should be separated and placed by type and within reach of all players. Once this is done, each server welcomes two customer cards into their section and places them in the green locations at the top of their tray. The game begins with the player who most recently went out to eat.

Each customer card will have a requested food order shown at the top that is needing to be filled by servers. Starting with the first player and moving clockwise, lead servers will send their team one by one to the Kraken to collect culinary creations. Each of the food stations has three spaces where servers will line up; numbered 1-3. The position the server is placed in will determine how much of that type of food they will tray up to take back. However, once per round when collecting food, servers can bribe the cook with tips to move up in line. To do this, the server must be the last in line and there must be at least one other server ahead of them. The number of spaces is also the number of coins that must be paid. This can also only be done once per station, so servers can’t keep tipping out to try to out position one another. Once all of the food has been brought back, it is time to dish it out! If a lead server now has enough dishes to complete an order, they may return the necessary tokens to the supply and receive a tip for their service from the customer based on their level of satisfaction. As with real life, the longer a customer has had to wait for their food, the less likely a large tip is to be left. The amount they will leave is listed at the bottom of their card in colored squares correlating to their position on the tray. Should a customer have to wait too long, servers risk not only losing the customer but will have to pay when they walk out! To try and keep certain customers happy, the Manager card can be played once per game to swap the positions of two customers; raising the satisfaction level of one while lowering that of another. Players can also use their “I’ll have what they’re having” card once per game to change one customer’s order to match that of another player’s customer. This card must be played before any customers are served for that round. At the end of the round, customers are shifted to the right either one or two spaces and new customers are seated in the open green spaces. Should any event cards be flipped at that time, only one will trigger with the rest being discarded. The event card will be placed in its corresponding food station, 86ing that item for the following round. Then the first player token is passed to the left and play continues in this manner until eight or nine rounds are completed based on player count. When scoring, tips are tallied, walkouts are paid for as is leftover food, and any server who has at least three of a given type of customer will score an extra dollar in tips for each of that type. The player with the most tips wins!

Let us start by saying that as two people who work in a restaurant, Cryptid Cafe does an excellent job of emulating what it is like, but replaces the stress with fun! Everything from the art style to the campy food dish names helps to set the tone for what we found to be one of the better restaurant themed games we have played. The game scales well based on our experience with the prototype, adding to the busy restaurant vibe and the special kind of chaos that comes with it when adding in more servers and their respective customers. We quickly fell in love with everything this game has to offer and highly encourage everyone who reads this to go back it on Kickstarter before the campaign ends.

All photographs of Squatchy Games products were taken and edited by Krista.