Chai: Tea for 2 is a game all about shipping, processing, and delivering tea as you duel against someone who is attempting to do exactly the same for their own customers. It’s a more complex game than a cup of tea would be, but one that feels quite captivating and full of strategy.
Chai: Tea for 2 has everything done on a board. Each of the players get the same type of starting board and get to pick a tea harvester. These harvesters give bonuses in scoring for the type of tea that they match the color of. When it comes to the actual gameplay, everything is done through a dice roll and a rotation of different moves that can be done around a board that’s across the top of your playing area. This has a section of tea leaves that are placed out each round, which can be harvested, cards that can be bid on, which change your field, an adjustment area where you can swap cards on your field or bid to go first, an area you can bid for specific contracts for your tea shipments, and a place where you can add dice to move tea leaves along your field.
Both players start off by rolling all of the dice, then starting with the player who’s bid to go first, they start spending. These dice can be spent on anything across the top, but your real goal is to earn points. This is done by processing tea, which start at the bottom of your field and make their way up specific routes, that are alongside the actually processing timings for the different types of leaves.
At the top of your field there is the ships you’ve got orders from, and fufiling them with the exact tea they want will give you points. As you purchase cards that can go around your field, you can plug them into specific spaces. Some allow you to move up all of a specific color of tea leaves in that section, some give you extra points for specific tea leaves, etc. You can even use your dice to swap the cards around, so that you can continue to use them as a way of moving cards up.
Chai: Tea for 2 becomes a game of spending, movement, and trying to keep things going while keeping an eye on what the other player is doing as well. I played a condensed version of the game at Game Con Canada, where I did like how cute the look of the box was, with such a cut-throat game inside.
You can find Chai: Tea for 2 on the developer’s website.
