Prosperitea is a board game about owning and running your own tea shop
You stew, you lose.
Brew, market and sell tea in the upcoming board game Prosperitea, a tabletop title about sourcing the best leaves in the community.
Prosperitea is a card game for three to six players that presents the almighty challenge of becoming the most prestigious tea shop owner in the local area. All the players are invested in artisanal teas and want to provide the finest blends possible to the locales. However, ingredients aren’t always easily available and sometimes cooperation with other brewers is required to get a blend just right. Luckily enough, aiding others in the tea business can pay off, with rival owners being able to use the rewards to acquire even better ingredients for even better teas.
The game begins with players deciding a turn order and each receiving ingredients and funds dependent on their place in the order - with the first player getting the most ingredients and least funds. Players then take turns to source and fulfil orders for their individual tea shops, using their funds to acquire ingredients and those ingredients to sell tea.
The first phase, sourcing, sees players choosing to spend however much they want to gain additional ingredients cards from the shared market. Players can take up to four ingredient cards from any of the available decks, but they must only take from a single deck. Alternatively, players can choose to skip the sourcing phase to instead perform some advertising and gain two additional funds from the bank, before discarding one of the order cards from the marketplace.
Order cards are gained during the fulfillment phase of a player’s turn, with the active player choosing to fill one of the available orders in the marketplace. There are two types of orders in Prosperitea - standard orders and premium ones - with each requiring a certain number or type of ingredients. During the fulfilment phase, players can decide to fulfill an order on their own by providing all of the required ingredients up front. If a player lacks one or more of the ingredients for an order, they can ask other players if they will contribute their ingredients in exchange for favour tokens - which can be used in place of otherwise missing ingredients.
Whenever a player successfully fulfills an order, they can choose to sell it for more funds or to display to earn prestige, which is the currency players will be scoring themselves on at the end of the game. Alternatively, players can turn their completed order cards into evergreen orders which can be used to easily acquire more funds, which can then be used to gain rarer ingredients. The game ends once one of the order decks has been emptied, with the winning player being whoever has the most prestige.
Prosperitea was created by Al Gonzalez III, the co-designer behind Prosperitea publisher Mentha Designs’ other title Cantankerous Cats, a family-friendly card game about being mischievous cats looking to stir up trouble at their owners’ homes.
The Kickstarter campaign for Prosperitea is live until April 12th, with a pledge of $29 (£21) getting backers a copy of the core game that’s estimated to arrive March 2022.