The goal of Tea Game is to make teas and submit them for judgement to your fellow players. It features two phases. In the first phase, players create teas by buying ingredients (e.g. lemongrass, vanilla, milk, sugar) and assigning them to tea bases (e.g. black, herbal, rooibos). In the second phase, players judge teas head-to-head, with the maker of each tea first giving a sales pitch before the judge decides based on their taste. Tea ingredients are worth a variable number of points, and the sum of the points values of ingredients determines the value of a tea should it be picked in the second phase. During the first phase, players can also buy special decoration cards, which are either worth points or cause interesting interaction between players. The stated goals of the tea game are: a) encourage creation of teas based on aesthetic preference, not just point value and b) be accessible to players who are not tea drinkers.
The first stage of the game highlighted my long term strategic decision-making. At first, I thought my strategy in the initial phase should be careful construction: buy just the right ingredients for my tea while finding ways to sabotage other players, either by buying ingredients they want or using interactions afforded by decorations cards to upset their plans. As the game went on, I realized this was not the case, in part because there were no sabotaging ingredients (e.g. mud, concrete), or ingredients that created a value engine. This led me to the really unique and novel part of the game: the requirement to be strategic over the long term in what ingredients I bought and what interactions I took in service not to a formal win condition but relative to the future judgements of other players. I say unique because while other judging games also feature strategic choice relative to future player judgements, that choice is usually the selection of a single card, not a long term, multi-turn construction (the final tea).
The second stage of the game tapped my showmanship. As the pitches were given, I noticed that the best story usually won. Further, the best stories were often created around the teas with the most ingredients. When two teas were head to head, the one with substantially more ingredients won every time. This made me realized that the aesthetic judgement being appealed to was not only taste in tea, but delight in the story being constructed to sell a unique (often lightly sabotaged) set of ingredients. Delight in the story carried even more weight if the person judging was not a tea drinker. Once I realized this, I did my best to lean into telling a story around the creation of my teas. Further, I adjusted my pitch style as I heard other pitches. Instead of emphasizing simplicity (which I did for my three-ingredient tea), I emphasized the wealth of possibility afforded by my six ingredient tea—my tea could be anything the judger wanted. Picking the right tea name really stretched my creativity! Given the importance of constructing this story, I would have played the first phase differently by buying ingredients and interaction in support of a story in addition to a tea that I thought would taste good. I would also try to finish more six-ingredient teas to increase my likelihood of one being picked.
When my teas weren’t picked, I didn’t feel social rejection. Instead, I felt that I had failed to implement a good strategy because I had misunderstood the essential mechanic of the game: crafting a story around your tea. Crafting a tea story is a great essential mechanic—I think the only responsibility of the game designer is to make it clear how core the construction of that story is to winning the game. This doesn’t require a change in design, just a change in instructions (and, of course, I’ll know better next time). For the player, the responsibility to not play games if they know their feelings are likely to be hurt follows directly from a more general responsibility: don’t play a game if you aren’t willing to accept the stakes. For example, if I sit down to play poker with a $20 buy-in, I’d better be prepared to lose that $20 and not be salty about it. Similarly for judging games: by agreeing to play, you are agreeing to have your cards/teas/whatever judged by players according to their criteria, and to accept whatever outcome they choose. Within this, however, players are responsible for being at least not unkind when judging. If someone maliciously lists all the flaws with my submission in addition to not picking it, I can fairly feel wronged because that’s not part of the game, and therefore not part of the stakes I accepted when agreeing to play.
