My friend Ellen used to live in an apartment overlooking the Starbucks line.
When I came over they would make me coffee. We would sit at a little table by their window, talk about writing, and look down at the rows and rows of cars lining up to collect their coffee. Then we would sit for a while and just write.
There’s a weird, mesmeric poetry to watching the line slowly snake along. Every vehicle different yet somehow all the same. Each order unique, but they all participate in one ritual. But mostly, watching the Starbucks line is a chance to look down at those poor fools and think “I have coffee, and you do not.”
And so, we designed a game together.
To be fair, E's version of this game is probably a little different from mine. By the way, you can read her excellent thoughts on relationships and mental health at her Substack, Therapist's Log Supplemental.
Love is an anti-capitalist game, by which I mean that the mechanics are intentionally selected to cut across the assumptions of capitalistic, consumeristic culture.
The Three of Cups: celebrate coffee
Love in the Starbucks Line – a pitch
In Love in the Starbucks Line, you take the role of a writer working hard to complete your Great Work. But Work requires coffee, coffee requires money, and you don’t have enough money.
Mechanic: At the beginning we choose some arbitrary points-scoring criteria, such as “longest novel”, “best written”, “bestseller”, or “suffered for art.”
The board depicts a modest apartment building. The board spaces are windows, in which cards can be placed, representing the various people who live there. The building overlooks a Starbucks with a queue of space winding out the door.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant once posited that one of the chief pleasures of heaven was not having to wait for coffee.
You must place your limited spoon tokens in the Starbucks line, your own room, or the rooms of your fellow apartment dwellers in an effort to finish your great work.
Spoons in the Starbucks line move towards the coffee window at a semi-regular pace. When a spoon arrives at the window, you receive one coffee (at a cost of one buck). Coffee goes directly onto your great work, signifying progress towards completion. The Line is the most reliable way to get coffee.
Mechanic: The game timer is a stack of coffee tokens, turned face down. Each token advances the line 1-3 spaces. Each turn we reveal a token and move the line that much. When the last token is chosen, the game ends.
Spoons placed on apartment dwellers represent time and effort invested in relationships, which can provide various sorts of return in the form of money (loans or patronage), various inspirations (which can potentially make your Great Work even greater), love (because how doesn’t want love), and in some cases, coffee. Lots of different interactions, special abilities, and so on here to make it interesting.
Meet the neighbors.
You can also visit your fellow authors and exchange all these things, but not coffee. And if you’re really desperate, you can go work at Starbucks, which nets you good money but costs you a permanent spoon.
The end game and scoring
After a certain number of rounds, the game ends and Corporate closes down your Starbucks. When this happens we tally up all the coffees, inspiration, happiness and maybe some other weird card effects and tomfoolery to figure out what kinds of works we completed. Whose sold the best? Whose was the most inspiring? Whose was the longest, hardest slog?
The winner of the game is the player who scores the most VPs. Once the winner is determined, each non-winner player has an opportunity to record a number of achievements in the rulebook. Some are absolute (like “who has written the longest novel to date”) and some set a bar (“write a novel more than 10 coffees long”).
Is it anti-capitalist?
This game is my first stab at an anti-capitalist design. I’m still not 100% sure if I’ve hit that bar, or even what that bar looks like, but here are the things I’m trying to achieve:
Hoarding isn’t a power move. Unlike many games having too much of something doesn’t help you in the end. It might even actively reduce your final score. It might help with some end-game achievements though.
Winning isn’t the only goal. Achievements are cool! Does this spoil the fun? In theory, if someone at your table has given up on victory and instead decided to hoover up all the love in the building, this is still a challenge you need to work around and plan for if you’re trying to win.
Money isn’t the uber-resource. Look, in every single game ever made (except, of course, the Mad Magazine Game), money is good. I envision this as a game where you start with a decent amount of money and watch it dwindle over time.
Mutual support wins the day. Building relationships and interactions with other players in LITSL should model mutual support most of the time. Yeah, sometimes you’ll have the option of exploiting or competing directly, or maybe you just need to be selfish sometimes and practice self care. In Love in the Starbucks Line, mutual support, especially between players, is the killer app to be discovered through play.
Will I ever make this game? Honestly, I love it so much that I just might. If I ever find myself rained out in the woods somewhere or on the couch with a broken leg, this is the game I might design. For now, however, it goes into that file labelled “Game Design Ideas” until I need it again.
What did I learn?
As I continue this creative journey, I am trying to experiment, learn, and remember, so that I can make my creative process better. Love in the Starbucks Line wasn’t meant to make a statement about Capitalism, but it does make a Statement. I does this because it comes out of my own struggle to make sense of my place in the world and of my role as a creator, but also as an economic actor. This game design captures some of that ambivalence and my own response to it.
But most of all I learned that making coffee for someone can be a rebellious and creative act; and so can receiving a coffee that someone made for you.
Ack!!!! How amazing that watching the Starbucks line from my tiny apartment could inspire such a thoughtful game. I would love to see it finished, and insist on helping beta test.
I love that that the game models the mutually supportive role of writers. It's true that, in the bookstore, authors compete for the best shelf space. But in all other respects, being a writer means being part of a community of writers. Successful writers support each other.