Invent a drink, offer it to someone, and watch it land. Cups and Curses is a coffee shop sim about making something for a person: you brew in the morning, serve whoever the day brings, and spend the evening in the town or at your own counter trying something new.

Invent

Coffee, tea or cocoa, then whatever is in the pantry. Every ingredient does something, and you find out what by using it. An undiscovered effect is a grey mark under the jar until the first cup reveals it.

Combine what you have and the shop names it: Honeyed Cool Tea, Croaking Spiced Coffee. Some combinations turn out to have had a name all along.

Offer

Your board is your vocabulary. When someone comes to the counter you talk, and what you can offer is what you invented and chalked up that morning.

Nobody asks for something you cannot make. Nobody walks out because you took too long. There is no timer on the shift: the day is a list of people, and it ends when they are served.

Know the regulars

Some come once and leave a letter for the paper. Some come back, sit at a table, and over weeks you learn what they take to and what they cannot stand. The cup you can make for them gets better the better you know them.

A columnist asks whether she may write about the shop. A clerk from the branch office has had a week of forms.

The evening

When the shop closes, the door opens onto the street. Buy from the grocer and the seed merchant, grow your own behind the shop, and carry the occasional thing between people who both know you.

Some ingredients are not sold in shops, and the people who have them will want to trust you first.

Set in the world of Rites and Receipts, where magic is licensed, inspected and filed, and a coffee shop is where people bring what they are carrying.

Features

• Invent drinks from ingredients whose effects you discover by using them

• A board that is your vocabulary: offer what you invented, in conversation

• No timer on the shift and no fail state

• Regulars with stories that continue across visits, and tastes you learn over time

• A town to walk in the evening, and a garden behind the shop

• Named drinks to find from hints, and your own inventions the town learns by name

• Full controller support