Pipeline studio serves a piping hot cup of Joe with its next game, Coffee Traders

Nurture and cultivate a bean-based business in Coffee Traders, an upcoming board game from the publisher behind Pipeline, Capstone Games.

Coffee Traders is a game for three to five players that has competitors growing, developing and profiting off their very own coffee bean farms. Taking place in key coffee bean-growing countries within Central and South America, as well as parts of Africa and Asia, the board game sees players becoming farmers during the 1970s.

Up until this period, coffee farmers had experienced exploitation, forced to cultivate their patches of farmland and trade their harvest for very little. With the introduction of Fair Trade organisations, coffee farmers finally found some support in their fight for fair compensation for their work. The subsequent increases in profit enabled coffee traders to further develop their businesses and improve their trading networks.

Players take the role of these farmers as they develop each of the available regions, cultivating larger stretches of land for growing coffee beans and supplying an increasing demand. Along the way, players can construct various buildings within their communities - such as hospitals and production stations - to improve the living conditions of their employees and to support their growing business.

As demand for their coffee beans grows, players will need to decide which businesses they want to trade with, potentially gaining additional rewards for specialising in certain types of bean or supplying to certain types of customers. Whichever player gathers the most points by the end of the game is named the winner.

Coffee Traders was created by Rolf Sagel and André Spil, the designers behind 19th century-themed board game Wildcatters, which has players becoming oil barons competing for control of the market by developing their oil fields, constructing rigs and refineries and bidding for the right to more land.

Besides Pipeline, Capstone Games is responsible for releasing fantasy board game Terra Mystica - an area-control game about conflicting cultures claiming and terraforming land to suit their individual environments - its sci-fi spiritual successor Gaia Project and last year’s historical trading game Maracaibo.

Coffee Traders is set to be released next year, with the retail price yet to be confirmed by Capstone. (Thanks BoardGameGeek.)