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This is a demo of Cups and Curses: the first four days in your very own coffee shop.

Invent a drink, offer it to someone, and watch it land. 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, Spiced Soft Cocoa. Some combinations turn out to have had a name all along. You can also rename cups as you like!

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.

Every morning the forecast tells you what the day will want, and there is more on it than four slots on a board can hold. A cup that does two things at once is how you make room for everyone.

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 the last of them has been served or sent home to try again tomorrow.

The regulars

The grocer three doors up hands you a jar of her honey and wants the first cup made with it. A columnist asks whether she may write about the shop. A clerk from the branch office has had a week of forms.

Some come once and leave a letter for the paper. Some come back, sit at a table, and start to tell you things.

The evening

When the shop closes, the door opens onto the street. Buy from the grocer and the seed merchant and carry the occasional thing for people who are starting to know you.

The review

Your shop was sealed once. By the second night the paper says the side street is under review, and by the fourth, somebody from the Federation is at your door. How that evening goes depends on who you have made friends with.

It does not end there.

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.

In the demo

• The first four days, with a story that ends on the fourth night

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

• A morning forecast to plan the day's board around

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

• No timer on the shift and no fail state

• Regulars with their own requests, and errands to run for them in the evening

• Named drinks to find, and your own inventions under the names you give them

• Full controller support