Play, build, solve.

Your first minute

1. Open Coffee Town. Your coffee farm, roastery and shop are already built, and one light whole-bean bag is in stock.
2. On Ticket 1, tap Fill this order. You’ll see a fictional receipt and unlock the mystery room.
3. Pick your next goal: make another bag, decorate the town or solve the three locks.

Build your town

Choose a block, then tap an empty square. A coffee farm grows beans; a roastery packs bags; the coffee shop takes orders. Paths, trees, benches and murals make the town yours. The star ✦ is the mystery room. The classroom symbol ▥ is the school goal. Tap a building to use it.

Switch between Forest, Sunset and Night looks, and give your town a short shop sign. Decorations cost fictional game tokens. You earn more from orders.

Pick and roast coffee

Tap Harvest beans or a coffee farm. Choose four red ripe cherries. Green cherries are not ready. Then choose Light or Dark roast and Whole bean or Ground. Move the roast-heat slider into the matching range: 25–45 for Light, 65–85 for Dark. Packing uses two green beans.

These are simplified game tasks, not real processing instructions.

Run the shop

Three customer tickets are visible at a time. Choose the one you can fill with stock, or make the bag it asks for. Each sale creates a fictional 12-token receipt: 2 grower tokens, 3 school tokens and 7 back to your shop. Every two deliveries triggers a surprise event with two choices. Three sales create one classroom book bundle in the game.

Goals give you something short, medium and long to aim for: a first sale, a solved mystery, three decorations and five sales.

Solve a mystery with friends

After your first sale, enter the mystery room. Choose New room and send the Scout, Maker and Bookkeeper links to friends. Each link opens the same case with only that friend’s clue visible. Share clues by talking in person or through your own school-approved channel. There is no public chat or account.

The three locks ask you to match a coffee bag, rebuild the journey from farm to school, and combine three digits for a safe. Cases change with the room code. The default room code changes each week.

Important: role links share a case and a clue, but puzzle progress does not sync across devices. Each player can try locks on their own screen; agree which screen is your team’s main puzzle. Someone opening a role link can enter the mystery without playing the shop first.

Meet at the Coffee Town Café

Tap the coffee shop on the town map or open the café. Pick a story, choose a drink or non-coffee option, talk with Amani and answer a short question. Your first completion of each story earns a café stamp and game points; replay whenever you like. A new story is featured each week, and all stories stay available.

After a story, choose Play together on one screen to hand the device to a friend, or copy the invitation link and send it to a friend you already know. They see your choices, play the story and send a reply link back. Opening the reply link shows a two-seat postcard with both sets of choices. This is an exchange by link, not live multiplayer or chat. The link contains only the story, preset choices and a random code. There are no names, messages or accounts.

Below the story, Talk with Amani has a student table with 240 preset phrases and a parent table with 1,000 coffee discussion starters. Choose a table and topic, pick a line, or search the preset list. Amani gives a scripted answer and links to relevant research where available. Eight reactions work at both tables. The conversation stays on your screen; the search is local and there is no free-text messaging or live chat with other visitors.

Try a five-minute class challenge

Set up one device per team. Tap Start five minutes. During the challenge, each new sale earns 10 points, solving the mystery earns 20, and each new decoration earns 5, and each correct coffee fact earns 5. At the end, copy the score card and hand it to a teacher. You can also finish early. The timer runs only while that tab is open.

The challenge is a classroom activity. The site does not publish scores or collect team names.

Make something of your own

Write a short coffee-bag line and download its label draft as an SVG image. You can also write a mystery clue and download it as text. Show either draft to a teacher for review. Nothing you create is uploaded or published automatically. Please avoid putting a child’s name, photo or private information on a draft.

Saving, resetting and real impact

Your town saves in this browser on this device. It will not follow you to another device. New town starts again. Your game-point tally is saved in this browser. Class challenge scores are not saved. The room code and clue links do not collect an email or name.

Every token, receipt, book bundle and score in Coffee Town is fictional. It is separate from the real Grounds4Schools survey, leaderboard and any future coffee sales. The real project is still being developed. See the real questions and evidence ↗