The goal of Trouble Brewing is to serve a certain number of coffee orders within a 2 minute time limit. Orders will appear on the left on pieces of paper indicating which ingredients are needed. An order ticket will disappear when you start filling it, and a new one will take it's place. The corresponding ingredients are stored in jars on a shelf. An order ticket immediately disappears when you start filling it and a new one takes its place. Any orders you see are ones that you haven’t started making yet.
Tap the ingredient jars to fill a cup with those ingredients. If an order has two coffee beans listed on it, then click (or tap) the jar of coffee beans twice to fill a cup with two of those ingredients. Then select the blue button above the cup to start filling it with coffee. A red X will appear when you click on a cup if there is not an existing order for the drink that you made. A green button lights up when the coffee is ready to be served. Try to serve the coffee before it overflows or you have to trash it!
Select the green serve button as soon as it appears to get the maximum amount of points per cup (1000). If a cup does overflow, then you need to click (or tap) the cup to send it to the trashcan. You may click (or tap) a cup to remove it anytime during the game (you may want to do this if you make an incorrect order). The sequence in which you make the orders doesn’t matter either.
The number of orders required to serve within the 2 minute time limit increases as you advance to higher levels.
Once you reach Level 5, the orders are located in the first room on the left and the coffee machines are in the right room with the ingredients. You need to press the arrows to move back and forth between the rooms to view and make orders.
Orders appear in the left room on pieces of paper indicating which ingredients are needed like before. You need to click on the right arrow to move to the room on the right to make the orders. Then click on the left arrow to return to the room on the left to view more orders. An order ticket disappears when you start filling it and a new one takes its place. Any orders you see are ones that you haven’t started making yet.
You can review instructions for any of our games at any time. On the website, click How to Play before starting the game. Or, during the game, clicking the pause (II) button in the top-left corner and then selecting How to Play.
Scoring & Levels
You earn points for each order you serve based on your accuracy when filling the order. You earn less points if you complete the order slightly too soon (before the button turns green) or too late (a bit after the button turns green.) You only earn 1000 points if you click the button as soon as it turns green. When you click to serve an item you should see how many points you earned. The maximum number of points for each order is 1000. However, you may earn closer to 900 points if you’re less than accurate when stopping the cups from filling.
Bonus points are awarded for the time remaining after you filled all the cups. You earn 20 points per second remaining in the game!
You unlock more coffee machines at higher levels, thus allowing you to complete more orders and granting you higher scores. Each level increases in difficulty and you may find your score dropping when you reach a new level due to the increased challenge. As you continue to play the game, and play faster, you can earn more points at each level.
The maximum level in Trouble Brewing is 12. However, you can get between 52-72 orders within level 12.
The amount of cups you are allowed to fill adjusts based on your performance. So, if you struggle with 54 cups, you might go back down to 52 cups. You need to play and make 52 orders again in order to unlock 54 orders. Then you'll need to make all 54 orders correctly before you're given 56 orders.
Tips
In Trouble Brewing, one of the keys to success is to minimize your "switch cost." "Switch cost” simply means the time spent switching between each of your tasks. In Trouble Brewing, "switch cost" is the time spent switching from making new orders to checking in on cups that are almost full.
Expert multitaskers know how to minimize the amount of switching needed by "chunking". “Chunking” is a cognitive technique for grouping similar tasks together, enabling you to reduce the number of times you switch tasks. The less switching, the more tasks you can complete. Start drinks of the same size together so that each cup fills up around the same time. Chunk drinks by ingredient and then fill them in succession instead of mentally switching between different ingredients.