Boba Story takes the restaurant sim genre to a whole new level. Players have to manage a Boba Café. Also known as “Bubble Tea”, Boba is often referred to as drinks laced with delish toppings. In this game, you will have to prepare different kinds of bubble tea, attract customers and serve bubble teas to increase profits. The profits can then be reinvested to unlock new rooms, such as the Magic Den and a food counter. The game’s unique hand-drawn and minimalist graphics are very enticing and looks straight out of a children’s storybook.
If you are fond of unique restaurant-themed games, then do read our Resortopia Guide!
Originally from Taiwan, Bubble tea is quite popular among young adults. The most popular toppings in bubble tea are tapioca pearls, but in this game, you will be able to prepare a variety of drinks with various new toppings and base ingredients.
Now, Google has decided to celebrate bubble tea with an interactive doodle. It’s a fun minigame featuring a cute Formosan mountain dog who manages a boba tea stand. You can check out this mini-game here – Celebrating Bubble Tea (google.com)
Managing your small Boba café can be challenging, especially when customers demand new drinks and you will have to serve a lot of people to increase your earnings. With the help of these Boba Story tips, tricks, and strategies, you will be able to maximize your profits and expand your café.
Related: Kuma Sushi Bar Guide: Tips, Tricks, and Strategies
Getting Started
Start with the waiting area to build flooring. The in-game tutorial below will explain how to build one. You can either tap the Furniture icon or tap the empty slot in the waiting area to build flooring.
You will receive 100 bonus leaves after finishing the tutorial.
Customers need to wait before they can be served delicious Boba tea, so they will have to move to the waiting area to order drinks. Tap the furniture menu on the lower-left corner of the screen and press the empty slot above “Wait” to build your first flooring. Once you build one, a customer will arrive in the waiting area to order a drink.
Make sure you complete the waiting area first by building more flooring to accommodate more customers and take more orders from them.
If you build one tile in the waiting area, then only one customer will move to the waiting area. To serve more customers, build more floorings from the furniture menu. You can build six floorings initially to accommodate the maximum number of customers in the waiting area. You can serve up to six customers at once when you build the complete waiting area using six tiles.
In the beginning, choose the cheapest flooring, the brick tiles, to build the whole waiting area. You can change the design of the waiting area later once you have enough leaves. Designer waiting areas will cost more leaves and are only for decoration purposes.
Leaf is Boba Story’s primary currency. You earn leaves every time you serve a customer. When a customer arrives in the waiting area, the Boba tea icon appears above him. Tap the drink to prepare it on the counter. The drink will be served automatically. Once the customer finishes his drink, he drops leaves. Tap to collect them.
To build the counter, tap the furniture menu and press the “+” button above the word “Counter”. You can build a maximum of six counters in the beginning. Build the basic drink counters first. They are the cheapest. You can change their design later once you have accumulated enough leaves.
Tap the Boba tea picture above the customer to start making a drink for him. The drink will be prepared on the counter and it will take a few seconds to prepare it. The drink will then be served to the customer automatically.
After the customer finishes drinking the refreshing Boba tea, they will drop leaves. Tap to collect them from the flooring. The total amount of leaves earned so far is displayed on the top-left corner of the screen.
New customers will demand new Boba teas. A picture of an ingredient and a red exclamation mark will be displayed above a new customer (see the screenshot below).
Don’t tap it. Instead, tap the “Menu” on the wall, unlock an empty glass/drink and then search for that ingredient to start preparing a new drink.
Each new unlocked drink on the menu earns additional leaves. Before unlocking an empty glass using leaves, check the extra leaves you will be earning on the bottom of the empty glass. For example Glass no. 3 earns +2 leaves whereas glass no. 4 earns a bonus of +3 leaves.
To attract more guests, tap the “Promote” button on the lower-right corner of the screen rapidly. You can attract a lot of guests at the same time if you tap the “promote 15x” button, although you will have to watch an ad to activate it.
Try not to spend too much on décor in the beginning. You will see empty spaces with a “+” symbol suggesting that a player can place new furniture and décor in those areas. Once you have earned a lot of leaves, you can start decorating your Boba café. AFAIK, placing décor does not affect your profits.
Now that you know how to play Boba Story, check out these useful tips, tricks, and strategies to increase your profits, prepare new drinks and unlock new features
Max Out Floorings and Drink Counters
As you earn more leaves from your customers, max out floorings and drink counters to serve as many guests as possible. Build the cheapest brick flooring in the beginning to accommodate more guests in the waiting area.
Having built six floorings in the waiting area, you can serve up to six guests or more. The remaining will wait outside the waiting area in a queue.
To serve all guests in the waiting area quickly, you will need more drink counters. When the Boba tea picture appears above a guest, tap it and the tea will be prepared on the drink counter. With several drink requests popping up above guests, it becomes inevitable to have more counters to fulfill their demands as soon as possible.
Max out the drink counter area by building six drink counters in the beginning. Start with the cheapest drink counter.
Play Mini-Games to Earn Bonuses
Noticed the picture of a kettle on the drink counter? The kettle appears when the Boba tea is being prepared. Tap the kettle to play a mini-game. There are three different mini-games to play in Boba Story:
1. Shaker
Tap and hold the screen and move the finger to drag the shaker side to side until the bubble that emerges from the shaker is of the same size as the bubble on the left.
2. Brew Tea
There will be a kettle and a gauge/bar above it. Press the start button and tap brew when the arrow is in the green zone of the gauge. You need to be quick and timing is required to tap when the fast-moving arrow is in the little green zone.
3. Fill The Bar
Press and hold the fill button until the purple bar moves up to the fill line. The closer you are to the fill line, the more points you will earn.
You will earn points after finishing any one of the above mini-games. Points determine the multiplier. If you score 100 points in a mini-game, you will earn x5 multiplier.
For example, if the drink value is 6 and you achieve x5 multiplier in a mini-game, you will earn 30 leaves (6×5=30).
The closer you are to your objective, the higher the multiplier will be.
*New Game* – Don’t Spill the Toppings
In this mini-game, drag your finger to move the cup and collect as many toppings as you can. While collecting, make sure the toppings do not drop on the floor.
How to Make New Boba Tea
You can make different kinds of flavored teas in Boba Story. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making one:
1. Tap the Menu on the wall.
2. In the Café Menu, unlock an empty glass. You will need leaves to unlock one.
3. Tap the empty glass again to start preparing a new Boba. An unlocked glass earns extra leaves when you use it to prepare a new drink.
4. Choose a drink base. You can select up to 2 ingredients as your base. Locked ingredients (there’s a lock sign on top of them) can be unlocked using leaves. You will need to spend a lot of leaves to unlock them. Certain locked ingredients, toppings, and add-ins can be unlocked at the Experiment Table in the Magic Den. More on this later.
5. Tap, hold and drag ingredients to the empty glass. Experiment by mixing two different ingredients to create a new Boba tea.
6. Tap the blue undo button if you want to discard the current mix and start mixing two different ingredients again.
7. When you finish adding ingredients, tap the “Next” button to move to the “Add-In” screen. Here you can add extra ingredients to spice up your drink. It’s optional, but it does increase the total price of your new Boba tea. You can drop only 1 add in. Dropping more than one add-in won’t make any difference to your drink, price-wise. Make sure you purchase more add-ins using leaves.
8. Tap the Next button. Choose a topping (optional). Selecting a topping for your drink also increases the price. You can unlock new toppings using leaves.
Press the Next button.
9. Finally, add a decorative lid. It also increases the price. Unlock more lids to boost your drink price. You can get a drink boost of up to +5 once you unlock the last lids. Read Boba Story: Garden Walkthrough and All Lid Codes to find out more about honey combinations and special lids.
On the final screen, you can view the total value of your new Boba tea, as displayed in the above screenshot.
Tip: To get a full list of Drink Base, Add-ins, Toppings, and Lids, tap the shopping cart icon on the lower-left corner of the screen.
Hire Employees to Get Boosts
In Boba Story, you can hire employees to attract more customers, double the price of all drinks temporarily, and speed up serving Boba tea to your customers.
Tap the person icon on the lower-left corner of the screen. At the time of writing this guide, there are three servers – Mizu, Lily, and Joji.
Mizu (Hiring cost – 144 Leaves): This cute little axolotl employee auto-activates promotions for 20 seconds to invite a lot of customers. Needs to rest for 340 seconds. The promotion boost and rest period may change as you level him up.
Lily (Hiring Cost – 60 Leaves): The best “Boba Barista” makes all drinks worth 2x for 15 seconds initially. Has a cooldown (rest) time of 340 seconds. During the resting period, you can’t seek her help.
Joji (Hiring Cost – 72 leaves): The main character of Boba Story, Joji takes the drink order on behalf of the player. With Joji around, you don’t have to tap on customers to take their orders. He has a cooldown time of 225 seconds. When activated, Joji can take drink orders for 20 seconds. The time can increase once you level up/give him a raise.
Tap on an employee’s profile picture and use leaves to hire them permanently.
Once you hire an employee, he/she will activate boosts automatically and then rest for several minutes once the cooldown time starts. You don’t have to do anything.
When an employee rests, there’s a clock icon on his/her picture. You can watch an advert in the game to speed up rest time. Tap the profile pic and then you can speed up time. Once the rest time is complete, the green bar on the bottom of the employee profile page fills up and this is when you can give your employees a raise using leaves.
How to Give Your Employees a Raise
Tap the person icon on the lower-left corner of the screen and then tap on a hired employee’s profile pic.
On the employee’s profile page, you will see a bar under “Needs Experience”. You will have to fill the bar. The bar fills up slowly when the employee is resting.
The bar can be filled faster if you watch an advert to speed up resting time. Tap “Watch Ad to Speed up” on the bottom of the employee profile card to do this.
Next, tap the “Give Raise” when the green bar beside it fills up. You will need a certain amount of leaves to give a raise to your employees.
Giving a raise or leveling up all employees in Boba Story provides the following benefits:
Mizu: Increases the free promotion time of Mizu. The duration to attract more customers will increase with every raise.
Lily: After giving a raise/leveling her up, Lily provides a 2x price boost to all customers for an extended time. Her resting time also decreases.
Joji: The time to take drink orders from customers automatically will increase. Joji’s total resting time will decrease.
How to Unlock the Magic Den
You may have noticed that certain ingredients, add-ins, and toppings such as Lychee Soda, Moon Boba, Honey, and Frog syrup can be unlocked only at the experiment table in the Magic Den.
In Boba Story, the Magic Den is where you can craft such special items to make rare Boba tea for your customers. Rare drinks will have a higher price than others.
Swipe right to move to the Magic Den. You will need 1500 leaves to unlock it.
After unlocking the Magic Den, follow these steps:
To craft special ingredients, you will need trinkets, such as hearts, frogs, chicks, mushrooms, sugar cubes, honey bees flowers, etc. You can get trinkets from the animated Fireplace named Kokoro in the Magic Den. The fireplace is at the top/middle of the screen.
Tap the fireplace to open “Kokoro’s Gifts”. Next, tap the “Free” button. You will get 3 free chances to obtain random trinkets every few hours.
Once the three free chances to drop trinkets ends, you can purchase more chances using leaves. You will need at least 400 leaves to buy a chance to drop more trinkets for crafting ingredients.
The fireplace coughs out trinkets. Tap to collect them. All trinkets will be stored in the treasure chest, which is located near the fireplace (right-hand side).
Next, tap the experiment table on the bottom of the Magic Den screen to start crafting ingredients for your Boba tea.
You will need three trinkets in order to craft a new ingredient. The order of the trinkets does not matter, just that the combination should be correct. Keep experimenting until you discover/unlock a new recipe/ingredient for your drink.
To begin the experiment, drag and drop a trinket from the bottom to the empty square on the top. Do the same for the next two trinkets. Now tap the “Experiment” button.
Wait until the green bar fills up. Once it does, tap the “Show Results” button.
A new ingredient is unlocked, you can go to the café to start using it in your boba tea.
Experiments involve trial and error, so don’t fret if you fail an experiment. You will receive bonus leaves as a reward for your effort in case of a failed experiment.
Want to know what trinkets are required to craft new ingredients for a refreshingly unique Boba Tea? Follow our Boba Story Magic Den Experiments: All Recipes to know more!