Who doesn’t love Bubble Tea? Crazy people, that’s who. Boba is delicious, and now, you have the chance to run your own Boba shop and compete with other players to be the best shop in town. Do you have what it takes to be a titan of tapioca pearls? Or will you fail to create a drink worth savoring?

Game Name: Sabobatage (Base Game 3^rd Edition)
Designer: Eric Chen
Artist: Jesus de Ubaidis
Publisher: Self-Published
Player Count: 2-5 Players
Playing Time: 10-30 minutes

Upfront Disclaimer: I purchased my own retail copy of “Sabobatage”. No free copy was provided for review, and I’ve had no contact with the publisher regarding this game. All opinions contained within are my own unbiased thoughts.

Game Overview

Well, it doesn’t explicitly say anywhere in the rules that you need to actually be drinking boba to play this game but don’t tell that to anyone in my household. I’ll take just about any excuse I can find to go out and get myself a nice milk tea with bubbles (half sugar, please).

The box for Sabobatage is very eye catching with bright colors and a pleasing cartoony style to the illustrations. Crack open the lid, and there isn’t much to the components found inside. An extremely compact rulebook, two “menu cards” that are just a quick reference for which ingredients in the game go together, and then 110 cards that are well decorated with more cute, cartoony artwork. The cardstock used is fairly standard quality, and it’s more than adequate for what this game will require – they have a nice linen feel which makes them enjoyable to shuffle, deal, and hold.

The gameplay is very straight forward, and it’s one of those games where all of the “action’ cards explain exactly how to use them on the cards themselves, so there is very little time spent on the teaching/setup to the game. To very generally summarize, gameplay goes as follows:

1. Every player is dealt 5 cards to start, the remainer of the cards go in the center of the table in a face-down draw pile
2. On your turn, you do two things – Draw 2 cards (or potentially 3 later in the game), and then you have the option to play up to 3 cards, but you can choose to player fewer (or none) if you’d like. You can either play cards to build drink sets, or play action cards that either help you or sabotage your opponents

You are working to assemble 5 “Drink sets”. A standard drink set consists of 3 ingredient cards: a tea, a flavor, and a topping. Certain flavors only pair with certain toppings, but any tea card will work as the base, so there is some careful mixing and matching that needs to happen. The first player to assemble 5 completed drinks in a 2-4 player game, or 4 completed drinks in a 5-7 player game, is the winner.

It’s trickier than it sounds to successfully create 5 completed drink sets, because you will constantly be monitoring what other players are doing and carefully managing your turns to sabotage their boba shops as much as possible along the way. Examples of action cards include “Sugar and Ice”, which allows you to steal any one ingredient from any other player and play it for yourself instead, or “BOGO” which allows you to steal a random card from any opponent’s hand plus draft an additional card from the draw pile for yourself. And then there is the king of sabotage cards – the “Sabobatage” card, which lets you choose any 5 cards on the entire table (split between as many opponents as you would like) and destroy them, provided the players don’t have a special “Customer Loyalty” card in their own hand that lets them stop you entirely in your tracks.

My Thoughts

I think there are certainly things to like about this game – it’s a very simple game, it’s got a great fun theme to it, and it’s compact (you could discard the box, and easily travel with this game almost anywhere). The artwork is colorful and endearing, and really anyone could pick up this game in about 30 seconds. I played a round of it with my 8- and 12-year-old kids, and apart from needing to reread the action cards in our first round to remember what they do, there was almost no down time from opening the lid to jumping right into the first round.

But here’s the rub – I’m really stuck on how to recommend this game or who to recommend it to, because there is one problem – it’s extremely similar to another quick-to-learn card game that has almost all of the game mechanics, and even similar goals – Monopoly Deal. And I’ll just say it straight out – Monopoly Deal is the far better game between the two. They work the same – in Monopoly Deal you’re trying to collect 3 sets of properties (instead of 4-5 sets of Boba ingredients). There are huge similarities to the cards, too – the “Customer Loyalty” card in Sabobatage is pretty much identical in function to the “Just Say No” card in Monopoly Deal. The “Sly Deal” card from Monopoly Deal is basically the same as the “Sugar and Ice” card in Sabobatage. But where the mechanics in Sabobatage end, Monopoly Deal has the advantage of the whole “money” system on top which really adds a ton more depth to the game.

And both of these games have a really strong “take that” mechanic to them, where you’re not just building your own table out, but you’re also actively messing around with your opponents, often times in big ways. It’s a polarizing mechanic to a card game, where some people just don’t like it in general, and it can get particularly worse when playing with some younger kids who tend to get a little more emotional about suddenly having their chances of winning stolen away from them in an aggressive fashion. I’m not the “take it super easy and let my kids win” type of parent, they need to earn their wins – but it just doesn’t have the same feeling with a Take That mechanic where it actively feels like you’re singling someone out at the table to mess with (even if logic dictates it being the correct person to attack).

So that’s where I have some trouble recommending this one – from a theme and art style, Sabobatage seems like a great game to play with a wider age range including kids, but it just doesn’t have the depth where I could really see myself sitting around with a group of adults and playing more than one or two rounds of this game. It IS fun, and if I didn’t already own and absolutely love Monopoly Deal, I’d probably be able to appreciate this one more than I do right now. And especially with Monopoly Deal being a ~$9 game, versus over $25 for Sabobatage at the time of me writing this, I just don’t know how I can recommend Sabobatage in good conscience. I will say – they do make an expansion for Sabobatage called “Legends of Matcha”, and maybe with some more mechanics added on top, it becomes a much better game. I’m not sure, and I’d love to find out, so I’ll update this if I ever get the chance to try the expansion on top.

Verdict:

A bright, colorful, fun game that is quick to teach and could be played at nearly any age, making it a good choice for families or very casual players (as long as they don’t mind “Take That” style games). But there is a better game that is very similar, Monopoly Deal, that I would probably recommend above this one, due to slightly better implementation of the mechanics.

Likes:

• Fun theme and colorful, whacky artwork are a joy
• Very simple to teach, the cards themselves explain most of the game
• You get to use it as an excuse to go drink more delicious Boba

Dislikes:

• $25+ is just too high for a simple card game
• Strong “Take That” mechanic can turn many people away from enjoying it
• Other games (Monopoly Deal) are nearly identical in gameplay but better implemented