Sabika

Sabika had not passed my first procurement check. But it was played away from home — on one of those rare nights when we are not playing one of my games — and it won me over enough that I bought it the next day. It is tight and burny, but in exactly the way that makes you file it under “guilty euro pleasure” with very little guilt.

At its core, it is a very honest multi-rondel. Your choices do not feel like disconnected actions on a board: the mechanisms lock together, and the game has a clear internal logic. Deciding where to move and what to exploit is not merely an optimization exercise; there is flow and consistency throughout the whole structure.

The interaction also keeps it from becoming solitaire. We are not talking about spectacular funerals, or a game that lives to throw you off your plan, but there is enough competition — especially through some racing elements — that you need to watch what everyone else is doing and cannot operate in a vacuum. That degree of pressure suits it: enough for the table to matter, without becoming unpleasant.

To me, this is the game Scorpius Freighter should have been, if AEG did not have that fixation on family-friendly games. The production is merely okay and it has the expected amount of clutter, but it lacks nothing next to the year’s top medium-heavy euro releases. It plays beautifully, stands firmly as a whole, and yes, it could very easily become a reference title for multi-rondel games.