When I visited Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in 2022, I picked up a game of Sabacc--because it's Sabacc! The Star Wars space poker game that Han Solo used to win the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian!
This week I played it (or rather, inflicted it on my friends). Well, it is awful.
It is a deck of 62 cards, half red, half green, in three suits (circles, triangles, and squares). The suits don't matter. Your goal is to have a hand that equals zero points--green cards are positive, red are negative. There are cards with pips worth the value of the pips--fine. Then there are face cards, with designs so greebled and similarly radially symmetric that I absolute could not tell them apart. I'd look at the instructions to look up the design (which are printed VERY small) and then the value would fall out of my head instantly.
That doesn't matter anyway, because at the end of each round, you roll a set of dice, and if you get a double, everyone dumps their entire hand and redraws (I guess to imitate the randomizer function of the actual game). This means it really doesn't matter what you do, the winner is arbitrary. Oh--and the design on the dice is light gray on a very slightly darker gray and all the designs are so similar you have to look VERY closely to determine if you've rolled doubles.
Also there's no betting. I mean, I suppose you could. But there's no point in having a mechanic for folding ("junking") if there's no betting.
And this isn't even Sabacc! According to wookiepedia, Sabacc has 76 cards in 4 suits (Flasks, Sabers, Staves, and Coins) and your goal is to get to 23 in your hand. And there are a bunch of special cards like "The Idiot" and "Moderation." So this is space tarot black jack poker. Cool.
This appears to be a variant of sabacc called Corellian Spike, but it's not even really that! If you look at the rules in wookiepedia, it's the deck of Corellian Spike, but none of the mechanics.
This makes me wonder if the people who made this game for sale were stuck with the graphic design from the movie Solo (since this is what they are supposedly playing) and then had to make...something.
The shape of the cards makes them really difficult to shuffle. It can be done, but I kept playing 62 card pickup, and the length was just longer enough that it was aggravating the tendon in my middle finger to hold them for a shuffle.
I will say it's a very satisfyingly weighty box. But that's all it's got going for it.
This week I played it (or rather, inflicted it on my friends). Well, it is awful.
It is a deck of 62 cards, half red, half green, in three suits (circles, triangles, and squares). The suits don't matter. Your goal is to have a hand that equals zero points--green cards are positive, red are negative. There are cards with pips worth the value of the pips--fine. Then there are face cards, with designs so greebled and similarly radially symmetric that I absolute could not tell them apart. I'd look at the instructions to look up the design (which are printed VERY small) and then the value would fall out of my head instantly.
That doesn't matter anyway, because at the end of each round, you roll a set of dice, and if you get a double, everyone dumps their entire hand and redraws (I guess to imitate the randomizer function of the actual game). This means it really doesn't matter what you do, the winner is arbitrary. Oh--and the design on the dice is light gray on a very slightly darker gray and all the designs are so similar you have to look VERY closely to determine if you've rolled doubles.
Also there's no betting. I mean, I suppose you could. But there's no point in having a mechanic for folding ("junking") if there's no betting.
And this isn't even Sabacc! According to wookiepedia, Sabacc has 76 cards in 4 suits (Flasks, Sabers, Staves, and Coins) and your goal is to get to 23 in your hand. And there are a bunch of special cards like "The Idiot" and "Moderation." So this is space tarot black jack poker. Cool.
This appears to be a variant of sabacc called Corellian Spike, but it's not even really that! If you look at the rules in wookiepedia, it's the deck of Corellian Spike, but none of the mechanics.
This makes me wonder if the people who made this game for sale were stuck with the graphic design from the movie Solo (since this is what they are supposedly playing) and then had to make...something.
The shape of the cards makes them really difficult to shuffle. It can be done, but I kept playing 62 card pickup, and the length was just longer enough that it was aggravating the tendon in my middle finger to hold them for a shuffle.
I will say it's a very satisfyingly weighty box. But that's all it's got going for it.