Young and Full of Fluff

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.

I finished watching Obi-Wan this weekend as well as watching Dr. Strange in the Multi-verse of Madness. As Disney is pursuing a similar strategy with both of these properties—that is, spinning out as many movies and TV shows as they can—I was thinking about why I think that largely works for the MCU and largely doesn’t for Star Wars. (I say as a fan of both.)

The MCU is built off of comics canon. This has a long history with dozens (hundreds) of characters with their own titles, each main characters in their own right, who then crossover with each other in various ways. It also has a long history of doing whatever it wants with its own continuity, including throwing it out every decade or so or just ignoring story beats that weren’t popular.

Applied to the MCU, this means that each franchise has its own genre. The fact that different of the movies introduce world building elements that should really affect the other ones doesn’t matter. You can have something like the Eternals and their existence didn’t impact the Thanos narrative because Eternals stays in their own sandbox until they decide that they don’t. Yes, there are some handwaved internal justifications, but to me as a viewer, those aren’t even the point. I can enjoy Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, Loki, Black Widow, and Dr. Strange all at the same time without worrying too much about what the existence of all the other ones means for each separate property.

In other words, the MCU works on comic book rules. Continuity matters when they decide it matters and the rest of the time, why worry about it.

Star Wars on the other hand started as the singular vision of an iconoclast, and grew through the 9 main movies into an intergenerational saga about one family. There are a limited number of main characters—to create more, they take side characters and peel them off into stand alones. And it has a singular continuity that has only been overwritten once, when they decanonized the Expanded Universe.

From the beginning Star Wars canon has functioned differently than other fictional worlds because every work authorized by Lucasfilm that contained Star Wars characters was canon, and in the era of the Expanded Universe, authors often had to rewrite stories to contain elements from other of the books and comics (what leaps to mind is the Dark Empire comics which ravaged Coruscant—which then had to be ravaged in all other works taking place after them).

This meant that each work could have a permanent, negative impact on the whole canonical universe. Which means that every thing a person doesn’t like as a fan is the subject of rage, because now it’s stuck there and you have to live with it forever. (Lightsaber blades shatter on lava monsters? F*** you Kevin J. Anderson!) This also meant that every now and then Timothy Zahn had to wade in with a book that fixed the massive contradictions in characterization and power levels between authors. Zahn once told me at a con he'd been awarded a Golden Spackle award for this by fans.

Even after the removal of Expanded Universe from canon, Disney’s efforts are hampered by the organizing structure of the Star Wars universe being the Skywalker Saga. New stories have to be shoved into the silent spaces in that saga in ways that undermine the story's own beats—which is how I feel about Obi-Wan. Loved seeing Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan, but there is an impossibility of creating a satisfying end to an interstitial series when you have to keep all the pieces on the board for the story ten years later.

(I have a side rant about how they brilliantly dodged this with Mandalorian by creating a character that was basically the Boba Fett of the Expanded Universe but *wasn’t* Boba Fett so they could do whatever they wanted with him, but anyway.)

Long way to say—I think that Disney can probably keep spinning out Marvel content as long as they have good creatives at the wheel because the nature of the source material leads to a flexible relationship with canonicity.

But Star Wars is restricted to coloring within pre-existing lines, and the more series and movies they put out there the more they constrain what they can do in the future. I think they’re going to hit a wall with Star Wars much more quickly.

(All of this is of course about quality of the content. They’ll keep doing what they do as long as they make money of course, which may be a long, long time after the quality drops off.)

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