The ESRB rating for Star Wars Outlaws has arrived, and while it’s largely what you’d expect from an action game in the sci-fi franchise, it has revealed one notable detail: Sabacc is finally going to be playable in a Star Wars video game.
“During the course of the game, players can wager in-game currency on Sabacc, a blackjack-like card game with detailed rules,” the new ESRB rating summary reveals. The devs hadn’t previously revealed that detail, so I guess you can thank a need to warn parents of “simulated gambling” for the early info.
Sabacc first appeared in the Star Wars universe 41 years ago, in the 1983 novel Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu. It soon became an iconic element of the galaxy’s underworld, and you could bet that any time a Star Wars novel or comic needed the spice of some high stakes gambling, Sabacc would be the game of choice.
The full rules of Sabacc were first established in the 1989 tabletop RPG supplement, Crisis on Cloud City, which established a blackjack-style game where the goal is to get as close to the number 23 – negative or positive – as possible without going over. Despite the established ruleset and the popularity of the game within the fiction, no Star Wars video game ever directly adapted it. The closest we got was Pazaak in Knights of the Old Republic, another blackjack-style game that spiced things up with the addition of a deckbuilding element.
In the now-defunct Legends canon, Sabacc was how Han Solo won the Millenium Falcon off of Lando Calrissian, and that story was so popular that it was depicted as part of on-screen canon in Solo: A Star Wars Story. These days, Disney sells Sabacc decks at its Galaxy’s Edge attraction, but Outlaws is set to be the game’s big playable debut for the vast majority of Star Wars fans.
