Star Wars Outlaws features my new favourite card game, I can't play enough

I’ve played around five hours of Star Wars Outlaws and I probably spent more time than I should have playing sabacc.

During my preview session for Star Wars Outlaws I got to experience the main pillars of gameplay that make Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world adventure. This included exploration, stealth, combat, starship travel, and my new favourite, sabacc.

Check out Star Wars Outlaws below

Sabacc is a card game in the Star Wars universe a bit like real-life poker. You have yellow cards and red cards, each with a number on them, and the goal is to get a pair of matching numbers. You can draw cards to get a pair, and if you’re happy with your hand you can pass until the round is over, then everyone lays out their cards.

The player with a pair of the lowest value wins. So if you have a pair of 2’s and another player has a pair of 4’s the first player would win. A pair of 3’s is a special pair, and the best hand you can get, even better than a pair of 1’s.

It’s a simple but intuitive game that you can play at just about any cantina from what I could tell, and I absolutely adored it, almost to my detriment.

Ubisoft

I’ve never been one for these in-game card games. I didn’t play any gwent in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and I only played the minimum amount Queen’s Blood in Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth that I had to in order to progress the game. It’s not that the card games are bad, I just didn’t feel a desire to learn them and preferred cracking on with the main parts of the game.

It was an entirely different story for me with my preview of Star Wars Outlaws. I decided to try a few games of sabacc just to give it a go and say I’d done it. It took me a game or two to get my head around the rules, but once I’d won a few games I was hooked. I’d earnt a lot of credits but I was hardly paying attention, I was just having fun.

I probably spent a good hour of my time with the Star Wars Outlaws just playing this silly little card game, I was hooked.

During my time with the game for the review I tried to distance myself from the sabacc tables, they’d just take up too much of my time otherwise. But when I found out you could showdown against the galaxy’s high-rollers, including Lando Calrissian, I knew what I had to do. I had to become the greatest space poker player in the cosmos.

Ubisoft

You can earn a lot of credits from these games, all of which can be put to use with vendors, either for new outfits or materials used to upgrade your blaster, speeder and Trailblazer, so it’s all worth it in the end. Several missions also involve the game, usually to win back something that was stolen from an NPC, so getting the hang of sabacc as quickly as possible definitely has its perks.

I haven’t been this gripped by an in-game card game since Luigi’s Casino in Super Mario 64 DS, and I’m going to keep playing it until there’s no one left to challenge, or until Ubisoft release it as a standalone title, whichever comes first.