Sabacc Rules – Corellian Spike
Have you ever wanted to play Star Wars Sabacc just like Han and Lando? Well now you can! With my custom homebrew rules, you can gamble away your very own starship just like the iconic heroes of ill repute that we all know and love.
Sabacc is a gambling card game very similar to poker, only instead of trying to win by assembling a particular card combination, a Sabacc deck is made of positive and negative numbers, 1 through 10, and all you’re trying to do is put together a hand that equals zero.
But don’t let the simplicity fool you! The addition of rolling the Sabacc dice inserts a nice degree of randomness and chaos that makes betting and bluffing even more fun.
Step 1 – Deal
- Players ante 1 Credit to join the hand. The dealer shuffles the deck and deals 2 cards face-down to each player, then turns up the top 3 cards of the deck – the flop. (Players can see how many cards are in each others’ hands.)
Step 2 – Play
Starting with the player to the dealer’s left and going clockwise, each player chooses either to:
- Draw from the deck, and then, optionally, to discard one card from their hand (face-down), or to…
- Draw from the flop, and then, optionally, to discard one card from their hand (face-down). When a card is taken from the flop, the dealer turns up a new card from the deck to replace the one taken.
Do this step 3 times.
For games with 5 players, do this step only 2 times.
For games of 6 or more, do this step just once.
Step 3 – Bet
- Starting again with the player to the dealer’s left, players may bet on the hand until all players have either folded, matched the current bet, or put in all of their Credits.
Step 4 – Dice
The dealer rolls the dice:
- If the results are different, nothing happens.
- If the results match, all players discard their hands (face-down) and the dealer deals them a new hand with exactly the same number of cards as they discarded.
Step 5 – Reveal
Players reveal their hands simultaneously and the hand with the total closest to zero wins.
Settle ties in this order:
- First: More cards beats fewer cards.
- Second: A positive score beats a negative score.
- Third: The furthest card from zero wins, with a positive beating a negative.
- Fourth: The greatest spread wins (the span between highest and lowest cards, with negative being lower than positive).
- If there is still a tie, the pot remains and new game is played to determine the winner.
Tips
- Use the dice to indicate who’s dealer.
- Keep the deck on one end of the flop and the discard pile on the other to avoid confusion.
Equipment
To acquire the game supplies (the deck of cards and Sabacc dice), I recommend Hasbro’s Star Wars Han Solo Card Game. It’s fairly cheap and of surprisingly decent quality. Plus the use of regular Earth numbers on the cards makes it infinitely easier to play with than the more expensive Galaxy’s Edge version.
You can also make your own Sabacc deck by shuffling together 2 decks of regular playing cards after removing 2 of the joker cards, all face cards, one full suit of hearts, and one full suit of clubs. You’ll be left with a deck of 62 cards that contains:
- 2 jokers
- 30 red-suited cards (1-10 three times)
- 30 black-suited cards (1-10 three times)
The black cards are your positive numbers, the red are negative, and the jokers are zero.
Since there are six different symbols on the Sabacc dice, you can just use 2 regular six-sided dice.