"Now This is Podracing": Some Sports And Games In The 'Star Wars' Universe
Competition is interwoven across the Star Wars franchise. From Watto’s loaded dice roll in The Phantom Menace to the basketball-like Booma Ball mini-game featured in Mos Espa in TT Games’ LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. Games in the form of gambling, childhood games, games of the mind, challenges of the body, and sports are absolutely everywhere in the Star Wars universe. With the NBA playoffs upon us, the NHL playoffs coming in May, and baseball season having just started, we thought it would be a fun idea to learn about some of the sports and games in the galaxy far, far away!
One of the most popular games in the Star Wars universe is holochess or dejarik. This game is most comparable to our chess. The game involves two participants working with their creatures (each with their own unique aesthetic and fighting statistics) to battle the opponents’. The winner was whoever held claim to the last monster on the board. This game is the first one Star Wars audiences were really treated to visually as a board (not too dissimilar to a chessboard) and portion of a game is played in A New Hope.
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Podracing is probably the most famous sport to come from the Star Wars universe. The incredible Boonta Eve Classic sequence in The Phantom Menace captured imaginations and expanded on Star Wars lore in a very fun way! Merchandise of all sorts including toys, video games, and clothes to name a few, were made available celebrating the arrival of Star Wars’ Formula 1.
From the onset, it is clear that podracing is a cultural event. Interest tracks to all social classes, people have favorite racers, and the events influence excitement. Beings across the Star Wars universe involve themselves in podracing for reasons varying from thrill-seeking, to clout, to money, and beyond. The thrilling event involves participants piloting “pods” at fantastic speeds in races. The pods come in fantastic shapes and colors that often herald a home, clan, or planet that correlates to the racer. These races require tremendous, almost impossible, amounts of skill. It is noted that one must have “Jedi reflexes” to podrace. It is due to this tremendous skill gap, the dangerous nature of the courses’ design, and an occasional lack of track security that these races are very often deadly.
The actual courses are often determined by the curvature of the landscape. In the case of the Boonta Eve Classic, that means fast winding pathways through rocky canyons and perilous trails slicing through dark caves. The videogame Star Wars Episode I: Racer illustrated how courses have been conceptualized from very formal tracks to barren ice fields. It is noted by Qui-Gon Jinn when referring to podracing on the planet Malastare, that it is “very fast, very dangerous.” So much so, that Anakin’s skills in the craft provide an inkling to his profound abilities in the Force.
In Star Wars, the further away you get from formal leagues and associations, rogue betting and cheating become more and more commonplace. Gambling is something fairly pedestrian in Star Wars. We see it at different extremes from the shimmering extravagance of Canto Bight in The Last Jedi to fairly impromptu with events like dice rolls and duels for clout, money, or sometimes even larger stakes. One of the most popular gambling games is sabaac.
Sabaac is a game not too dissimilar to blackjack in our universe. In blackjack, a participant adds cards until they are close to, or have a total value of 21. The primary difference between blackjack and sabacc is that, in sabacc, totals can go up and down. Depending on the source material, the ideal numbers have been 0, 23, and -23 that the participants worked their way towards. The most famous sabacc game was finally seen in 2018, in the film Solo: A Star Wars Story between infamous smuggler Han Solo and one of the universe’s most interesting men: Lando Calrissian.
So, the question that arises is why? Why do these games feature so prominently in film and other media pertaining to the Star Wars universe? Well, other than to flesh out the daily lives of citizens, it says a lot about fate and how the characters interact with it. We often see these games tangling with the fates of the participants. Anakin and his mother, Shmi, had their freedom hanging in the balance with Watto’s infamous loaded dice roll, Han Solo’s fate and the ownership of the Millennium Falcon hung over intense games of sabaac with Lando Calrissian, and sometimes life itself is the stake, as can be the case with the fighting rings recently featured in the first episode of Season Two of The Mandalorian. This fight featured two Gamoreans, with one perishing from a blaster bolt from a member of the audience. This says a lot about how beings struggle with their places in society, especially those on the fringe of societies. For example, Watto’s dice being weighted can speak to how Anakin and his mother’s fate had been sealed by the stratified society they were born into. However, Qui-Gon’s intervention with the Force was able to overcome that obstacle, freeing Anakin and allowing him to embrace his destiny.
As a bonus, one of the lesser-known examples of fate hanging over a bet comes from Legends. In Kevin J. Anderson’s novel, Jedi Search, the first novel in the Jedi Academy trilogy, we see Luke Skywalker attempting to rebuild the Jedi Order. He is seeking out candidates with inherent, potent Force abilities to train. One such candidate was Dack. On assignment from Luke Skywalker, Lando Calrissian sought out Dack, on the planet Umgul, due to his unbelievable success at gambling. This was only to find out Dack had been cheating!
I hope you enjoyed our trip across the Star Wars universe and some of the games, sports, and challenges it holds! Thank you for reading and may the Force be with you!
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Source(s): Wookieepedia.com