Mini-Games

Pazaak

Pazaak is KOTOR’s primary mini-game, and will be one of your greatest cash resources, assuming you have a little luck and the patience to reload your game when you hit a bad string of losses.

Tips

The rules of the game are fairly basic; check your Completed Quests entries in the menus to get the basics down. You can also hit up Atton for a tutorial any time you’re on the Ebon Hawk.

High-stakes Pazaak will require a good deck. Unlike in KOTOR, though, the only real way to acquire Pazaak cards in KOTOR2 is to buy them, and there are few enough places to do that. You can buy cards from a player in the Cantina on Citadel Station, one of the Rodian merchants on the same station, a player in the Cantina on Nar Shaddaa, and an Ithorian player near the landing pad on Dantooine, and perhaps in other places as well. It’s more difficult to find enough cards to make a side deck fully constructed of the valuable flip cards (cards that read as +/-1 or +/-2, for instance), but should you find them, these should always go into your deck.

Luckily, one of the more annoying aspects of Pazaak in KOTOR has been amended; the computer-controlled player will no longer always go first. This will greatly help you balance out the chances of an early bust, so, well, hooray for Obsidian. Assuming you and your opponent have evenly-matched decks, you’ll no longer be at an automatic disadvantage when facing off against a computer player, since you will now take turns going first in a match.

Since the computer will always do its damndest to match or beat your score, you’ll know that your initial score will have to be at or near 20 in order to win; unless your opponent busts by a huge margin, he’ll almost always find a way to hit a 19 or 20 during the first few games, especially if he knows that you’re sitting on an 18.

The new golden cards for Pazaak can help you win by filling up your side of the field with nine cards.

If you get lucky and begin a game with a few low cards, you’ll find that the computer will always stay on an 18 or better, and will usually play a card in order to hit 19 or 20. If your opponent has no more cards in his hand, he’ll stay on anything better than 16, which gives you a pretty big margin for error. As we’ve said, though, there’s no way to consistently ensure that your opponent draws higher cards than you, so you’ll generally need to attempt to get to 19 or 20 and stay there, and hope your opponent can’t match up or do better than you.

The third rule of Pazaak is: the first game is important, but less important than the last. You’ll want to try and ensure that you have something in your hand when you get to match point; hoping for a natural 20 is rarely a viable game strategy. If you find yourself constantly running out of cards in the third round or later, you’ll probably be better off if you play more conservatively in the first round or two. Try to hit to as close to 20 as you can manage, then let the computer waste its cards trying to beat your score. Even if you wind up going in the hole, card advantage becomes much more important as the game goes on, so if you can goad the computer into wasting a card or two to tie a score of yours in the middle of the match, you’ll be stronger towards the end game.

For our money, the best side deck consists of three +/-2 cards, three +/-4 cards, and four +/-3 cards, although the numbers of each card doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they’re there: if you don’t have enough +/-3’s, replace those slots with other double-sided cards, not a +3 or a -3. Any double-sided card is generally preferable to a single-sided card, though this is less true of the extreme ends of the double-sided types. A +/-6, for instance, should be scrapped in favor of a +3, just because, due to the way the cards hit the table, you’re more likely to find a use for it.

It’s rumored that some of the Pazaak players will give you a unique reward for winning a certain number of times in a row; most of these rewards are extra cards.