Pazaak is a game similar to blackjack that was originally a mini-game for the Star Wars: KOTOR series of videogames.

It is played 1v1, with players taking turns drawing cards ranging from 1 to 10, trying to get the closest to 20 without going over. Each turn, a player may play a modifier card (+2, -4, ...) from his hand to alter the total. A game is played as best-of-5 (3 winning), and the hand cards are dealt only once at the start of the match.

More information on pazaak

There are various apps available, but there are no official physical versions of pazaak cards. I created image files depicting the card fronts and backs, faithful to the KOTOR look & feel, which you can use as resources. These are available in the Releases section.

I am not affiliated to BioWare / LucasArts in any way and am only distributing these in an attempt to spread the pazaak love. If this represents a legal issue I will remove them.

You will find a CLI game engine that can run games and enforce rules.

You can plug bot agents, or possibly human interfaces (untested).

This is useful to simulate many games in a monte-carlo fashion, to analyze the value of modifier cards (+2, -4, +-3, ...). It may also be used as a basis to develop bot players. A naive but functional implementation is provided in testagent/.

To run:

$ cd pazaakcli
$ go build
$ cd testagent
$ go build
$ cd ..
# stdin line1 = side deck for player 1
# stdin line2 = side deck for player 2
$ ./pazaakcli -player ./testagent/testagent -player ./testagent/testagent <<EOF
auto
auto
EOF

The conclusions drawn from analysis conducted using the command-line engine will be provided in the form of a report file.

See side_deck_card_rank.txt for a rough early analysis of side deck card value. More to come.