Vintage Battle At Sarlacc’s Pit Game

This is a board game from 1983. Each player takes the role of one of the heroes (Luke, Leia, Han, or Chewbacca) and tries to make it through the guards to Jabba.

You move and fight by drawing cards somehow, but honestly I couldn’t make sense of the rules. They seem needlessly complex for what is really a game for young kids.

Anyway, the game comes with a very cool 3-D game board that you assemble from pieces of cardboard, featuring the sail barge and the sarlacc below. There are also a number of little plastic figures that are used as the playing pieces. The sculpts are a little rough, but no worse that other figures of this type, and maybe better than the average board game playing piece. One thing I should note is that the Leia figure uses her Endor outfit, not her metal bikini. This is also true with several other products, to the extent that I think there must have been some sort of rule at the time that licensees couldn’t use her skimpier outfit in their products.

The paint jobs are very very rough. On the one hand I do have to give them some credit for the fact that they bothered to paint them at all. But on the other, I kind of wonder if it might not have been better to just cast them in appropriate colors instead of doing such a slipshod painting job. The Gamorrean guards aren’t terrible, but the others are kind of laughable.

Still, I love the game board and the art on the box and cards.

EDIT: Here is a PDF of the game’s rules and assembly instructions (click the image below).