6 Most Popular Video Games With Gambling Games In It

Many video games are almost like the real world nowadays, including various activities to explore in an open-world environment. A decent chunk of AAA titles offers you a chance to test your luck with gambling options, too, serving as the perfect introduction to the rules and fundamentals of online casino games with no risk involved.

Here are the best experiences you can find in the gaming world nowadays, with a thorough and detailed breakdown of what they bring to the table!

The Yakuza series

As the name would suggest, the Yakuza game series revolves around the Japanese underworld, telling stories of crime and redemption in a GTA-like fashion but with its beat-em-up-oriented flair and many Eastern influences. The game is chock full of minigames, including many casino game options. The series shows no signs of stopping, with its tenth entry, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, released to commercial and critical acclaim in 2020.

The unique aspect of the Yakuza series' gambling minigames is that they also feature a set of rulesets specific to Japan, making it a great way to learn these more obscure gambling games and getting on edge on fellow players in the real world. Games like Cee-Lo, Cho-Han, and Koi-Koi can all be found in the Yakuza series, rendered with glorious graphics and great attention to detail.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (and Gwent)

Nowadays, The Witcher is a household franchise, in no small part thanks to this game, whose popularity and excellent reviews played a huge part in the eventual Netflix series. It is one of the best ARPGs ever made, with its unique medieval fantasy setting and massive, fully realized world feeding into a tremendous and memorable storyline. There's also a card game that became a smash hit of its own!

That's right: The Witcher 3 features a fairly intricate unique card game known as Gwent, which became so popular in the gaming community that it got its own standalone free-to-play multiplayer CCG variant later down the line. Not only is it a ton of fun, but it also serves as a great way to get a handle on the basics of odds management and card counting, making it a nice way to figure out the math behind gambling games in the real world.

Dedicated casino video games

This might be of surprise to you in the year 2021, dear reader. Still, dedicated offline video games focused on nothing but a casino environment were pretty hot a couple of decades ago. Titles like Hoyle Casino or the Caesars Palace series offer you as close of an experience to the real deal as you can get, with the former appearing on the highest-grossing games charts in the early noughties.

All of the best casino video games are there with rule breakdowns and detailed explanations, allowing you to get a taste of the casino environment without risking your hard-earned cash. If you do feel like testing your luck based on your experiences in these games, playing online casinos for real moneyis a logical next step to experiment with.

The Watch Dogs franchise

One of those infamous Ubisoft open-world bouts set in a near-future version of Chicago focusing on surveillance tools and hacking, the Watch Dogs games serve up equal parts thrilling and terrifying take on the future of our society. The game's many minigames also include gambling games, made all the more enjoyable by the overwhelming gadgetry around you.

Texas Hold 'em poker is the main one here (though shell games and slot machines are also available), and you'll feel like a god in the game because of all the hacking tools available to you.

Though the use of cameras to spy on your opponents' cards and the Profiler tool to check their stress levels isn't exactly the sort of knowledge that you can make use of in the real world, the game's built-in odds checker serves as a great way to figure out the fuzzy math involved with poker before you try your hand at the real deal.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise

You know it, and you love it: it's GTA, the most influential video game franchise out there, a massive open-world sandbox of craziness and endless possibilities regardless of which entry you're focusing on. Though tales of criminals and their exploits technically anchor the games, literally anything is possible in these games. They serve as hubs for many intricate user-made experiences, from hardcore races to roleplaying.

Much like the Yakuza games, casinos are a big part of the game world in the GTA games, with GTA Online's fully multiplayer take on the GTA 5 world serving as a particularly notable example.

The casino experience in the game is taken so seriously that it simply isn't available in particular jurisdictions. For something less interconnected and more old-school, all the casinos in GTA San Andreas are for a more… blocky experience.

Fallout New Vegas

There's just no way to complete a list like this without highlighting the granddaddy of all Vegas-based titles, one of the most beloved entries in the long-running RPG franchise, Fallout: New Vegas. The game sees the return of original developers Obsidian to the franchise after Bethesda made the grand leap forward to the third dimension with Fallout 3, offering a gritty and dark tale of the Courier's revenge interwoven with three unique factions in the Nevada desert after the nuclear apocalypse.

Featuring its dystopian take on the Vegas Strip, there's plenty to explore here for gambling fans, and the ability to improve your luck as one of Fallout's signature S.P.E.C.I.A.L. abilities goes a long way to combat the house's (and Mr. House's) built-in and crookedness-oriented advantages, making them some of the best gambling games to play at home.

The game features six different casinos (The Tops, Gomorrah, Ultra-Luxe, the Vikki and Vance Casino, the Atomic Wrangler Casino, Dead Money's Sierra Madre Casino), offering blackjack, roulette games, and slots. You can also play Lucky Horseshoes at the Sunset Sarsaparilla headquarters. Various travelers in the wasteland may also play the Caravan card game against you, but this game is not available in the Fallout New Vegas casinos.

Final Thoughts

If the world of gambling is something that interests you, gaming can offer an excellent pathway into a broader and more profound experience of this exciting world. The more adult-focused AAA video games often feature a slate of gambling-related minigames for people to peruse and play around with.

They offer a straightforward and safe way to learn the basics of every casino game. The titles listed above offer the best such experience today. Though there are always other top-tier video games coming down the pipeline, the gambling offerings of these titles have stood the test of time and will no doubt remain relevant in the future as well.

Author bio

Sam Lee is a game and casino enthusiast with years of experience in gaming and gambling. Sam's work has been featured across a wide variety of sites over the years. You can find more of his content at Safest Betting Sites' casino games and betting hubs.

Twitter: @SBS_Authority