Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers Review

Game developers have clearly been spending a lot of time in the casinos lately, and not just because they’ve been fired by our wonderful, pristine industry. They’ve taken classic casino games, stripped away all the annoying life-ruining gambling, and turned them into fun roguelike deckbuilder games. This year we’ve got a clever novel spin on roulette with Bingle Bingleand the excellent poker player Balatro might as well have deleted all other games on my computer.

Now we have Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, a roguelike deckbuilder in blackjack. It’s a game with its tongue so far back in its cheek that it would be in danger of losing it if someone punched it in the face. Unfortunately, considering that this fun, smart card game is often frustrating in the face. What’s the guarantee on a Steam Deck that’s been thrown against the wall many times?

If you are a living saint who knows nothing about the sinful world of gambling, blackjack is a game in which you and your opponent take turns drawing cards from individual decks. You both try to get a score that adds up to 21. Get a score of 22 or higher and you lose, which means you will almost certainly lose unless your opponent is kind enough to lose too. The trick is knowing when to stop. If you have 18, is that Really Is it worth the risk of drawing another card?

The first twist in D&DG is that you have a constant supply of 100 health to worry about, and every time you lose, you take the difference as damage. Let’s say your opponent has 21 and you have 18. If you stick to that, you’ll take 3 damage. But if you risk drawing another card and lose, you’ll take a huge amount of damage 21 damage. Ouch!

You can also look at your draw pile and your opponents’ draw pile at any time, like the best card counter in the world. Get into the habit of doing this, because sometimes it gives you a powerful indication of your chances, and other times it confirms outright whether you’re going to win or lose.

It’s a decent system for building a roguelike deck, and more compelling cards will soon mix things up. Like one that lets you steal a card from your opponent, suddenly turning their winning 21 into a pathetic 11. Or one that deals three damage to itself but gives you five shields against future attacks. Or a brilliant 0.5 card that only rounds up when you’re below 21 in your final score. This one has done so much for me that I leave him everything in my will.

The charming presentation makes it simple to learn. In an ancient tavern that “smelt of beer and vice,” you start by playing drunkards, janitors, and bards. Survive long enough and you can move up to the upper floors or descend into a shadowy and mean basement, where your first opponent will literally be a rat. Later, you explore the VIP area with crypto-shilling celebrities and the main headquarters, where parts of your deck are released to protect the bosses’ bonuses. Brutal.

While a few extra jokes for each character would have been fine, there’s still enough humorous dialogue to make you smile, and some of the cards are sublimely silly. I’d like to see how long someone could survive a game of blackjack in a real casino with an SD card, a PS1 memory stick, and a legally-enough-different-from-Pokémon card. Others make cheeky references to Slay the Spire and Balatro, which is… bold. Do you Really Do you want to risk comparisons with the best of the best?

This gambling house also commits every possible scam under the sun. There are overvalued loot boxes, cryptocurrency that you can buy and have to sell before it plummets in value, a bored monkey NFT card, roulette, slot machines, three-card Monte, etc. It is quite good at satirizing Very this type of thing, while maintaining the integrity of the game…

Joker in the pack

It’s a proud, humorous game, but play long enough and stern strategies start to emerge. Cutting and changing the deck to make it easier to hit that precious 21 is obviously a clever goal – filling my 10 and 0.5 with cards Is going work someday, for fuck’s sake. There are also a ton of nasty things to sabotage your opponent with, like a card that can burn one of his cards out of play. Or a card that “locks” one of his cards, forcing him to play it every hand. Cards like these become indispensable against late-game opponents, something you learn through frustrating trial and error.

You have streaks where the gambling gods smile on you and everything seems to be going well. Then you have streaks where Satan seems to be dealing. But all too often you have streaks where the game just slows to a crawl.

Stalemates are very possible and incredibly tedious. At one point I managed to trick myself by burning my opponent’s deck until it contained only two cards: a pair of 10s. This meant they automatically scored 20 points each turn, and the best I could do was chip away at damage as I managed to get a perfect 21. This is an extreme example, but it’s far from the only way to trap yourself in a miserable battle that drags on forever until you’re eager to turn the deck against yourself.

The game starts with four starter decks, each entirely in one suit (hearts, spades, diamonds, or clubs), with different suits granting different bonuses when you roll 21. Hearts restore health, spades create shields, diamonds win more chips, and clubs hit harder. In theory, this is fine, but since each starter deck still consists of the same set of basic numbers and face cards, most of the game plays almost identically until you unlock a few more cards in a series. This means things get repetitive quickly.

Worse still, the health-restoring Hearts deck is simply much more valuable than the other three options. Health is a nightmare to restore otherwise, relying on either a card spawning on the run, the incredibly stingy taverns, or some overpriced “loot boxes” that give you a card and restore a measly 2 health per person (ha ha ha, I guess?). Defeating an area boss with only 3 health left should be thrilling, but it’s not when the first enemy in the next area easily finishes me off.

Despite all my complaining, I’ve put 20 hours into it. Granted, that’s because the tyrants who run PC Gamer force me to play games before reviewing them, but I also plan to get back to them after my work commitments. Because it feels like a game that is just a few tweaks away from being the next great deck-building game, and the creator has already announced that he has balance update in progress to make the early approach less punishing. But for now, every failed attempt ends with a reminder that “The House Always Wins” (ha ha hey) seems a little too correct.