Publisher: Yogscast Games
Developer: Purple Moss Collectors
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: Not Rated
I’m playing Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers without having also played Balatro, which is probably silly of me. By all accounts, Balatro is one of the year’s best games, a crazy take on poker that’s utterly addictive. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is a crazy take on blackjack, which…while obviously not the same thing, is close enough that I could imagine the games inhabit a similar space, at the very least.
So I can’t even try to compare the two games. But I can say that based on my time with Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, I should probably dig into my ever-expanding backlog and actually play Balatro.
In some ways, that’s probably a backhanded compliment: I’m basically saying that Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers left me wanting to play something with similar ideas but fleshed out more.
While that’s true – Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers can be a little incomprehensible at times, to its detriment – I prefer to look at it in a more positive light. I felt like it was a game I only partially understood, with its rules constantly changing around you, but at the same time, that’s the fun of it, too. It may start off with a quick, relatively straightforward introductory game to give you a rough idea of what’s in store for you, it’s not long before you discover that this version of blackjack is nothing like anything you’ve ever played before.
For one thing, the deck is only sort of like one you’d see in a real game of blackjack. You start off with a standard set of cards, but in short order you start getting all kinds of randomness mixed in: Jokers, transit passes, tarot cards, Get Out of Jail Free cards, and all kinds of others besides that. The game doesn’t always explain what these cards do, so you’re left to figure things out as you go along and then remember it all as it comes up again.
On top of that, when you lose a hand you don’t just lose chips, you also lose some of your health. This is where the “Dungeons” part of the title comes from: you start off with 100 health points, and every hand you lose can whittle away at those as you make your way through an increasingly bizarre dungeon. On one level, you’ll meet bards and squires, on another you’ll face off with witches and giant rats. Further, each of them have their own playstyles you need to adapt to: some are aggressive and will draw new cards even when they’re at 16 or 17, while others will be more conservative and stick at 13. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers may look like a card game, but it’s a card game built around the bones of a roguelike dungeon-crawler.
And it inhabits those bones well. Again, I don’t know how it compares to Balatro (though I should make sure to remedy that soon), but I do know how much I enjoyed playing Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers – and that, by itself, is enough to make me thing it’s worth recommending.
Yogscast Games provided us with a Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers PC code for review purposes.
