I feel like Balatro will be seen as a blessing and a curse in the coming years.  Just as we see bountiful amounts of “Soulslike” games birthed from Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and the many roguelike card-builders spawned from titles like Slay the Spire, we have already begun to experience the increased traffic of “Standard deck of cards game with many twists in to make it something completely different” games hitting the market.  Some will be good.  Some will be bad.

Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers takes a lot of what makes Balatro such a tantalizing piece of gaming and combines the storytelling of Dungeons & Dragons with the money-sucking casino game of Blackjack.  You walk into a seedy tavern armed with a deck of cards and your wits. Your task of discovering who runs the seedy and shady casino is masked by a litany of patrons to combat and several floors to traverse.  What starts as a small deck of numbers and face cards soon evolves into a cavalcade of boosts and rule changers as you dip and dive through the house-of-mirrors’ worth of encounters.  But if you bust your HP: you’re out.  And back to the bartender with you.

Your starting deck informs a lot as to how you start your run, as each suit provides a different buff when you hit a blackjack: hearts heal, diamonds cash out, clubs shield, and spades hit harder.  Whether you want to play a more defensive and reactive build or a more forward, hard hitting style, the options are there for you.  You start with 100HP and a couple chips in your pocket, used primarily for acquiring new cards, playing minigames, or spending on certain abilities.  After a friendly spar with the Bartender, you’re shown after each victory you’re awarded a choice of one of four cards, the fourth requiring you to pay chips to see.  This is the start of where you can acquire one of the over 300 cards to unlock throughout the game.

Understanding the range of cause and effect on these cards is an immense undertaking. If you can think of something whimsical and ridiculous to do with a blackjack hand, there’s a good chance the card exists.  Most cards will be activated in different set situations, aptly colored in red and politely given a definition at each notice, but almost always requiring a commonly used D&D term: Advantage.  Advantage is a finite resource that allows you to do a multitude of things to gain an edge on your opponent, such as playing cards from your ability-made hand or activating secondary buffs and debuffs on your cards.  Advantage is gathered through one of three random passive buffs of your choosing provided at the start of your run, and it would be wise to work your deck into generating as much Advantage as possible, because you’re going to need it.

When engaged in combat, your goal is to hit 21 for a blackjack or get as close as you can, and it’s the same for your opponent.  You will Hit to add more cards and Stand to end your turn, with you and your opponent taking turns adding cards to your hand until both have stood or busted by going over 21.  Whoever has the highest number at the end of the hand will take the difference between the two hands and deliver that amount in damage: rinse and repeat until you have a winner.  Hitting a blackjack will not only provide the most damage, but also activate the suits on the cards used in your hand allowing for any of the four buffs to proc, giving you life, shields, cash, or damage.  If you’ve ever played blackjack before you know that it’s like that one Fort Manor song, but instead it’s 80% luck, 10% skill, 10% concentrated power of will.  D&DG does little to this formula because you will live and die, a lot, on your ability to hit 21.  It’s how you heal, how you crush opponents, how you mitigate damage, and how you cash out for better things.

There are several stages on each floor for you to build your deck out with battles, but there are also optional events that can happen in place of a good ol’ fashioned throwdown.  Pay some chips to take a nap and restore some HP, play roulette to change the number value of cards in your deck, rob a sleeping man, pay taxes, channel your inner Shawshank Redemption, the list goes on.  Each game has the ability to provide you with extra cards or set you up for success for your next fight, but some can also financially ruin you or dwindle your HP or burn cards in your deck, the only way to know is to go into the event and coin flip some trial and error: a recurring theme within this casino.

While your HP is higher than almost any opponent you face, your HP does not refill after a fight. You will have to pick the right events or work your deck to gain more HP while you fight or use cards that provide shields to mitigate damage as it happens.  But get ready to be peppered with some tailor-made shenanigans when you see what the CPU can accomplish most of the time, because your opponents hit 21 a lot.  There’s no shame in losing a hand, so smart play is rewarded with small losses instead of big chunks if you bust.  You will have to play steady and not be reckless or the game will punish you for it.

Each of the 60 characters come with specific decks they’ll use to put you in the dirt, but the later game foes have truly evil setups that are flat not fun to fight.  Each enemy will have a glaring weakness within their deck for you to find, which can be a fun test to see how you can adapt to what’s in front of you, but certain decks require specific cards to exploit that weakness, and if you don’t have that card there’s a very very low percentage chance you’re going to win.

To go full circle, Balatro avoids the problem of “randomized instant death” by giving you two opportunities, the Small and Big Blind rounds, to cycle the shop and give yourself a fighting chance to overcome the obstacle in front of you.  D&DG does provide two choices per floor, minus boss encounters, but no way to see what is ahead. If both the choices are two enemies you don’t have the cards to fight against, you lose and there’s no going back.  Nothing is more debilitating for a game than to provide the enjoyment of the fruits of your labor only to lose to something you can’t control.

And this feeling will follow you throughout your playthroughs.  There are plenty of times where I misplayed a hand and put myself in a scenario to lose, or I didn’t clock my Advantage correctly and didn’t take the shot when I should have, but it’s mirrored by your opponent tossing out 21s like they’re fun coupons or running into a foe whose deck is so blatantly powerful it’s clear you’re headed for a restart because you didn’t grab that one card 3 floors and 15 fights ago.  D&DG revels in the fact that you will go on losing streaks so you can unlock more of what is to offer, but where games like Dark Souls or Lies of P counterbalance these losses with taking what you’ve learned and using it for the next fight, you’ll leave most losses just hoping the next time they don’t get the House Luck as much as they did this time.

Which is a real shame, because the labor of love to provide a near infinite amount of deck combinations, instilled humor of the characters and situations the D&D style setting guides you through, and the pure card-comboing shenanigans that you can pump out within a run is fascinating and can be really fun when it clicks.  But there is, and I shouldn’t really be surprised in this, a frustrating amount of luck involved with having a good time, and no game’s final outcome should have you winning but still feeling like a loser.

Aw, dang it.

4/10