Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers review: A whimsical yet fun roguelike that pushes Blackjack to the limit

Hm. Hmmm. Right. So, what do we have here? There’s my Blood Donor card, which lowers the value of the hearts I play but also heals me. Which is fine, really. A lower score means I can squeeze in another card for more healing. If I can draw my Tarot card, I’ll deal damage with every heal, and I’ve already drawn two scratch cards for even more quick damage. Now, if I can just draw a Jack, I can bring in the King of Space and Time for a brutal finisher. That’ll transfer everything from my side to my opponent’s, forcing a bust for a nice final bit of pain and…

Oh, you thought we were playing Blackjack? At one point, I did. That was a much simpler time. Before the NFT monkey. Before the glitch cards. Before the flipping Charizard. Whatever other issues I might have with it, I can’t praise the shuffling-slappy strategy of Dungeons And Degenerate Gamblers enough for taking Blackjack—a game that’s only mildly interesting if you happen to have your favorite hand wagered on it—and making it interesting without changing the fundamentals any more than is recognizable. It changes almost everything after that, mind you. But even when you’re scorching a necromancer’s library card with your Gerald From Riviera, the everyday appeal of risking everything on one card for a slightly better outcome remains strong. I think I might actually appreciate Blackjack more now, to be honest. D&DG makes you realize just how solid those fundamentals really are. They stay in shape even after being creatively trolled and grilled from all sides, like the canvas in Lawler vs. Kaufman.

It’s probably fairer to say that it’s D&DG’s twist on those basic principles that does the heavy lifting. Like traditional Blackjack, the goal is to get as close to 21 as possible without going over. You draw a card, then either stand at your current score or get another. You’re pitted against a group of opponents. One of them might be a bouncer. The other might be a talking rat. Whoever gets closest to 21 wins the round. D&DG’s first twist is that losses don’t hurt your chips—they hurt your health. If you stand at 17 and the rat scores 19, you lose two health. But if the rat busts—again, by drawing over the 21 limit—you deal damage equal to your entire score.

But you may want to continue at this point even after you’ve seen your opponent bust, and so the health system cleverly encourages risk even beyond the point of a traditional Blackjack win. The dumb rat busts when you’re on 16, but they still have 17 health left, so you may want to risk another draw to finish them off before the next round starts, and it may not go so smoothly. With this, D&DG emphasizes the importance of not just winning, but winning Good.

You only have 100 health total, and your opponents often have 30-50, so busts can be devastating for either side. To help you out, each opponent displays the number they’ll be standing on so you can plan around it. If either side hits the magic 21, their score gains bonus effects based on the suits it’s made up of. Hitting 21 with 10 clubs and 11 hearts will deal double damage from clubs and also restore 11 health from hearts. Spades generate shield, which is lost before you lose health when you take damage, and diamonds generate chips.

This also applies to your opponent. And to top it all off, there’s a system called advantage, which are essentially cheeky cheeky cheat points. At the start of each run, you fight a quick tutorial match, after which you choose one of two advantage chips with different rules. One can generate an advantage point every time you win a round, while the other gives you one every time you get a score of 17 or higher. Advantage is stored for the duration of the match, and you can spend it at any time to exploit certain cards for special effects. Often these cards are “handy,” meaning that they go into your hand rather than on the table when you draw them. Many others are base-value cards that either change their effect or trigger an additional effect when exploited.

Despite being relegated to a sort of additional scoring system, chips are still incredibly useful. After each opponent, you are given a choice of four cards to pick one from. Only three are visible, and you have to pay 21 chips to view and select the fourth. You can spend them on a night in a fancy hotel room, to restore some health. You can pay a counterfeiter to change the value of your cards, and sometimes you are given the chance to simply buy more cards.

And these, in a very broad sense, are the brakes. What actually makes the game, Are The Breaks: The various keywords and other strange effects you collect and strategize with, creating heart-pounding combos that will stand up to later opponents. Because you better trust that they’ll break things too, and in thematic ways, no less. The Necromancer can hit you with multiple Gravecards, which can be exploited to lower their score, throwing your plans into disarray. A later opponent might have a deck built specifically to pile extra score on your side after you’ve already stood, so you’ll need plenty of counters.

This reliance on themes—and what will almost certainly be placed opponents playing rather than outright randomness (or at least decks built to make certain plays perfectly normal)—is a big part of how the game stays interesting, and often quite fun. But it’s also where my problems start to crop up. Take the second phase boss, for example. He likes to play a “21 of clubs,” which is an instant win, or at least a draw. There’s an easy counter here. All you need to do is find one of the few cards that caps his 20, and he’ll still bust. I’ve beaten him without this card, and there are other ways around it. But I think this is emblematic of a certain level of railroading, or at least regular deck checks that I’d usually know I was prepared for much sooner. It gives you milestones to aim for, which keeps things dramatic, but it also meant that I could sometimes see a loss coming very early on. Sometimes I even knew it after the first few games.

So you effectively end up with this sense of limitation and fate hanging over every game from the start. So I win matches and play through events, hoping against hope that I’ll get lucky with the right cards. Because there’s a point in the run—not too far off, either—where playing the basics just won’t work anymore. You need certain cards, or at least it felt that way. Full disclosure: I’m a math geek, so it’s entirely possible that there are some deep-seated safety mechanisms in place to ensure that you’re guaranteed to have great decks every run. Either way, I rarely find myself there, and what initially felt like freedom didn’t take long to shed its Scooby Doo mask and reveal itself as a kind of daunting limitation.

And yet I still find myself working on D&DG. After about eight hours, my collection tells me I’ve barely seen half of the cards, and discovering a new card is more often than not a genuine joy. I also have plenty of opponents to play against, and starter decks and modifiers to play with. I won’t say that D&DG makes losing fun. Playing those opening phases repeatedly quickly loses much of its appeal after a chance to find a deadly combo early. But it does make losing bearable, and winning feels great and gets better the more thoroughly you embarrass your opponent. Then consider the real promise of the game, the underlying fantasy. How thoroughly can you make this talking rat regret his life choices? That’s still a great sell.

This review is based on a review of the game, written by the developer.