i like roguelikes and not card games

[TEITANBLOOD]

i like the variety / randomness and those epic items and guns (in other roguelikes) and other ways of dispatching the competition. I do like Slay The Spire and Ring Of Pain and i was wondering if this game is worth it.
Again i am not a card game player. if i play card games i play them as primarily roguelikes and maybe nothing else.

From what i can see there is a ton of joker cards here. Where are the uniques and legendaries and such... I guess what i am asking is will i be able to enjoy this as a roguelike enthusiast?

[snakeskip]

I'd say It's a deckbuilder rather than a roguelike in the classic sense. Though nowadays people call every other game a roguelike. Probably because most players have never played Rogue or any classic roguelike.

There are no characters, monsters, weapons, armor, magic or dungeons. No attacks, defences, health. There's no map or any navigation or exploration. Even permadeath is arguable since there's no character who could die.

You just play poker hands trying to beat score targets which ramp up as you progress. In the end you either fail to reach a target and lose or succeed to reach them all and win. Between rounds you can buy more cards.

That being said, if you like Slay the Spire (which is a deckbuilder with some roguelike elements) then you might enjoy Balatro as well. Balatro just doesn't have many roguelike elements. If any at all.

[Winter Wolf]

What snakeskip said plus, there is a roguelike mentality to the learning curve. What I mean is the "the losing is fun" philosophy applies here And while there is no "permadeath" there is a game over screen. The goal of reaching minimum antes is not always straightforward. There are a bunch of different starting decks and there are a number of different difficulties with increasing cumulative issues to overcome.

The way you win is by beating a minimum ante of chips (A threshold if you will), Each hand has a base value of +chips and +mults(multiples). Chips add up and then are multiplied by the +mults.

There is money in the game which is used to buy things in the stores. There are a few things in the game other than the store that care about your money amount. After winning the round you will gain interest equal to $1 per $5 upto a cap of +$5. You will also gain money based on how many hands you have left, in some cases you may also gain $ for other things, and blinds will give you a set amount as a bonus.

Jokers modify what you can do in the game. Some of them help you get $$ which is used in shops to buy jokers, packs, vouchers and cards. Cards you can buy in the shop can be consumable or can add to the deck. Other jokers give you consumables under certain conditions, and others give you additions to chips and or mults. And in addition some give a xMult (multiplies the multiples by a number). These last 3 are very important for increasing the played hand score to reach the minimum ante.

The consumables are equivalent to potions/scrolls in other roguelikes. They are valuable in that they can impact your hands, or jokers, or money total, or deck or all the above. There are Tarot cards (typically changes cards in your deck, or gives $$), Planet cards (increase values of specific poker hands), Spectral cards (These tend to be very powerful but have strong drawbacks. And these are the ONLY way to get the Legendary jokers).

Vouchers can change the rules of the game giving you more playable hands, higher hand size, change prices in the store, change how interest works.

So yeah it isn't a dungeon crawler/hacknslash adventure. There is no story. The bosses are abstractions of added difficulty either by raising the minimum ante or giving conditions that debuff your jokers and or deck cards.

In the end it is neither a roguelike (as in Rogue) nor a Deck builder (such as Slay) nor Solitaire (though it has a strong similarity to it) but a weird amalgam of all the above with its own unique spin.

Be warned it can be math intensive.

[Game Judge James]

Originally posted by snakeskip:

I'd say It's a deckbuilder rather than a roguelike in the classic sense. Though nowadays people call every other game a roguelike. Probably because most players have never played Rogue or any classic roguelike.

There are no characters, monsters, weapons, armor, magic or dungeons. No attacks, defences, health. There's no map or any navigation or exploration. Even permadeath is arguable since there's no character who could die.

You just play poker hands trying to beat score targets which ramp up as you progress. In the end you either fail to reach a target and lose or succeed to reach them all and win. Between rounds you can buy more cards.

That being said, if you like Slay the Spire (which is a deckbuilder with some roguelike elements) then you might enjoy Balatro as well. Balatro just doesn't have many roguelike elements. If any at all.

There ARE a few roguelike mechanics at play under the hood here, though. Randomized jokers/tarots/spectral/seal, etc. on cards and what appears in shops.....the random nature of each run individually (seed) and the random tags applied in each round, you not knowing what types of modifiers are going to pop up on your run, and the biggest one...the randomized Boss Blinds every game, especially the final Boss Blind. (Which I'm honestly hoping for more of...think 10 instead of 5).....

[Meneluma]

If you are more of a fan of rouguelikes than card games, you may come to realize that the game is extremely shallow when it comes to the deckbuilding, and even the core aspect of it being the Jokers, has an overwhelming number of them being just powercreep versions of each other as opposed to work in interesting ways.

Most the Jokers boil down to either +Chips, +Mult *Mult, while the cards can only have around 10 different added effects total, of which most don't stack, and the ones that do appear so rarely.

It has an addictive quality for about 25 hours, but then once you realize how shallow it is, the illusion breaks

[Godhand]

Originally posted by snakeskip:

I'd say It's a deckbuilder rather than a roguelike in the classic sense. Though nowadays people call every other game a roguelike. Probably because most players have never played Rogue or any classic roguelike.

There are no characters, monsters, weapons, armor, magic or dungeons. No attacks, defences, health. There's no map or any navigation or exploration. Even permadeath is arguable since there's no character who could die.

You just play poker hands trying to beat score targets which ramp up as you progress. In the end you either fail to reach a target and lose or succeed to reach them all and win. Between rounds you can buy more cards.

That being said, if you like Slay the Spire (which is a deckbuilder with some roguelike elements) then you might enjoy Balatro as well. Balatro just doesn't have many roguelike elements. If any at all.

except that you don't build a deck in this game. why would anyone call this a deck builder. because you can manipulate/add cards? Any other deck builder requires you do create your deck and then start playing. Not start playing and changing your deck in the progress of it. Might be a deck building game but I wouldn't primarily call it that.

Originally posted by TEITANBLOOD:

i like the variety / randomness and those epic items and guns (in other roguelikes) and other ways of dispatching the competition. I do like Slay The Spire and Ring Of Pain and i was wondering if this game is worth it.
Again i am not a card game player. if i play card games i play them as primarily roguelikes and maybe nothing else.

From what i can see there is a ton of joker cards here. Where are the uniques and legendaries and such... I guess what i am asking is will i be able to enjoy this as a roguelike enthusiast?

I was absolutely tired of card games, but this one got me hooked and reeled me in.

[Goblin]

Originally posted by Godhand:

except that you don't build a deck in this game. why would anyone call this a deck builder. because you can manipulate/add cards? Any other deck builder requires you do create your deck and then start playing. Not start playing and changing your deck in the progress of it. Might be a deck building game but I wouldn't primarily call it that.

You already got schooled on this terrible take once before, why would you repeat it?
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2379780/discussions/0/4356743780115095537/#c4356743780115789681

[snakeskip]

Originally posted by Godhand:

Any other deck builder requires you do create your deck and then start playing. Not start playing and changing your deck in the progress of it.

How come?

In quite many deck builders you start with some minimal deck and build it as you go. AFAIK Dominion was the game which made deck builders popular. In it all players start with the same set of cards. In Slay the Spire you start with a preset minimal deck as well.

[swolblu]

I would call it a modified version of poker. There are roguelike elements, but it is still mainly just poker at its core - and comes with the same highs and lows. Someone else described the game as addictive but shallow and I think that is a good summary of it.

If you like poker, you'll probably like it. But otherwise I would avoid.