Hmm. Hmmm. Okay. So what do we have here? I have the Blood Donor card, which reduces the value of the hearts I play, but also heals me. That's actually good. The reduced score means I can squeeze in another card for more healing. If I can draw my Tarot card, I'll deal damage with each heal, and I've already drawn two scratch cards for even faster damage. Now, if I can just draw a Jack, I can put down the King of Space and Time for a brutal finisher. This will transfer everything from my side to my opponent's side, forcing a bust for a nice final bit of pain and…
Oh, you thought we were playing Blackjack? I did too at one point. That was a much simpler time. Before the NFT monkey. Before the broken cards. Before the stupid Charizard. Whatever my other issues with it, I can’t praise Dungeons And Degenerate Gamblers enough for taking Blackjack — a game that’s even remotely interesting if you’ve ever bet on your favorite leg — and making it fascinating without changing the fundamentals beyond the point of recognizability. In my mind, it changes pretty much everything beyond that point. But even when you’re burning a necromancer’s library card with your Gerald From the Riviera, the casual pull of risking everything on a single card remains strong for a slightly better outcome. Honestly, I might appreciate Blackjack more now. D&DG, despite being creatively trolled and hit from all sides, makes you realize how solid those fundamentals actually are, like the canvas in Lawler and Kaufman.
But it’s probably fairer to say that the real challenge is D&DG’s twist on these basics. As in traditional Blackjack, the goal is to get as close to 21 as possible and not go over it. You grab a card, then you can stand at your current score or get another one. You face a group of opponents. One might be a bouncer. The other might be a talking mouse. The closest to 21 wins the round. The first change from D&DG is that losses don’t hurt your chips—they hurt your health. If you stay at 17 and the mouse scores 19, you lose two lives. But if the mouse goes bust again by going over 21, you deal damage equal to your entire score.
But even after seeing your opponent go bust, you may want to continue at this point, and so the health system cleverly encourages risk even beyond a traditional Blackjack victory. While you’re sitting on 16, the silly mouse is bust, but they have 17 health left, so maybe you’ll want to try another draw to finish them off before the next round starts, and maybe that won’t go so smoothly. However, D&DG emphasizes the importance of winning, not just winning Alright.
You only have 100 health in total, and your opponents usually have 30 to 50, so explosions can be devastating for both sides. To help you out, each opponent shows the number they will stop at, allowing you to plan accordingly. If either side reaches the magic 21, their score gains bonus effects based on the teams that created them. If you reach 21 with 10 sticks and 11 hearts, you deal double damage from sticks and also heal 11 health from hearts. Spades generate shields that disappear before health when you take damage, and diamonds generate chips.
All of this also applies to your opponent. On top of that, there's a system called advantage, which is basically just cheeky cheat points. At the start of each round, you'll play a quick tutorial match, and then choose one of two advantage tokens with different rules. One can generate an advantage point every time you win a round, while the other gives you an advantage point every time you stand at 17 or higher. Advantage accumulates throughout the match, and you can spend it at any time to use specific cards for special effects. Typically, these cards are 'in your hand', meaning they go into your hand rather than on the table when you draw them. Many others are cards with a base value that changes their effect when used, or creates an additional effect.
Despite being reduced to a sort of utility point system, chips are still incredibly useful. After each opponent, you’ll choose one of four cards to choose from. Only three are visible, and you’ll have to pay 21 chips to view and select a fourth. You can spend these on a night in a fancy hotel room and a little health boost. You can pay a counterfeiter to change the value of your cards, and sometimes you’ll even get the chance to buy more cards outright.
And these are, in a very general sense, the brakes. But what really makes the game is, has Breaks: The various keywords and other strange effects you’ll accumulate and strategize about create scorching combos that will hold their own against later opponents. Because you have to believe they’ll break things too, and in thematic ways, no less. The Necromancer can throw multiple Grave Cards at you, which can be used to drain their score and disrupt your plans. A later opponent may have a deck specifically built to pile extra points on your side after you’re already standing, so you’ll need some decent counters.
This reliance on themes and almost certainly added opponent play rather than true randomness (or at least decks built to make certain games very common) is a big part of what keeps the game interesting and often quite funny. But this is where my problems start to arise. Take the second stage boss, for example. He often likes to play '21 of clubs', which is an instant win or at least a draw. There's an easy counterplay here. You just need to find one of the few cards that set his limit to 20 and he'll keep popping. I've beaten him without this card, and there are other ways around it. But I think it's symbolic of going off the rails at a certain level, or at least regular deck checks where I'll usually know if I'm ready much earlier. It gives you milestones to aim for, keeps things dramatic, but it also meant that I started to see a loss very early on. Hell, sometimes I'd know after the first few matches.
So effectively you get this sense of limitation and being at the mercy of fate, hanging over you from the start of each game. So I win matches and play events, hoping I get lucky with the right cards. Because there comes a point in the game—not too far away—where playing the basics won’t cut it. You’ll need certain cards, or at least that’s what I felt. Full disclosure: I’m a math idiot, so it’s entirely possible that there are some incredibly sneaky security measures that ensure guaranteed killer decks in every game. Either way, I rarely stumble upon them, and what initially felt like freedom doesn’t last long, as Scooby-Doo drops his mask and reveals itself to be a kind of demoralizing restriction.
And yet, I'll continue to make progress in D&DG. After about eight hours, my collection tells me I haven't even seen half the cards, and discovering a new card is often a real treat. Plus, there are plenty of opponents to face and starter decks and modifiers to play. I won't say that D&DG makes losing fun. Playing those opening stages over and over again loses a lot of its appeal, beyond the chance of landing a deadly combo early on. But it makes losing tolerable, and winning feels great, and the more you embarrass your opponent, the better. Then consider the game's real promise, its underlying fantasy. How much can you make this talking mouse regret his life choices? That's still a great sell.
This review is based on the game review structure provided by the developer.