Luck Be a Landlord is a game that takes the roguelike deckbuilder genre and strips it down to a very barebones form, removing a lot of the key elements that were established by Slay the Spire. There is no combat, therefore no decisions to take in combat, no exploration and no HP management. The "cards" here are rather slot machine symbols, and you never decide when you get to play them as they are randomly chosen and placed with luck.
So what's the gameplay left here? Symbol picking. Your goal is to pay rent, in which you do by gaining coins on the 20 square slot machine. You start with 5 symbols, and after every spin you get a choice from 3 symbols to add to your "deck". The name of the game is synergy as you will want to go well with your other symbols. Lots of them work with being next to another on adjacent squares which is something you have to rely on luck for, but with a little odds calculation you can have an idea how soon it will happen. After a few spins your rent is due, and it's game over if you don't have the money... and if you survive well you get to pick a "relic" which has random effects on a subset of symbols. And the loop goes on for spinning, picking symbols and paying rent. The game is won when you have done that 12 times.
Winning a game adds a new floor which just adds some sort of penalty (like higher rent or less removal tokens) upping the challenge a little bit. After Floor 7 you get essences unlocked which are like chaotic relics giving you a little bit more options and tools to tackle on the harder challenges. I've completed the 9th floor and this is where I stopped, kinda saw all the game has to give. The game feels a little bit hard on the first few runs, but eventually you get to know the symbols and all the synergies, and after that it's just repeating the same strategies over again and hope that they land.
It's nice that this isn't just another Slay the Spire clone (as they are so many of those) and the game does really try to go into a different direction, but some of the elements it strips were what made the genre great in the first place. Perhaps a lack of content too? There's not much satisfaction after winning a few runs with just essences unlocks (and eventually the landlord to "kill"), does leave me wondering what's the incentive of keeping playing when you've already mastered the basics. Then again it's a pretty cheap so perhaps my 8 hours of playtime were worth the price. Overall an interesting twist on the genre (which I would argue at this point it's no longer part of), but lacks some complexity to play this game for a long period of time. You are better off with many other Roguelike Deckbuilders if you really want a more complete experience.
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Its somewhat of a hidden blessing that its relatively easy to "beat" this roguelite, because this might just be more addictive than an actual slot machine during the first hours of gameplay
Its fun game but it can be beaten in an hour and then its just achievement hunting - nothing wrong with that but the amount of achievements and grind required to get some of them is so absurd that it spoils the fun for me - who in its right mind will motivate himself to beat the game 777 times?