After my recent mini exploration of card games this dropped at a convenient time, while my deck building brain is still firing. Luck be a Landlord mixes a card game with a slot machine to surprisingly good effect.
The set up is you need to pay the rent and it keeps going up and up. A depressingly familiar scenario. What better way to do it than gambling. Hey, it’s about as legit as the stock market. Every X number of spins you’ve gotta pay up or it’s game over. Up to a goal of about a dozen payments. There are 20 levels that get incrementally harder and introduce new elements, of which I’m nearly halfway through.
Before every spin you select a card. Most commonly that card will add a symbol to the machine and if it appears in the results of the next spin it scores whatever cash is on the card. Often there is an extra effect. Such as certain symbols next to each other multiplying cash. Or a symbol destroying an adjacent one for extra cash. There’s a wide variety of synergies to exploit.
Other cards (items) can create a permanent new rule for the game or affect specific symbols, which can be toggled on and off as required. A good example being items that increase the chance of finding rare cards. At times rare cards are essential to set up the highest cash scoring chains. However, a lot common and uncommon cards are needed that feed into those chains, so being able to temporarily turn off the increased number of rares helps get what is needed.
As with most deck building games it’s about card management. Fine tuning it into a maximised system. Twenty random symbols appear from each spin of the machine. If there are forty symbols in the inventory that’s gonna add a lot more randomness to the outcome. Finding twenty perfectly balanced symbols through adding, removing, and skipping, is the goal. In order to reap all that cash.
Sometimes the RNG will cut a game short. With so many cards and items available it’s probably to be expected, and it can be irritating if I’ve banked on finding a ‘hooligan’ and it just won’t show up. Thankfully I found it wasn’t too often and once I spent a bit of time experimenting it is possible to have a significant effect on the chances of winning. At times it almost feels easy. As when I got deep into the flower, bee, water, and sun combos. Spinning past a billion bucks. Either way, this is in part a gambler’s game so leave the rage-quit at the door and enjoy frivolously trying to make it all work out.
To drive completionists mad there are 186 achievements. And lots of luck in getting them. Play long enough and erratically enough and maybe it will happen. Eventually.
Luck be a Landlord may not look like much. Low pixel count graphics and simple bright colours. Regardless, it gets the job done and is suitably addictive given the subject. It also scales nicely to a windowed game for a bit of multi-tasking. I like playing this alongside a twitch stream. Worth a gamble.
Available from Steam and Itch.
mishmash 