Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is the Betamax of casino roguelikes

As 2024 rolled in, we were expecting two exciting games in the casino roguelike genre to be published: Balatro and Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers. It was a great year to be a gamer.

First came out Balatro in February and as they say, rest is history. It took the world by storm and was beloved by everyone and their dog. Six months later, Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers came out but didn’t quite reach the hype that Balatro did. I think that’s a shame.

Balatro is roguelike deckbuilder that’s loosely based on poker but not really. You start the game with a regular 52 card French suit deck and need to play poker hands to gain points to beat the level before you run out of hands to play.

Between rounds, you can buy cards to improve your deck: you can add seals and enhancements to your cards to get more points or coins from them; you can buy Joker cards that add extra effects; you can buy tarot cards that give one off abilities; you can buy planet cards to improve your base points for different poker hands.

The goal is to build an engine that increases your points on an exponential scale to beat the ever-growing requirements.

DDG is a roguelike deckbuilder that’s loosely based on blackjack but not really. It’s a game where you fight an opponent by dealing damage to them based on your blackjack hands. Regular rules of blackjack apply: you play one card at a time to your side of the table and if you go over 21, you go bust. If you stand before or at 21, your score and your opponent’s score are subtracted from each other and the extra goes through as damage. If you get exactly 21, you gain extra bonuses like heal, shields and so on based on which suits you played.

After fights, you can add new cards to your deck to build combos, deal more damage, put up shields and more.

They have so many commonalities: they both start from a casino card game, adds wonky cards with nerdy pop culture references that don’t quite fit into a poker or blackjack deck and eventually make the game about something very different.

I think DDG is the better game. The cards you get to add to your deck are more creative. You can add old baseball cards, Yugioh cards, Pokemon cards, Magic the Gathering cards, Slay the Spire cards, birthday cards, credit cards, Playstation memory cards, scratch cards and much much more into your deck. That’s what really charmed me when I first learned about the game.

It takes the concept of “card” and jams in every imaginable card from outside the world of regular playing cards in a really fun way. There’s even Jimbo from Balatro in it. The most ambitious anime crossover of 2024?

One thing Balatro does better and why I believe it succeeded better is the juice. It’s in the category of addictive “number goes up” games and the developer did a wonderful job making that dopamine hit feel good.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Balatro. I’ve played almost 100 hours of it and have to ratio my gaming sessions to only long weekends and holidays because it’s that addictive. But I like DDG more and before either game came out, I really hoped it would have been the “winner” of the two.

Just like VHS beat Betamax in the videotape wars, Balatro became the more popular game despite in my opinion not being the better game. The good thing is that unlike with the videotape wars, the losing side doesn’t disappear so we get to play both of these great games for years to come.

If you have played neither, I can highly recommend both. If you’ve only played one, go check the other one out as well.