[DrFlipper]

What is the appeal of this game? (Beyond exploiting addictive personalities with a very thinly-veiled gambling simulator that is rightly being banned.)

It looks so boring. I can't tell if the reviewers proclaiming this as an "innovation" in the "roguelike" (?) genre are trolling or not. It's an ugly slot machine game where you click a buttonn to spin. This would have been uninspired trash in 1993. What am I missing?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1404850/Luck_be_a_Landlor...

[sirbranedamuj]

As someone with several dozen hours in it, I think of it as the purest distillation of the "deck builder" game genre. In a deck builder, you often shuffle your deck and the order in which you draw the cards influences the stuff you're able to do on each of your turns. This works the same way. You slowly build up a set of symbols which can appear in some random order. The first 20 of them show up on the slot board and their adjacency to other symbols causes various effects to happen. You're trying to make the 20 symbols that appear on each spin be as profitable as possible so you can keep up with the escalating rent payments.

I adore this game and I tell everyone I can about it.

[tetha]

The game is very much a deckbuilder like dominion or slay the spire, and the slot machine is just fluff, except maybe adding a two dimensional aspect to it.

The main appeal is: You accumulate symbols into your deck, and the slotmachine arranges a random selection of your symbols up to 20ish (don't recall 100%) onto a 4x5 grid. Afterwards, symbols interact with symbols, combos happen and it just becomes funny to make a couple hundred thousand gold in a single spin. This is very similar to the fun of having an engine go off in dominion.

And then that appeal changes as you realize that there is very little luck necessary in the game. If you try hard, you can get win streaks at highest ascension levels. If you learn the different combos beyond the obvious ones, the weird interactions you can have with items and essences and so on.

It takes some 3-4 runs to appreciate the depth the game actually has. And then the fun begins.

[bakies]

You're missing the rougelike part. This game is more about deck building and rougelike elements than it is about gambling. The button to spin is indeed the least interesting part of the game.

[mcpackieh]

'Roguelike' has lost all meaning. Rogue never had any "deck building". Roguelike is not meant to mean any game that uses RNG.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Agreed. A roguelike must have:

Random procedural map generation.

Turn-based gameplay.

Items which start unidentified, but can still be used (with some risk of being cursed).

Ability to save and exit at any time to resume later, but no ability to save without exiting. Character death deletes the save file and requires starting from the beginning.

Combat-based gameplay, with monsters becoming more difficult as the player progresses through the map levels.

Character can level up by gaining experience, encouraging them to stay at a given level to gain power.

Food must be consumed to avoid dying of starvation. Food is not particularly common, forcing the player to keep progressing to future levels to avoid starvation.

If it's missing one or more of those elements it's a roguelite at most. It's not just random maps, or "permadeath", or item identification, or the tension between starvation and experience, it's the combination of all those elements.

[bakies]

By your definition "roguelike" feels exteremely narrow, maybe this is why the terms have become so conflated. When I think of rogue-like or lite games (since let's continue to conflate the terms), which are my most played on Steam, I think Spelunky, Risk of Rain, Slay the Spire, Isaac, Noita, FTL, Unrailed!, Spider Heck, maybe even PlateUp!, and of course Luck be a Landlord. It's a popular genre and none fit half your description. Sure they're all roguelite, some only having one or two of your points, but "roguelike" seems useless by your definition. It would only fit Rogue itself and pretty direct clones it seems. I haven't played Rogue....

[mrguyorama]

> Roguelike is not meant to mean any game that uses RNG.

The ORIGINAL ROGUE had random elements, what are you on?

[mcpackieh]

Read what I said; I didn't say that Rogue had no RNG. I said that roguelike is not meant to mean any game that uses RNG. RNG is common is many kinds of games, we don't call a game a roguelike just because it has RNG. Video poker has RNG. We don't call videopoker a roguelike.

Doom had monsters. We don't say that any game with monsters is a Doom clone. Games are only Doom clones if they have more in common with Doom than merely having monsters.

Roguelikes are dungeon crawlers with random procedurally generated levels, played on a grid with discrete turns and permadeath. The more of these characteristics a game has, the more roguelike it is. There is some flexibility in the meaning of roguelike, room to experiment with the format for instance by using a hex grid instead of square, by loosening the turn-based constraint or even using non-euclidean geometry. But merely having RNG does not make a game roguelike. If having an RNG is what it means to be a roguelike, that makes any game played with dice or a shuffled deck of cards into a roguelike. Is Scrabble a roguelike because you draw random letter tiles and play it on a grid? That's obviously not what roguelike means.

[Kerb_]

Square is not meant to mean any 4 sided polygon.

Squares are 4 sided polygons, but rectangles, diamonds, and rhombuses are not squares, despite being a 4 sided polygon

[waffleiron]

I’ve played the game, its indeed a roguelike deckbuilder. Instead of drawing a hand of cards the same thing is simulated as a slot machine spin. Mechanically the game isn’t much different, aesthetically it is.

There is a significant level of strategy involved and a low level of luck to win.

[bubblematrix]

Agreed, it literally looks like a slot machine app...

[LMHallucination]

You pick symbols to add to the wheel that have complex rules for what they reward. To oversimplify, it's slay the spire for people who like the deck-building part but find the battles tedious.