Luck Be A Landlord is about learning a stranger's mental map of the universe
Luck Be A Landlord, the slot-machine-themed deckbuilder, is a lot easier than I thought it was. I decided to actually try and beat it earlier this month, and I managed to do that in about 2 days of intermittent play. It's much easier than most other deckbuilding and gambling-based "roguelite" style games.
LBAL seemed hard to me when I first encountered it because its synergies are so opaque and bizarre. The game contains, among many others, the following synergistic themes:
- Plants and flowers and sunshine and bumblebees
- Fruit as an overlapping plant theme set with separate buffs and engines
- Ocean life - jellyfish, turtles, pearls, oysters, etc, but also:
- PIRATE LIFE, a separate and just-barely-overlapping axis of synergy
- Animals
- Bears specifically
- Cats specifically
- Rabbits most specifically of all - including several mechanics related to the developer's own pet rabbits, and items named after them, and the concept of shed rabbit fur
- Mining for ore, which sometimes involves dwarves but sometimes does not
- Multiple separate overlapping booze related synergies
Winning the game requires you to memorize these potential synergies so that you can draw a "deck" of slot machine symbols which maximize their interactions and buffs between one another. The symbols relate mainly to symbols which are thematically connected via folklore or "common sense" relationships - like cats with milk, Midas with coins, divers with pearls, and so on. Two additional systems - items and essences - modify the symbols in similarly thematic ways.
This means that winning the game requires you to understand the developer's mental map of the entire universe.
That's what it feels like, anyway. You have to learn about the developer's obsession with rabbits, and lean into it if you can. This kind of personal logic is all over the game. Crows and magpies have similar mechanics, but magpies are somehow "more powerful" at expressing that mechanic. Chickens lay eggs, but they have a 1% chance of laying a golden egg. Geese also exist... but they ONLY lay golden eggs at 1% chance, and the rest of the time they lay nothing. The goose who lays the golden egg is of course a familiar story to many, but the logic of chickens laying eggs constantly, and being buffable to lay eggs even more constantly, while geese sit around and do nothing but lay GOLDEN eggs at a VERY slow rate, with no egg lay rate buff items... well, you gotta learn that distinction to win this game.
There is a bounty hunter who kills thieves, and gamblers are killed by dice (but only when the dice roll low values). But all humans are killed by General Zaroff, from the famous short story The Most Dangerous Game. And Bounty Hunters can be upgraded to kill all other humans using a certain item called "Zaroff's contract." So if you want to build a deck with a "killing guys" engine, you need to know that this developer thinks about The Most Dangerous Game way the fuck more than I do!
I decided to beat the game on not only my PC but also my phone, and pushing through the levels on mobile with all these synergies internalized was such a different experience. I was trying to explain my choices to my husband while he watched, and it was bewildering to him. "Yes, I can take the oyster, which generates low-value pearls... but the diver AND the geologist can transform pearls into permanent upgrades, and multiple characters buff pearls... meanwhile, I have to throw these cherries out because only one person buffs cherries. Her name is Mrs. Fruit."
Anyway, I think it's genuinely great that I can download a game where the main skill check is to learn all the folkloric connections between various plants and animals and objects and people that some stranger has expressed from some place deep in his soul: these are the systems that represent the entire world.