Played a bunch of Nubby's Number Factory
I saw someone call this game, like, deeply pointless or manipulative or bad or something? Because it is number-go-up and the ball bounce mechanic is analogous to pachinko? I don't care enough to find the post, and even if I did, I wouldn't show it to you, because it's probably not a widely held belief. But I have a bit of a media contrarian streak in me and when a friend of mine says that something is worthless, there is sometimes a little voice in my head that screams, "Play it! Now!!"
So I did.
So many indie deckbuilders recently have begin playing with not only the aesthetics of gambling - like Balatro - but with extremely amped-up, intense "mitigate randomness" gameplay. This tends to strike some people as just as dangerous and addictive as gambling, and I do understand why, even when I don't agree with that assessment.
The point of games like Luck be a Landlord, Nubby's Number Factory, Ballionaire, and Balatro is actually to do algebra in your head. At most difficulty levels in most of these games, you don't actually have to do the math. You do, however, have to learn how to take a bunch of random items and combine them so that they do the biggest possible multiplication operation. Every round, you get an input, X; you're trying to make it exceed Y. And it turns out that aggressively randomizing X in order to stress-test your ability to hit Y is an extremely pleasing challenge for a lot of people.
The funny thing is that stress testing someone's math problem with random inputs does pair very, very easily with the aesthetics of gambling. The little minigames found in actual gambling games, like pachinko, also work to help randomize values of X in these games. It's so easy for these games to borrow minigames, techniques, visuals, and reward ceremonies from gambling games.
I think there is certainly something complex and interesting to be said about this generation of newer indie developers who are so willing to put those gambling visuals in their deckbuilder games. I think some of them might be doing it because gambling mechanics are genuinely interesting ways to randomize a number! That's why we use them for gambling!
I also think some of them are doing it possibly because it is boundary-testing to put gambling mechanics in your game. They tend to lampshade this pretty hard. I definitely got that feeling from NNF, where you're "making numbers in a factory" under a dismissive, impish boss. Some of these games have a sly but gentle sinister quality to them... they use randomization to comment on the pointlessness of work, or compare the quest of seeking financial success in life to gambling. Luck be a Landlord found its own way to lampshade the extractive themes shared by both gambling and traditional finance by presenting you with a landlord who requires more and more and more rent each day.
And finally, I think some of these games might be sticking in gambling visuals and mechanics because gambling no longer has a stink of any kind in gamedev. Genuine gambling mechanics (not algebra challenges themed like gambling) are so ubiquitous in free-to-play games that gambling itself is losing its stink in our culture more broadly. I do, genuinely, believe that free-to-play games are driving this trend, not following it. In the US, there's also the separate issue of sports betting's sudden rapid rise. I'm not sure that either of these things are happening entirely separately from the gambling visuals you can find in so many popular math games.
I do like Nubby's Number Factory a lot. I haven't unlocked all the factory supervisors yet, but the little math widgets you get to resequence and upgrade do make you feel as if you have extraordinary agency over the randomness you're subjected to. Ballionaire failed at this; I wrote about that shortly after it came out. NNF gives you so much agency over the math that you can easily break the game once you've learned the "deck" of possibilities well enough. Some of the "supervisors" also add additional agency to the player - like Tony Jr, a supervisor which allows you to draw items at the start of the game and just begin with more agency over your build in the first place.
Breaking the dang game by building a good multiplcation engine is the real source of serotonin in a game like this. When you break the game, you win even when you aren't lucky.
I don't think it's possible for these games to critique either gambling or capitalism with mechanics or visuals borrowed from gambling games. I think a lot of these games are too easily enjoyed - or transformed into something enjoyable - for the gameplay to really "say" anything about why gambling or exploitative factory labor is bad. But I also don't think they need to. I think gambling is losing its stink because of regulatory failures around actual gambling.
Anyway, if you liked Luck Be a Landlord, Nubby's Number Factory has a lot of the same charm. I'm glad I checked it out.