Gamblers Chess

A great unique take on a Balatro like game that really switches up the gameplay from Balatro to add the joys of playing chess to it as well. Works way better then I was initially expecting! Would definitely recommend if you like chess but are looking for alittle bit of a switchup to the traditional game.

The game is fun but unfortunately seems highly unbalanced. I might be doing something significantly wrong, I don't know. But after having played the game for almost three hours I couldn't manage to get past the third floor. I figure a general principles of Roguelikes is that, with enough skill, it's possible to win nearly every round, or at least get quite far. Most of the time, I died in the first floor. Even after having devised what I thought would be the best strategy (try to stay close to the bottom, get to the bottom corners of enemies to kill them with a pawn move, and later buy as many pawn in-game and non-pawn permanent cards as possible), a lot of the deaths didn't feel like they were my fault but rather merely a result of bad luck because I was just out of options to move in much of any significant way. It also feels like the pricing in the shop is a little odd. Pieces you can place in the board that are permanently gone after they've been taken once cost just as much as permanent cards. Plus, you can only move this pieces if you get lucky with your cards and are not forced to push your Joker to the upper edge of the board because your only options are pawns for a few turns. There are also, with the exception of the main Joker piece, no custom pieces like there is in other chess roguelikes like The Orouborus King. Though for late-game there do seem to be quite a few fun upgrades, I just wish I were able to reach that part. The game just came out, so I really do not want to be too harsh and I'll give it a thumbs up nonetheless. All the points above are no deal-breakers, I think I'm still going to look into this here and there, but this is the unfortunate current state of the game. Small changes like a difficulty slider (or, honestly, making early-game more forgiving in general) would help it all a ton, and since the game was just released in Early Access, with, at the time of writing this, not a single review, I hope that it'll receive some of the updates it needs to compete with something like The Orouborus King which, despite being flawed as well, just has so much more strategic potential as of right now.

10/10 GOTY