Welcome to the Tavern. You enter the place with a deck of cards and you face gamblers from all walks of life to battle against in this deckbuilding roguelike from 2024. It came out in the same year as Balatro with way less hype and fanfare and I think that’s a shame because it’s the more fun (and less addictive) of the two great casino roguelikes of the year.
In Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, you play games of blackjack against an opponent. Well, kind of at least. Because it stops being regular blackjack quite fast. Each hand, your goal is to play cards to get your total value as close to 21 (a blackjack) without going over to deal damage to your opponent. Whoever has the higher hand without going over will deal the leftover points (say you have 20 and your opponent stands at 18, you deal 2 damage through) as damage.
Once you win a game, you get to add a new card to your deck. But it’s not just your run-of-the-mill French suit cards you get to add. You might find a Charizard card from Pokemon TCG, a Black Lotus from Magic the Gathering, Leg Sweep from Slay the Spire, a birthday card, a credit card, a PlayStation Memory Card, a lottery scratch card and much much more. Anything that is a card in real life can probably be found from the card rewards and shops.
All of these cards add fun modifiers when played. They might increase in value every time, they might manipulate your deck or your opponents deck, they might get you more money. The imagination is the limit and the developers of the game aren’t running short on that fuel.
The basic gameplay loop is so deliciously simple and easy to grasp that you’ll be up and running in minutes. But the strategies in deck building and making decisions throughout the hands and rounds and shops run deep as the complexity of the combos grow. There’s so much creativity that the developer has put in that delights me. As a bit of a Pokemon geek, I will always grab the base set Charizard card when it appears in the card rewards.
(To include this as an entry in Helmet Gaming Challenge 2026, I’m utilizing a linguistic loophole: “draw” can mean drawing an image but also drawing a card from a deck. Just in case you were wondering. It’s not that serious.)