Double or Nothing?: Buckshot Roulette and Lethal Gambling

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Buckshot Roulette, as well as discussions of addiction and suicidal behaviour. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or find them online at 988lifeline.org. If you are in the UK, you can call The Samaritans on 116 123 or visit their website at samaritans.org. If you are struggling with drug addiction, medical treatment and other resources are available. Those in the US can visit www.usa.gov/substance-abuse. In the UK, you can learn how to seek help on the NHS website.

1978's The Deer Hunter is more responsible than any other piece of art for familiarising the public with Russian Roulette. In the film, Christopher Walken perspires in a sweltering Vietnamese gambling den, pressing a Smith & Wesson to his temple. Moviegoers reeled at the thought of the actual backroom casinos that must have inspired this suicidal slot machine. Yet, it may be that Russian Roulette jumped from fiction to non-fiction and not the other way around. The first known mention of the term is not in a historical document but in a 1937 short story of the same name. Russian Roulette was penned by Swiss writer Georges Surdez, and prior to its printing, there's not one verified mention of the macabre gambit.^[1] Despite the myth born of The Deer Hunter, there's also no evidence that Russian Roulette lurked in the bamboo shacks of the Vietnam War. Nonetheless, the game has been played for real since, and it slots neatly into The Deer Hunter's morphing relationship with violence.

At the nucleus of the film is a gaggle of working-class Pennsylvanians. During the first act, violence is a force they command flagrantly and heedlessly. It is a round loosed into the side of an animal on a hunting trip or the dare to play in traffic. However, when the men are drafted into the Vietnam War, they become the targets of gunfire beyond their control, not only on the battlefield but also as prisoners of the Viet Cong. The captors force the Americans into games of Russian Roulette and bet on the results. You'd think anyone would try to put the maximum distance between themselves and such a terrifying ordeal. Yet, The Deer Hunter wants to challenge the shibboleth that we always avoid placing ourselves in the path of suffering. In the film's disturbing third-act twist, we learn that even after the war ended, the character of Nick, voluntarily stranded in a Vietnamese backwater has been testing just how far his luck can stretch at the Russian roulette table. His old commanding officer, Mike, flies 12,000 miles to bring him back home, but staring at him from across the table, the light behind his eyes extinguished, Nick pulls the trigger one final time.

Nick's pathology is an allegory about the self-destructive nature of addictions, and so is Mike Klubnika's 2023 video game, Buckshot Roulette. Klubnika's art is laquered in analogue machinery, futile toil, and misguided hope. With Buckshot Roulette, he twists the game from Surdez's story into a whole new balloon animal. With its unhygienic interior, obscene disease, and direct confrontations with a shady waistoid, Buckshot Roulette has a lot in common with Strange Scaffold's Clickolding, which would be published the following year. Yet, in Clickolding, you spend more time listening to another person reflect on their struggles with psychological dependency. Buckshot Roulette puts a greater share of resources into having you adopt the acidic behaviours of an addict.

The items you'll use in Buckshot's fatal vice include drug paraphernalia such as cans of larger, analgesics, and syringes. The roulette host flicks pills off the back of his thumb and into his gaping mouth like he's flipping coins. After injecting yourself with the needle, the music gets louder and the colours brighter. I don't like that I like it; I can imagine filling my life with it. The table from which you pick up your stimulants and depressants sits in a cramped office overlooking a club. It is the kind of table you'd own and upholster for illegal games of blackjack. Another cheat, a flip phone that you snap in two after use, is the burner through which a pusher might keep in touch with contacts. And what better object to make you feel trapped in your addiction than handcuffs, which can bind you to the table? Then there's the morose pun of the Dealer also potentially acting as a dealer.

This bleached hideaway is a museum of sharp edges, illicit substances, and live ammunition, as Buckshot Roulette depicts compulsive gambling as always in tandem with the risk of harm. When you use the magnifying glass, you smash it on the table, leaving you holding a fistful of jagged shards on a stick. The syringe has multiple prongs at its base, some of them bent, hinting that you are not its first receiver. When you pull it back out of your stomach after use, you'll notice that there are fewer needles in its bouquet. Apparently, it has left something with you. Needle reuse is how a junkie makes ends meet, but it may contaminate them with HIV, hepatitis, or another pathogen or disease. Buckshot also has a saw whose inclusion may have been spurred by the eponymous torture porn, and lastly, there's the gun, which is, well, a gun.

Finding a firearm in a video game is like finding a letter at the post office, but Buckshot Roulette is one of the few programs where you can turn the gun against yourself. A much larger syringe, its barrel judders in your petrified protagonist's fists. The little details on each tool are massive contributors to the game's toxic atmosphere, and even the existence of the items speaks to an almost inverse design philosophy than the one you find in standard Russian Roulette. Russian Roulette is not like other games. It doesn't get on with them. Normally, a game is designed to seduce participants; it is joyful or beneficial to spend an evening with. R.R. is neither. It doesn't need the bait of happiness because it's not voluntary. At least, not unless your mind is left in shards like Nick's. However, Buckshot Roulette is voluntary: it's a program on your PC, and you could choose never to boot it. Therefore, its job is to take a trial of pain and make it enticing, to take a sport you might not be able to walk away from and turn it into one you run towards. Klubnika also makes sure rounds don't disappear in a muzzle flash by giving you more than one lightning bolt of health and switches Russian Roulette from extrinsic to intrinsic rails.

Games of pure chance like Russian Roulette don't have depth because if you can't change your in-game actions to improve your chance of victory, there's nothing to practice and no strategy to learn. With no hill to climb, there's less reason to return to the game after you've played it once. The external reward of Russian Roulette, your killing being suspended, is also a non-concern in a video game. Buckshot Roulette needs to make some renovations if it's to glue Steam gamblers in its trap of addiction. There's a common misconception that a successful gambling game is one that leaves everything up to the indifferent force of randomness. The accoutrements of casinos are dice and slot machines, and it would make sense that letting players smuggle any strategy into the games would reduce the number of times the house gets to retain their chips. That logic isn't wrong, but there are also gambling games that act as a dragnet for players by offering the impression of agency. Poker and Baccarat grace the felt of many a casino because the player figures that if they can stick and fold when the cards call for it, they can beat the bank. The owners, meanwhile, are playing the long game, knowing that whatever choices the player makes, statistically and collectively, they'll surrender more dollars than they win. You can see where Buckshot Roulette got the idea to keep you putting its stock to your shoulder. It quips that even if you just received a round to your frontal lobe, you can always make different choices next time.

Buckshot Roulette's matriculation from a game of pure odds to a puzzle of partial strategy begins and ends with its choice of weapon. What makes Russian Roulette a form of Roulette is the cylinder of the revolver: a lead-loaded wheel. What makes Buckshot Roulette a game of tentative deduction is the single chamber of its icy shotgun. You're shown the specific rounds the shotgun greedily swallows at the start of each inning, red cartridges indicating live ammo and grey signalling blanks. You don't know what order the tubes will be inserted in, but you know they will be arranged in a linear array. The chamber for one frame could go live, blank, blank, live, live. That means that once you know the location of a particular live or blank in the chain, you can keep track of when it will reach the front of the pack. You can also calculate the odds of firing a live round based on what rounds you saw dropped into the gun's breach and which have popped back out like nitrate jack-in-the-boxes. When you track the cartridges like this, you may be firing the same neurons you'd use to count cards.

Sometimes, snooping items let you obtain information on the colour of a round. With the magnifying glass, you can see the next shot that will be fired, and with the phone, learn the type of round at a random location in the chamber. When it's your turn, you have the choice of whether to project the next shot at yourself or the Dealer, allowing you to act on the odds or your knowledge of one round's state. If you fire a round at yourself, you lose one point of life, and it becomes the Dealer's turn. If you fire a blank at yourself, you get an extra turn. The same rules apply for the Dealer. This Punnett square hopefully helps clarify:

The rule that you receive an extra turn upon firing a blank at yourself is necessary. Otherwise, the right move would always be to fire at the opponent. In most cases, firing at the Dealer would provide the possibility to damage them with nothing for you to lose. With the extra turn rule, you do have an advantage to lose if you fire a squib at the Dealer: you're giving up another go. Some items also let you act on data about rounds: The beer that lets you eject the next round, the handcuffs that make the opponent skip their next turn, and the inverter, which flips lives to blanks and vice-versa.

Being able to eject a round is useful because, if, say, there are 3 lives and 3 blanks in play, you have a 1 in 2 chance of a positive outcome, whether you shoot yourself or your opponent. No matter what move you make, the odds won't change in your favour. If, however, you pop the stack and a live round flies out, there are now 2 lives and 3 blanks in the gun, giving a 2 in 5 chance of succeeding if you shoot your opponent and a 3 in 5 chance of making the Dealer skip a turn if you shoot yourself. There is now an action which is objectively more likely to result in a positive outcome: pulling the trigger on yourself. If, in this scenario, you drank the beer and a blank flew out of the gun, the statistics would be reversed. You'd have 3 lives and 2 blanks in the gun, giving a 3 in 5 chance of trepanning the Dealer if you shoot him and a 2 in 5 chance of not needing defibrillation if you shoot yourself. If you try to shoot at the Dealer and hear that dispiriting "click", at least you know you did the logical thing.

To further prove that this is a strategy game, not one of pure chance, let me run you through a sample inning. In this example, we'll call the next round that will fire from the gun the "first round", the round that will fire after it the "second round", and so on. At the start of this set, the Dealer and I are shown one live round and two blanks. Our current knowledge of the rounds in the chamber looks like this:

I am dealt the phone, the inverter, and the beer. I make a call on the phone and learn that the third round is a blank, so I know that of the two upcoming rounds in the chamber, one is live and one is blank.

I narrow the possibilities down further by drinking the beer and racking a round. The round ejected is live, meaning the next shot must be a blank.

I use the inverter to change it from a blank to a live and shoot the Dealer.

The snaggle-toothed executioner loses a point of health.

Play then switches to their turn, but all they have in the gun is the last round, which we know from our contact earlier, is a blank.

Not all hands of Buckshot are as determinable. If I receive that same set of items, but there are eight rounds being loaded into our powder guillotine, then I don't have enough tools to check up on or modify even half of the shots. The larger the ratio of rounds to your items in any given frame of Buckshot, the more guessing you'll have to do, pleading that the next time you stare into the void of the shotgun barrel, there's not a real pellet staring back. Your control is also curbed by the randomisation of your item draws and the randomisation of your number of lives at the start of the round. But here is Buckshot Roulette's hidden mercy, the one that will keep you coming back: Going first in this game is incredibly powerful, and in the single-player, you always go first; you are the white pieces. Let me show you. If you and your opponent start the round with two health and you have a saw, you can saw off the end of the shotgun to double the damage of the next blast. That's the Dealer TKO'd in one punch, and the round over. If you start with the Handcuffs, you can effectively take the first two turns, which might also give you enough time to paint the wall with the Dealer before they can get a shot off. As all items are cleared away at the end of a round, if you can win a round without the opponent taking a turn, they will be unable to make use of any of their items.

If there are only two or three rounds in the gun, you might be able to burn through all of them and move onto a new frame before the enemy can get their hands on the grip. If you can expend the last bullet in a chain, you also get two turns in a row, because it will be your turn when the final round is fired, then you'll move onto a new frame, and in every new frame, you get to move first. The syringe is an item which lets you steal one item from your foe. If you roll a syringe, then this means you start the round with the pick of not only all your items, but also any of your opponent's. Not only do you get to use the tool you steal from them, you can keep them from using that item. You can put the shoe on the other foot as well. If they start with a syringe, you get to choose which item to deprive them of. Being able to select items is important because some of them are superior to others in a given context. The beer is most useful if you're looking at 50/50 chances, and the magnifying glass is always better than the phone because while the phone will tell you the value of a round somewhere down the barrel, which you might never reach, the magnifying glass lets you know what round is primed now.

When I see how easy it is to outlive a round of Buckshot Roulette, I start thinking that its rusty nail teeth, its multi-dimensional phones, and its booming muzzles are all makeup. Wipe them away, and I'm more comfortable in its tetanused back room than I am in the command centre of your average RTS. But then, I haven't told you what happens when you finish Buckshot Roulette. In short, you won't. Klubnika will vaguely recognise you trouncing three consecutive rounds as "finishing", but once you do that, a new mode appears on the counter in the game's opening. Next to a gaping hole in a tiled bathroom wall, there is an amber bottle of Quaaludes. Take the hypnotic, beat the game, and you'll get your jackpot, but then Mike poses you a question you should never ask a gambling addict: "Double or nothing?". Survive another three rounds and you'll multiply your money, and he will again ask you, "Double or nothing?". You can beat Buckshot Roulette as many times as you want, but it will never end because if you're an addict, there is no goal amount, there is no "enough". Opioid highs fade into numbing anhedonia as your body acclimates to the bliss. Even if you're not suffering from diminishing returns, there's always a larger pot to chase until you don't have a mind to chase with anymore. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Who Invented Russian Roulette? How a 1937 Short Story Sparked the Deadliest "Game" in Pop Culture by Tibi Puiu (September 10, 2025), ZME Science.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.