Go! Go! GOTY! 2021: Game 2: Luck Be a Landlord

• Game: TrampolineTales's Luck Be a Landlord.
• Release Month: January.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 07/01.
• Completed: 07/01.

And now, almost immediately, this (*last) year's Go! Go! GOTY! moves into the tiny, weird, obscure, Indie stage of its catch-up gaming mission. I'll be frank: ever since my backlog blossomed from a manageable pile to the continents-wide landfill Earth had become in WALL-E, I've not been buying many new games. Recent acquisitions have oft been the result of bundles, and of two bundles in particular: the Itch.io Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid back in June and the Itch.io World Land Trust Bundle from December, each containing dozens of DRM-free games.

This does afford me the opportunity to talk about some smaller games that might've escaped everyone else's notice, because there's some real curiosities in the bunch, including today's game Luck Be a Landlord. I wasn't quite copacetic on how this game actually worked until a few runs in, but it dawned on me that this game has a certain similarity with that Super Auto Pets game Jan's been showing off lately and I suspect it's part of a growing trend of mobile-ready casual games that rely on luck as much as they do keen judgment and careful study. In Luck Be a Landlord, you have recently inhabited an apartment and given your first due date for rent. To help pay for your lodging, each apartment in this complex is given what we in the UK call a fruit machine, though usually just called slots everywhere else. Rather than trying to line up symbols, however, each individual symbol grants a certain amount of cash whenever it appears. Yet these mere payouts for simply appearing aren't going to be enough to pay the rent: the player's true goal is to find synergies that cause symbols to pay out more in certain conditions, and use every tool at their disposal to wring as much cash out of every spin of the wheel as possible. After every spin the player is given a random selection of three symbols and can choose one or none of them to add to their current stock; these symbols all have rarity values that determine how often they show up for selection, if not how often they show up after a spin once you've obtained them, with rarer symbols often giving you bigger payouts or better synergy potential. The rent will continue to balloon after each payment - what else is new? - so the player needs to carefully curate their inventory of symbols, remove those that aren't pulling their weight when possible, and consider how the symbols interact with each other to maximize your gains.

Much of the game is, of course, pure luck. The game refers to itself as a "gambling roguelike" and in the context of being mostly RNG-led and having to start over if you fail that description just about tracks. However, learning how the mechanics work is paramount to success and you won't be able to get by simply grabbing whichever new symbols give the most money. The option to skip the acquisition of new symbols entirely isn't a fatuous one: if there's genuinely nothing that can work with your current ensemble it will only cause you to lose out if it should appear instead of something potentially more lucrative - the playfield is a four-by-five grid of symbols, so taking on more than twenty symbols total means risking having one of your high earners no-showing on the next spin. Complicating matters is the way many symbols exist only to be destroyed: capsules destroy themselves the first opportunity they get, for example, giving you their contents which might be a burst of cash, a new symbol, or a double-value buff to all those that spawned adjacent. Other symbols are practically worthless until they get activated by a second working as a catalyst, such as milk and cats (the latter drinks the former for a major one-time payout, destroying the milk symbol forever), or only start to become valuable if you invest in more symbols of the same type, as is the case for the secretive cultists and the playing card suits. There are also items that the player can acquire that, rather than appear in the slot machine grid with the other symbols, sit outside the play field and provide passive boosts under certain conditions. These items can also make certain symbols far more viable due to doublers and other buffs, but it's a risky prospect to go all in on, say, cats and milk if you don't get the "black cat" or "lucky cat" items, both of which double the value of any kitties on the grid and add more perks besides.

There's a vast number of symbols and items to consider, many having some sort of combined effect with other symbols, and it takes a few runs to get an idea of what's out there, let alone before you can start forming potent strategies to earn the heavy sacks of cash you'll need to stay off the streets as your landlord continues to "wheat and chessboard" your bottom line. Given its relatively crude appearance and the gambling aspect at the forefront there's a belied depth to its gameplay, but after several hours of playing I'm still seeing new symbols - the rarity factor is a major component of that - and gradually cottoning onto what actually presents the best value rather than the revenue attached to that symbol, while tacitly understanding that sometimes circumstances simply won't go my way and that most runs are doomed to failure. The one time I actually successfully paid off the rent for the twelve iterations a standard run requires was because of some lucky finds: divers and pirates. Both of these aquatic-based fellows have a mechanic where they will destroy certain symbols when spawned adjacent to them - for the pirate, that's gold, containers, beer, and oranges (gotta stave off that scurvy) while for divers it's any kind of seafood like oysters, goldfish, octopuses, and crabs - and earn a permanent increase to their payout for all future spins. Towards the end I had two of each all giving out around ten coins per appearance, which combined with the payout from containers - their risk vs. reward element is that they don't pay much if they appear on their own but provide huge cash gains when destroyed, usually from keys or thieves - kept me solvent until the end. I've also had good luck with card suits, which pay out more the more of them spawn at a time, and the many synergies that flowers provide with bees, rainfall, farmers, and suns. (I realize this all begins to sound like that one ProZD skit about the incomprehensible dairy farmer card game that he becomes absurdly competent at, but that's the sort of feverish min-maxing Luck Be a Landlord inspires.)

The game's still in early access, but it hit its fully playable "1.0" edition back in January 2021 and continues to see new influxes of content periodically, with the next patch due sometime in March. I imagine each successive update will introduce new symbols and items to the mix, perhaps adding value to those currently lagging behind the more fruitful types, and continue to tweak its balance for as long as the developer is invested in the project. Far as I'm aware there's no microtransactions or other means to support itself in perpetuity, just word of mouth as it grows more complex and compelling for those of a strategic bent who perhaps don't care for the multiplayer aspects of Super Auto Pets and its kin. Since I've successfully won a run and there's no completion tracker for symbols that would normally drive my obsessive need to collect I'm happy to put it aside for now to focus on all the other odd little 2021 games I've got ready to go, but I could certainly see this becoming as addictive as the gambling contraptions it imitates.

Current 2021 GOTY Ranking:

1. Scarlet Nexus
2. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Nights
3. Luck Be a Landlord

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