Luck be a Landlord is a Roguelike Deckbuilding Game developed by Dan "TrampolineTales" DiIorio. It was released on Steam on January 6, 2023 and on Google Play and the iOS App Store on July 21 of the same year.
The plot is simple. You've recently moved into a new apartment, and for some reason, your only means of income is operating a slot machine which always takes one coin to play. The slot machine has an odd means of operation, however; after every roll, you add one new symbol to the pool of symbols that can be rolled (unless you choose to skip). Each symbol is unique, and contributes a different effect to gameplay—not merely giving a different amount of coins, but interacting with other symbols in particular ways.
Naturally, rent goes up every cycle, and a frightening amount at that; but for every rent cycle passed, you get an item that induces a new effect to the game, interacting with different pieces or adding an additional effect to gameplay in general.
You're also not alone in your struggle. Your local mutual aid network is happy to give you a few tools every rent cycle: a means of rerolling the three symbols you can choose from after a roll, and a means of removing an unwanted symbol from your pool.
Get to 12 rent cycles paid, and somehow, you'll be able to defeat your landlord.
Think you can make it?
Luck be a Landlord contains examples of the following tropes:
- 13 Is Unlucky: Inverted with the Black Cat, which gives you 9 coins if you gain a multiple of 13 from a spin, in addition to doubling the value of all Cat symbols. The Essence version of the item self-destructs when there are at least 13 Cats and multiplies their value by 13.
- Achievement Mockery: Arrows increase the value of symbols they point towards. There are three achievements for having arrows that don't point to anything.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Each spin of the slot machine costs 1 coin, but if you have exactly 0 coins after a rent payment, your total will magically change to 1 so you can keep playing.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Dove prevents any adjacent symbol from being destroyed and permanently gives an extra coin for each symbol it saves. It looks good on paper, but in practice, not so much if it ends up "saving" something you want destroyed such as Reroll and Removal Capsules.
- Banana Peel: A potential symbol, selectable directly or generatable if a Banana is consumed by a Monkey or Mrs. Fruit. If a Thief is near it, both it and the Thief will be destroyed, with a comical sound resembling that of a Looney Tunes character running.
- The Bartender: The Bartender symbol. He has a small chance of chucking out either Beer, Wine, Martini, or Chemical Seven symbols.
- The Beastmaster: Well, the Beastmaster. He'll give a bonus to all animal symbols near him, whether they be cats, bears, wolves, oysters, sloths, or even Eldritch Abominations.
- Big Eater: Mrs. Fruit will destroy most fruit objects (exempting more valuable ones), giving out more coins when rolled for each fruit she's destroyed.
- Black Comedy: Referenced by the Dark Humor item, which makes the Comedian symbol buff adjacent symbols related to death and alcoholism.
- Changing Gameplay Priorities: Early in a game, it's imperative to add symbols, even if they're not ideal, to fill up your reels and generate enough coins to afford rent. Later in the game, as the number of empty slots dries up, it becomes more important to be selective, skipping and removing symbols to bring the average quality high enough to afford the ever-increasing rent. In the late game, the growing need to find symbols that synergize with each other takes the forefront, so they can make large amounts of coins for the big endgame payments.
- Cheesy Moon: In the event a Moon symbol is destroyed, it breaks into 3 Cheese symbols.
- Chummy Commies: The local mutual aid network contacts you via Commie_McComrade@bouncy.mail, and the relevant e-mails address you as 'comrade'. They're your initial and non-random source of Removal and Reroll, which are vital to managing your deck.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Ninja symbols are worth fewer coins the more of them there are on the board, unless you have the Cursed Katana item, which flips this on its head, making them worth more for each other Ninja.
- Cursed with Awesome: The Hex-type symbols function as this. All have some kind of potentially negative effect, such as having a chance of stopping you from selecting a symbol after a roll, flatly reducing your chance of rarer items, or even destroying any other symbol around it. But they also all give out three coins when rolled, which is a good sum for a single item without interaction. Some Hexes also have specific ways to take advantage of them:
- The Hex of Midas generates Coin symbols that clutter up the reels, but the Pirate symbol or Coin on a String item can clear those out and give a profit in the process. The Triple Coins item triples the value of all Coin symbols, permanently buffing them and making the Hex a literal money printer.
- The Hex of Tedium makes rarer symbols less likely to appear, which is a benefit if you need common symbols.
- The Hex of Destruction destroys symbols indiscriminately, which can work out just fine if you found yourself filling up the reels with mostly low-quality symbols in the early game, or symbols that give a benefit when destroyed. Then you can use a Removal Token to clear the hex once better symbols start coming in. It's also one of the few ways to get rid of Dud symbols without waiting for them to go away on their own.
- The Hex of Draining can make an adjacent symbol worth 0 coins, which is beneficial if it happens to hit one of the few symbols that are normally worth a negative number of coins. In fact, one of the achievements is unlocked this way.
- Deal with the Devil: The Devil's Deal item. If you lack the money to pay a rent payment, you can use it once... in exchange for 6 Dud symbols being added to your pool. If that wasn't your last rent payment, prepare for pain. Its Essence counterpart simply destroys itself and gives you 33 coins if you can't pay the rent.
- Death or Glory Attack: The Midas Bomb symbol destroys all adjacent symbols, but multiplies the value of the destroyed symbols by 7x. Against the landlord boss fight, this can either outright win the game, or permanently screw you over into a death spiral loss.
- Deck Clogger: Some symbols are put into your symbol "deck" to make it worse, which is particularly harmful since many synergies rely on adjacency bonuses, and the "junk" symbols take up slots that could have gone to something synergistic. It's even rougher on higher floors, where removal gets rarer. Examples of symbols that tend to clog up your "deck" include:
- Floor 5 introduces the Dud symbol, which is used to make the game harder on higher floors. It provides no coins, can't be removed by normal means, and the only ways to destroy it manually are unreliable and have a high risk of collateral damage. It does have the decency to eventually destroy itself, but that takes 33 spins. And while floor 5 only gives you a single Dud at the start of the game, later floors give you more, and even keep refreshing your Dud "supply" throughout the game. Landlord will also sometimes add one during his battle in one of his fine prints.
- Two Hexes have a high base value of 3 coins, but downsides that can fill your "deck" with junk:
- The Hex of Midas sometimes generates coins symbols, which have a base value of 1 and few synergies, so in most builds, they'll just clog up your "deck".
- The Hex of Hoarding sometimes forces you to take one of the three symbols offered after a spin. There's a high chance that none of them synergize well with your build and only serve to make your "deck" worse, and unlike the Hex of Midas, you can't reliably prepare for it because you don't know what you'll get.
- Due to Changing Gameplay Priorities, many of the starting symbols and the ones you pick up early on will eventually become junk. In the early game you'll want a lot of symbols to make sure you'll afford the upcoming rent, but later on, you want to improve your "deck", which means trimming stuff that isn't carrying its weight.
- The Devil's Deal item pays your rent when activated, but then adds 6 Dud symbols to your deck which cannot be manually removed and take 33 spins to disappear on their own.
- A Degree in Useless: Averted with the Anthropology Degree item, which gives a bonus to value to all humanoid symbols, which is pleasant in many a build.
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- Many of the Essence items have a tall requirement to destroy them, such as adding, destroying, or transforming many of a certain symbol or type of symbol, but radically improve that symbol once that item is destroyed.
- Doing a crab or cultist sweep is very luck dependent but if you get it going you'll have very easy access to a lot of money. Crabs generate more money per crab on the same row so the more you have the easier it is to get a payout. Cultists are more difficult because they don't even give out one coin until you find another but each one on the board gives another coin to each other one. They snowball pretty hard but given the strict timer and nature of symbol management it's easy to either shoot low and not make enough money waiting out the exclusive symbols or not have the room as you needed to make money and got other symbols to do so.
- Eat the Rich: A general motif in the game.
- Your landlord is set to be 'defeated', and will receive a random fate upon completion of the game which implies their death or spells it out in no uncertain terms.
- There is also the Billionaire symbol, which gives you nothing unless it ends up next to Cheese or Wine (and even then you get only a pittance), but delivers a jackpot when destroyed. They can be destroyed by Zaroff like other persons, Robin Hood specifically... or automatically via the Guillotine item.
- You can be on the end of this if you pick up the Guillotine Essence and have one billion coins.
- Eldritch Abomination: Invoked almost by name with the Eldritch Creature, with a circular maw. Thankfully, it doesn't drive anything mad; it instead consumes all Hexes, Witches, and Cultists, becoming stronger (hence giving more coins) with each consumption.
- Endless Game: If you so wish, in earlier floors you could continue playing your run past the defeat of your landlord paying more rent still until you either cannot keep up with rent or get a run so overpowered that rent could never catch up. Later on the landlord becomes a boss fight and you remove them so that instead the place is yours with no rent but a counter for turning in essences and getting items so you can keep going either plodding along without worry or letting a snowball build wildly until the Guillotine Essence kicks in.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: As part of the "Billionaires have no souls" theme, Dog symbols give 2 extra coins if next to any human symbol in the game, including Hooligans, Thieves, Ninjas, and even Cultists, with the sole exception of the Billionaire symbol.
- Explosive Breeder: Any symbol that creates other symbols can serve as this, though the Egg -> Chick -> Chicken line is the one that perpetuates itself. This can be extremely dangerous to a run without some means of managing it, as it may result in bloating the pool. The Conveyor Belt doubles the spawn chances of these symbols.
- Final Boss: Once you get to a high enough floor on your last payment the mutual aid network will tell you to make the final push. Instead of just paying rent the landlord not only gets health that depletes from strong spins but each spin they will arbitrarily add in more restrictions claiming "fine print" until defeated.
- Grave Robbing: Hooligans destroy Urns, Big Urns, and Tombs to release Spirits that give out 6 coins for 4 spins before disappearing. The Grave Robber item also destroys these symbols automatically 66% of the time.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game:
- One of the symbols is General Zaroff himself! Any human or humanoid symbol around his range will be destroyed, and make you a tidy profit. Even toddlers.
- With the Zaroff's Contract item, ordinary Bounty Hunters will act the same as Zaroff, declaring open season on all humans instead of just Thieves.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Apartment floors. Each floor adds another layer of challenge over the floors below it, which can be higher rents, fewer tokens, or more Dud symbols that clutter up the reels without directly offering anything in return.
- Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Keys are destroyed after opening any Lockbox, Safe, or Treasure Chest, with Magic Keys tripling their coin value.
- Joke Item: While the normal Guillotine item kills Billionaire symbols, the only effect the Guillotine Essence item has is to destroy you if you collect a billion coins. Achieving this results in a joke ending that makes the screen go black for a few seconds, then cut back to the main menu. By the time you have that many coins, you've already won the level and are deep into the endless mode. This is all the Guillotine Essence does, making it pretty much useless. The only reason you'll be picking it up is to unlock some achievements that require you to use it.
- Literal Wild Card: The Very Rare Wildcard symbol gives out the highest coin value in a spin. Card Sharks turn adjacent Suit symbols into Wilds while the Copycat item makes all Cat symbols function like them.
- Loophole Abuse: The Landlord can impose fine print that prevents certain symbols from being destroyed or removednote . There's no stopping you from doing the other action... unless he prevents you from doing that, too.
- Luck-Based Mission: Despite the planning one can make, it's still a game based off slots. If fortune frowns upon you, whether it be how the slots themselves roll, the symbols you can choose from, the items you can choose from, and if the effects of certain symbols engage or not... well, too bad.
- Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
- Reroll tokens allow randomly selected symbols to be randomly selected again, if the first set of offerings isn't to your liking.
- Shiny Pebbles and Rabbit Fluff make higher-rarity symbols more likely to appear, as do Cats if you have the Lucky Cat. The Hex of Tedium makes them less likely to appear, which is typically bad, but can be helpful if your strategy revolves around a common symbol such as Cultists or Crabs.
- The Reroll item applies this to Dice symbols, by making them roll a second time if they return a lower-than-average value the first time.
- Magikarp Power: A backing principle.
- The literally worthless Coal will turn into a valuable Diamond after 20 spins.
- Similarly worthless Cultists multiply in value if you can get more of them.
- Suits are worth half as much as most other uncommon symbols on their own, but explode in value when next to other same-colored suits and certain rare symbols.
- An item that floods the board with cheap objects becomes worthwhile with another symbol that destroys or boosts those cheap objects.
- Entry-level Cats gain more value with Pizza the Cat. And if you're lucky enough to get Copycat, causing cats to function as Wildcards—you get the idea.
- Matryoshka Object: A Matroyoshka Doll symbol will periodically destroy itself only to become a smaller doll with a larger payout, until it reaches its smallest size.
- Moon Rabbit: The Moon symbol will boost the output of many things, Rabbit symbols included.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Once Essence Tokens are unlocked, on the next rent payment after they are collected, the landlord will proudly appropriate them from you, but is forced to offer Essence items in exchange. The tokens are otherwise worthless, but the items you get in exchange can easily be the deciding factor in defeating your current level. note
- Not Completely Useless: Dud symbols are used to increase the difficulty and are unarguably worse than any other non-empty symbol in the game, but if you have three of them, they'll meet the Green Pepper's requirement of having 3 of the same symbol, and can potentially meet the Purple Pepper's requirement of having 3 of the same symbol adjacent to each other.
- Off with His Head!: One of the items you can obtain is a Guillotine. It will automatically destroy any Billionaire symbols, giving you quite a handsome payout. The implication given the nature of the item is clear.
- Oh, Crap!: Gamblers will quickly exclaim "Oh, no!" when you roll a 1 with any die symbol, as this heralds their destruction.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The Dwarf symbol will destroy beer and wine, giving relevant payout. Upon getting the Dwarven Anvil item, they are also able to destroy Ores and Big Ores.
- Our Spirits Are Different: Spirits come out of broken Urns and Tombs and give coins for a short while until they disappear. The Shrine item makes a Spirit appear whenever any symbol representing a living thing is destroyed, except Billionaires, who evidently have no souls.
- Piggy Bank: The Piggy Bank item functions like The Swear Jar, but every turn, you deposit 2 coins into it, and you can destroy it and get 2.5x the amount you put in if you can't pay the rent.
- Poverty Food: The modern kind encompasses a couple of the items you can obtain. Instant Ramen will let you choose two items instead of one every rent cycle, and the Frozen Pizza permits getting two symbols instead of one every other spin.
- Power of the Void: There are three 'void' objects, the Void Stone, the Void Fruit, and the Void Creature. All work the same way: zero inherent value, but returns 1 coin per empty space near it. If there are no empty spaces near it, it destroys itself and returns 8 coins. The Void Party item gives them a 50% chance of regenerating after destruction, but it can only happen up to 7 times in one spin.
- Puzzle Boss: The Single Spin Puzzles mod is the first official Game Mod of this game. It has nine floors where you have to defeat the Landlord in one spin by adding a symbol to the set of non-randomized slots.
- Reward for Removal: The Pufferfish, Jellyfish, and Sand Dollar reward you with a Reroll token, Removal token, and 10 coins, respectively if you manually remove them from the slot machine. The Diver can automate this for you by removing (not destroying) any of these symbols adjacent to him, permanently giving out extra coins per spin for each symbol removed.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: In-universe, the Frozen Fossil symbol. It takes 20 turns to thaw, less if you've destroyed or removed a Hex, Witch, or Cultist. Once it thaws, it turns into the Eldritch Creature symbol, which is hardly destructive to your run but heralds pain for your Cultists and Witches.
- Shout-Out:
- The Frozen Fossil symbol is a nod to the Magic: The Gathering card "Thing in the Ice // Awoken Horror". Both are Magikarp Power examples that start off frozen, but if you wait long enough, you get a powerful Eldritch Abomination.
- The Unique Item Highlander is a nod to the Highlander franchise, in particular the tagline "There can be only one".
- One of the achievements, "Breakfast", is a nod to The Binding of Isaac as getting two Pool Ball Essences require you to empty the essence pool, referencing how the Breakfast item will begin to appear when the item pool is empty.
- Stock Animal Diet: Mice destroy Cheese, Cats destroy Milk, while Bears destroy Honey.
- The Swear Jar: You can get one as an item. If you roll less than 35 coins on a spin, 1 coin will be deducted and placed into the jar. If come rent day you're low on cash, you can smash it for three times the amount put in.
- Thieving Magpie: The Magpie symbol will remove 1 coin from your total per turn... but also returns 9 coins every 4 turns. Perhaps it thieves from others?
- Undertaker: One of the items you can get is this, which prevents Spirits from self-destructing.
- Unique Items: The Highlander, a very rare symbol that pays out 6 coins each spin, and, true to form, won't appear again once added.
- Unlockable Content: Clearing 7 runs or clearing the 6th floor (or editing the save file) unlocks Essence tokens. These are collected similarly to reroll and removal tokens, and allow you to choose Essence items, which are based on the normal items, except they all have the same rarity level, and either come with a temporary or one-off effect, or their effect is delayed until a certain requirement is fulfilled. They range from "temporary copy of normal item" to "unique effect that is similar to the original only in what kinds of things it effects".
- Vanilla Unit: The Highlander is a Unique Item with an abnormally high coin payout at 6, but it has no synergies.
- "Wanted!" Poster: One of the items you can get is this, which multiplies the value of Thieves by 3.5, and since their value goes up with every spin, they have even bigger bounties on their heads when the Bounty Hunter, General Zaroff, or a Banana Peel destroys them.
- William Telling: The Robin Hood achievement has Robin Hood destroying an Apple that's directly above a Toddler.
- Would Hurt a Child: The General Zaroff symbol, and also the Bounty Hunter symbol if you have Zaroff's Contract, will not give any lenience to the Toddler symbol — it will be destroyed like any other person-type symbol.
