Billionaires "don't have souls," Luck Be A Landlord rules

I've written before about Luck Be A Landlord, a deck-building roguelikelike where you create a fruit machine that'll hopefully pay your ever-increasing rent. It feels an inevitable endpoint of an often-random genre yet is more complicated than it might sound, with the many different symbols and items buffing, changing, and destroying each other. This leads to strange and wonderful situations like the latest patch notes explaining that Billionaires no longer leave Spirits because, and I quote, "they don't have souls." Possibly true.

Luck Be A Landlord has dozens of reel symbols and items to draft, everything from your classic fruits and gems to grave robbers and bees and bartenders and soap and witches. Certain symbols and items interact with each other to pay out vital bonus money, so you're trying to build a complex machine which cannot help but have a weird theme.

Billionaires usually pay out nothing but they do give a one-off lump sum when destroyed, and you get extra if it's a Guillotine or Robin Hood which offs them. And in the game. So you could generate money from repeatedly drafting Billionaires just to have them Guillotined. Hey, you've got rent to pay. The rich lads do make Cheese and Wine more valuable, mind, so they could boost a run built upon food, luxuries, and other rich people. I remain delighted by how the slot machines you build often turn out to be weird story engines too.

Now, along with noting a delay for a planned new mode and details on balance tweaks, Friday's patch notes have explained:

Billionaires no longer drop Spirits when the player has the Shrine item because they don't have souls.

That's official, then. They wouldn't let you say it in a video game if it wasn't true. I do like weird patch notes.

Luck Be A Landlord is on Steam Early Access for £7/€8/$10. Oh, and thanks to "treat" for the comment pointing out that if you bought the excellent Indie bundle For Palestinian Aid on Itch this month, you got the game in that.