This Ain’t Even Poker Ya Joker is an idle game built around poker hands and a carnival theme. I ended up playing it to 100% completion, which I don’t often do for idle games. There are a lot of design decisions that separate it from the rest of the genre. So let’s break down what it does well (and what could be improved).
Disclaimer: this is not meant to be an attack on the developer. This is my own observations and preferences about the game. It is meant to be a form of studying and growth about my own preferences as a gamer impacting my growth as a game developer.
What it Gets Right
Story and Narrative Framing
The game wraps its progression in an actual story. There’s a villain, a goal, and a twist you reach later. (I won’t spoil the story in case you want to play for yourself.)
Most idle games give you an upgrade tree and call that motivation. Here the tree has a reason to exist. There’s a character to beat and a number to hit.
The dialogue fires at progression milestones instead of all at once on the first screen. The story unlocks at the same speed you do. A handful of sprites and some triggered lines carry the whole thing. For an idle game, it feels like a well thought out plot.
Visual Design and Art Direction
The art mixes 2D pixel sprites for the characters and cards with low-poly 3D models for the table and the space around it. The carnival theme ties the two styles together. Colors stay high-saturation and consistent from screen to screen.
The card flips are where the visual work pays off. Coins spray out every time a card turns over. A good hand sets off a burst of light. An idle game asks you to watch more than touch, so the feedback is important for keeping momentum.
A lot of idle games skip this part. The numbers go up and that’s the whole reward. When the player’s main job is to watch, the screen has to give them something to watch. Plenty of games in the genre just don’t do anything past the number increasing. This one treats the feedback as the payoff instead of an afterthought.
Deckbuilding as a Genre Twist in Idle Game Design
A standard idle game runs progression through a flat upgrade list. Buy the thing, a multiplier ticks up, buy the next thing. Same path, same order, every player. Nothing to decide along the way.
This game runs progression through cards instead. You add cards to the deck to stack it toward the hands you want to hit. The deck itself is the build. Weight it toward one set of hands and your output develops one way. Weight it toward another and it develops differently. Two players the same distance into the game can be running very different decks.
New cards come from the expedition system. You send units out and they bring back cards through a roguelike system. So the part of the game that grows your deck is its own active layer. It keeps the build decisions sitting as the core loop instead of off to the side.
What I’d change
Player agency
Idle games are passive on purpose. You set things up and step away. No complaint there.
I feel like the game is too idle in places. The only time you make an active choice is buying upgrades in the shop, and that’s the only active input the game has at all.
You never play a hand. The deck resolves itself. For a game built on poker, I expected at least a little of that decision-making to be in the actual play. Between purchases there’s nothing to do but wait for the next one to become affordable. One more active action point would fix that without breaking the idle structure.
The special card readability problem
Late game, the game adds four new card suits and replacements for all numbers/faces. The suits are pulled from tarot. I know enough tarot to spot where they came from, but not enough to make the translation to our normal suits on sight. A player with no tarot background is looking at symbols that mean nothing to them.
The number replacements I did not recognize. At a certain point, it became impossible to tell what the actual value of cards were. There probably is a logical method behind it. I just didn’t recognize it, nor did I see an explanation.
You can still play through it. It doesn’t feel good at all, though. A system this central to identifying cards shouldn’t get harder to read the deeper you get.
There are two ways to adjust this. First, add a reference layer. Some tooltip or popup that maps the new suits and values back to the standard ones, so the player checks once and moves on. Or two, drop the new suits and values entirely. I would favor the latter for simplicity.
The takeaway
Overall, This Ain’t Even Poker Ya Joker is a solid little idle game. The deckbuilding, prestige loop, and story are all well thought out. It’s the work of a fellow solo dev (I think?), which makes the scope of it more impressive. I recommend picking it up to anyone interested in idle games as well as developers interested in building them.
0 Comments