Quick Verdict: This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker really rides that balance of making you feel productive, while not handing everything to you all at once. It’s the type of game you can actively work on or leave for a few hours for a boon. With a prestige-type system, you don’t really hit a wall and continue to feel like a non-poker-playing badass. 
A code was provided for This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker by the publisher and it was played on PC.

Game: This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker
Developer(s): Mash
Publisher: Oro Interactive and Drillhounds
Review Score: 10
Cozy Score: 10
Price: $5.99
Pros: There’s active play or the ability to walk away and come back, so long as you keep the game open. The game scales in a way that feels satisfying without slogging. 
Cons: There’s no offline progress, so you’ll have to have the game open to see gains.
Platforms: Steam
Genres: Idle, Incremental

This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker is an incremental idler with Balatro-esque vibes where you are indebted to Lester the Jester. Through Poker-like elements that are definitely not Poker, you’ll have to come up with the money to pay back a 1 billion dollar debt. Yep, billion with a ‘B’.

You’ll start out with one card and slowly grow your hand up to seven cards. At first, you’ll have to manually click to flip your cards. Thankfully, you’re guaranteed a reward regardless of what you pull because a high card always nets you something. The only caveat is that a lower high card will get you a smaller return, whereas a high card grants a larger one. 

As you expand your hand, you’ll be able to increase your chance of snagging two of a kind, straights, flushes, and more. No need to know what’s good or not because that all runs in the background for you. As you start earning money, you’ll be able to buy an upgrade that will automatically flip your cards.

The coins will start rolling in at this point and you can use them for a multitude of upgrades that will increase the percentage of earnings for each type of poker hand, increase the time it takes to flip them, and even increase the number of hands you can have running at once. Once you’ve maxed out that upgrade, you’ll have 10 separate hands of 7 cards, flipping one after the other.

Other upgrades include the ability to start expeditions. These little quests can allow you the chance to put a new card in your deck that could vastly improve the power of your hands. From uncommon to legendary, you’ll reap the rewards when they pop up in your hand. Likewise, you have the ability to destroy cards in your deck. This feature can be used to get rid of lower cards to increase the chance of pulling high.

Both of these expeditions are pure chance, so you never know what you’ll be able to pull and the price for these expeditions increases every time you use them. But, you don’t have to grab what’s pulled. If the hand isn’t to your liking, simply take nothing and redo the expedition for no increased cost. Upgrades will increase the number of cards you can choose from at random. 

Watch the trailer for This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker!

Soon enough, you’ll find that you’ve earned a billion smackaroonis, but that’s not the end of Lester’s hold on you. Mary the Fairy introduces herself at that point and she brings a whole other set of upgrades in exchange for poker chips. These are earned slowly as you progress your normal coin hoard.

She will allow you to open up quests and in-game achievements, as well as automation for some other ways to earn coin. The quests pop up at the side and ask for benign things like putting a new card in your deck from an expedition or flipping the cards a certain number of times. Part of her upgrades are increasing the value of returns, the number of quests that can run at once, and automating both accepting and turning in quests.

The achievements, as far as I can tell, are still manually earned, but they pop off all the time and make a great difference.

The last way she helps to earn money is by making trinkets that sit beneath the playing area come alive. They’ll be interacted with automatically and each item will net you a return. Upgrades are available to make them go off sooner and increase the value when they do.

Mary wants 240 poker chips and you get the first 30 for free. After that, you’ll have to ascend every so often to net more. She has a few more upgrades, but these are the ones of note that greatly impact your ability to keep hustling. 

I’m about halfway through her challenge and I have my suspicions that she won’t be as trustworthy as she seems, but the only way I’ll know is by beating her challenge. 

Personally, I feel like This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker is one of the better idling games because it offers a lot of interactivity as well as the ability to let things sit while you work on other things. It’s been running in the background while I write this and I’ve been able to pop back and forth easily.

Don’t mind if I stack the deck in my favor.

This Ain't Even Poker, Ya Joker
This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker

There’s definitely a lot of serotonin drop on this one, so I highly recommend it. And the fact that it is only $6 makes This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker feel like a steal. If Mary is the end of the line, then that might be why it’s so low, but we’re still talking about 7-10 hours of gameplay value, so that’s easily less than a dollar per hour of fun. It’s totally worth it in my book. 

If you want to give This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker a try, and I very much think you should, you can get it over on Steam for $5.99.

If this isn’t your cup of tea, you can check out some of the other reviews we’ve done recently for Cozyrama and The Case of the Worst Day Ever.