A very strong concept to rival Balatro, but suffers in its execution. The game is plinko, where you can add pinball-like bumpers (called Triggers) which can spawn extra balls, accrue bonus money, or do some other third thing when your ball hits them. Every ball drop or so, you are allowed to pick one of three (or more) randomly chosen Triggers to add to your plinko board (called a Draft). If you have a build centering around Triggers which spawn Rock balls, and you receive a Draft where all Triggers don't interact with Rock balls, then you're - simply put - screwed.

The Trigger system, somehow, is surprisingly reminiscent of Yu-Gi-Oh; many cards that you can put in your Yu-Gi-Oh deck are designed with the intention of volleying off of other cards and their mechanics: the key difference between it and Ballionaire is that the player (in contemporary Yu-Gi-Oh) usually has the ability to choose exactly what cards they put into their deck. There's no RNG involved, unless you're drafting cards from booster packs, which is an unrecommended way of playing due to how critical the interplay between cards are. Ballionaire suffers from this heavily: a given Trigger is often useless by themselves, and granted that you have no precise control over what Triggers may appear in the next Draft, a given trigger may remain useless for the entire game.

The game's goal is to score an amount of money from your ball drops, augmented by your Triggers. Your main obstacle (aside from the cheeky answer of 'the game's RNG-centric design') are the Elders who demand tribute: every [x] ball drops, if you haven't made [y] dollars, you lose. Furthermore - and this is the important part - each Elder carries with them a debuff (a Tribulation) so long as they are demanding tribute from you. Each debuff affects you for one third of the game, whereupon it is replaced by the advent of the next Elder. Generally, each debuff targets a specific type of Trigger, or forces the player to prioritize certain Trigger types over others: for example, an Elder may make your Teleport triggers send the ball to an unintended destination, throwing a wrench into your plans.

Now, recall that your success in the game is heavily RNG-reliant and it is often that a majority of the Triggers available to you are functionally useless; now, thanks to the Elder, you are often forced to ignore beneficial Triggers due to the Tribulation they bring. This slashes down your effective pool of 'useful Triggers' down dramatically. As you play the game, more Triggers become available to you, and - like most other Triggers - they are combo-centric and are dead weight unless you happen to be lucky enough to get the other combo pieces. The Tribulation system is a clever idea on paper, in that it forces a player to get creative and choose certain Triggers which they would never take otherwise; for instance, making a player who prefers Coin balls play with Water balls. But again, the execution is poor, and almost feels short-sighted.

With that being said, a majority of complaints pertaining to the game almost always concern the execution, and given that this game has just turned one month old, there's definitely room for improvement. I would like to imagine that in six month's time, Ballionaire will become a mainstay in the brand new 'Big Numbers Casino' genre. But, that time is not now.

Not a terrible game and it's an acceptable time waster, but there are plenty of "ok" games that you can waste time with. What's most notable about the game is that it gets worse the longer you play.

You unlock additional draftable items as you progress through the game. In most games of this sort, that adds some extra complexity for more experienced players and allows for more builds, thus expanding the game's shelf life. In this case, I found it just dilutes the pool of items too much. There were more bad items taking up selection slots and it became harder to find items that worked well together. They need to group the items into "packs" and only have a limited number of packs show up per run or something.

The difficulties scale weirdly. At "Ballionaire +" I found the game quite easy, but I have yet to beat "Ballionaire ++". Between these difficulties they both increase the number of debuffs you have to deal with and double the scores you must reach at each level. This is a huge increase.

Finally, the debuffs are not particularly well balanced. Some only harm you if you're going for a very specific build, like forcing your ball to drop its hold items. Since you can see the debuffs in advance, just don't build for hold items (this does, however, exacerbate the problem of struggling to get enough related items to make
a good build). Others, like the one that debuffs items next to bouncers, are debilitating and unavoidable. You need bouncers. Additionally, since you can restart a run with 0 penalty, it just incentivizes rerolling until you get an easy set of them. Debuffs therefore just make restarting a run take a few extra seconds, making them more annoying than interesting.