TL;DR: More cosmetics than features, extremely grindy despite the small amount of content, counter-intuitive and unrewarding progression.
I’d been waiting to play this game for a while, ever since I saw a content creator try the demo, so I bought it immediately when it released.
The idea is solid, the art is genuinely gorgeous, and you can tell the developers wanted to ship a polished, enjoyable experience. Unfortunately, the final result didn’t meet my expectations.
The game somehow feels too short and too long at the same time. Incremental and idle games usually follow a clear progression curve: you start slow, experiment with strategies, figure out what works and what doesn’t, prestige, unlock new systems, get stronger, and eventually reach absurd numbers you can’t even name anymore. Gamblers Table starts off well. Buying a few Helpers, watching them flip coins, seeing them wear goofy hats, it’s fun at first. But that’s where it stops.
I never felt like I was meaningfully progressing. The game quickly becomes stale and extremely grindy for how little content there actually is. The Prestige tree feels more like a Prestige bush. There just isn’t much there, and the worst part is that some upgrades actively counter each other, making them pointless, while others completely negate your Table’s bonuses. I understand the idea of forcing players to strategize and choose upgrades that fit their Table and playstyle, but in practice that just means that out of roughly 20 Prestige upgrades, maybe half are usable at any given time. Even then, they rarely feel impactful.
Because of that, the game feels short due to the lack of content and real progression, but also painfully long because finishing it requires grinding for an unreasonable amount of time just to earn a single Prestige point you might not even use.
There’s also a serious readability issue. Once you have a lot of Helpers, coins, and visual effects on screen, it becomes very difficult to see the two clickable bonuses that appear on the Table for a few seconds. And when you finally notice them, they’re usually about to disappear anyway. One of them permanently increases your earnings by 3% and doesn't reset on Prestige, while the other gives a temporary buff that massively increases your earnings for a minute or so. Needless to say, you don't want to miss those.
The game could also use a couple of QoL improvements. An “undo” or Sell button would go a long way. More than once, I accidentally bought a Silver coin while playing on a Table that gives huge bonuses for having only Copper coins, or bought an extra Copper coin while a Prestige bonus rewarded having more Silver than Copper. In both cases, I had to start over from scratch, because my earnings dropped so low that there was no way to recover.
It would also be helpful to see all available Tables before assigning Prestige points. Right now, the process is frustrating: I have to Prestige, commit my points, click next, and then select a Table. Sometimes my Prestige points don’t match the Table I picked, so I have to redo the Prestige, reassign the points, remember what the Table does, and finally select it before I can play. There’s no way to check a Table first and plan your Prestige points accordingly, which makes strategizing unnecessarily tedious.
To be completely honest, I ended up using Cheat Engine’s speed hack just to 100% the achievements. I’d already seen everything the game had to offer, and the remaining grind added nothing but wasted time.
The cosmetics are nice though, too bad there are more hats than features.
All in all, and to conclude this wall of text, Gamblers Table has a strong concept and great presentation, but it feels like a promising prototype stretched into a full release. It genuinely feels bad not to recommend it, because the core idea is there and the potential is obvious if the game isn't set in stone and more content updates are planned. That said, in its current state, I just can't recommend it.
