Ballionaire: Your New favorite Rube Goldberg Machine
During the summers when I was a kid, my parents would drop us off with my grandparents. My brother and I would while away the hours playing carrom with Grandpa, tooling around at high speeds on the golf cart (until I hit a tomato cage), and watching the Price is Right before Grandma’s soap operas came on. Price is Right was, and is, very dreamlike.
Bob Barker, or Drew Carey, would always reveal a smorgasbord of prizes from behind a 70’s rumpus room wall that you could win if you spin a giant wheel and get the closest to a dollar or guess the price of salad dressings based on the yodelings of a mad mountaineer who was just introduced to the concept of capitalism. Those games were well and fine, but my favorite was always Plinko.
The concept of Plinko is fairly easy: drop the disk down the upright board and win the cash amount at the bottom. You can earn more chances at the big prize of $10K by guessing the price of a block of cheese. It seemed so easy to just drop the puck and let the carnival game decide your fate. The problem with Plinko is that it’s just a puck, some pegs and a dream. What if you could take it to the next level?
Enter Ballionaire, released on December 10th, 2024 by developer Newobject and publisher Raw Fury. I was not really aware of this game until I saw LocalThunk (creator of The Game Award’s ‘Game of the Year 2024’ nominee Balatro) post about it on Twitter in their own awards thread. Even then I didn’t check out a trailer for the game, and I’m kind of glad because it truly surprised me! Ballionaire is Plinko, but like the version my child’s mind couldn’t have fathomed with booby traps, hens laying eggs and axes hacking eyeballs in half!
Ballionaire shares some roguelike qualities with Balatro, but feels way more zany than it’s Poker coded cousin. Each run you get a board with a set of boons preset, the goal being to drop a ball and hit as many boons as possible to meet or beat the cash score within 5 attempts. Between each ball drop you get to add another boon or buff to the board. You’re essentially creating a Rube Goldberg machine that spits out chaos on every run.
The most satisfying aspect for me is when I started playing into synergies of neighboring boons in order to create massive explosions or to put some coin in the bank for intense multipliers on the next round! I lost track of time playing this on stream last night (sorry Avowed) but I had a blast figuring out different strategies with my community. I could also see this game being a very easy ‘ease into the action’ game for streamers.
If you’re planning on streaming this game on Twitch, there is an integration built in that allows your chat to vote on which boons and buffs you should take each run. I did end up turning this feature off after the first hour because, typically, each run was less than a minute in length and the integration would spam chat as soon as the ball dropped from the board. If there was a way to pair this with a bot that could handle Twitch’s polling functionality I could see it working much better, but probably a low priority item for the team.
All in all, Ballionaire is excellent and goes above and beyond my boyhood Plinko dreams! I’m looking forward to playing this more as a warm-up game. You can pick the game up on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2667120/Ballionaire/
FULL DISCLOSURE: I was provided a review code for Ballionaire by the publisher Raw Fury Through Lurkit in exchange for a promotional segment on my Twitch stream. I received no other payment from Raw Fury, Newobject or other representatives to make content on this game or to write this piece.