This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker! is a mashup of a lot of different games, but the basic premise is that it most certainly is poker, but as a clicker game.
I love playing poker. I’m not good at it, but knowing just enough of the basics lets me have a great time. In video game format, though, it never really captures me. I can’t play casino games, I can’t play online, or with whimsical character designs. Nah, pass me with that. I have a deck of cards. That’s why games like Balatro fascinate and captivate me. It’s poker, -ish, but it’s more about everything else. This Ain’t Even Poker, Ya Joker! is in that same vein but as an incremental clicker game. Our goal is the same, to get a great hand, but now have to do it several million times within a circus. In fact, it’s more about the circus than the actual cards. It could be jugglers or trapeze acts!
Sweet!
The challenge withn a game like this isn’t about knowing poker. Heck, we never have to look at the hands we’re dealt, at all. The game just flips through cards until it lands on an actual combination and gives us money. Being an incremental game means that the challenge is actually in how much we’re willing to be stuck doing the minutae, the mundane, to get to a goal. In this case the game asks us to hit a Billion dollars before we’re free (surprise, we won’t be) and then adds in the layers as to how we can do that. It feels good, actually, to rank up a type of hand or add the ability to hunt for treasure and collect new cards. Initially I started only adding cards, but somewhere by my 5th or 6th run I developed the urge to cultivate decks, preferring two pairs over high cards for example, and then adding and deleting the necessary cards to improve the chances at those combos.
It does get kind of crazily flashy, too, and I mean that in the way that there’s so much happening on the screen that it can draw our eyes to different stuff as things explode with money and lights.
Beyond all of that there isn’t much DEPTH in Ya Joker. It is, again, just testing us to see how long we’ll play before we tire out. I know that tends to be the focus of the genre, but I do wish there was slightly a bit more for me to actually have influence over apart from the skill tree, which later on can be completely activate all at once. But that’s fine, I guess. I don’t look to these games for prolonged play sessions; they’re meant to be in the background, overheating our laptops or draining our Steamdeck batteries.
Get that Billion dollars, Ya Joker.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video originally appeared on The SideQuest for January 23, 2026.
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