I have to say, I did not see this coming. In the space of a month I have discovered not one but two atypical deckbuilders that have completely subverted my expectations. The first is Luck be a Landlord, a slot machine simulator that stole my heart a whole year after its initial release (better late than never). The second is the very game that you and I here to discuss, Dear Reader.
Balatro is, in many ways, the game of my dreams. I love an interesting spin on the roguish formula, and I’m a keen Poker player (at least I was before my children ruined everything with their pesky wants and needs). The question in my mind was whether developer LocalThunk would be able to weave the two together in a satisfactory manner.
What is Balatro?
I know I always start with this question, but it’s not only to satisfy the SEO gods. Well, it’s mostly to satisfy the SEO gods, but that’s because they have way more influence over this industry than they ought to have – but that discourse is not the reason that either of us are here.
Balatro is a roguelike deckbuilder. That means, somewhat paradoxically, that it’s not a roguelike at all, but rather it’s a game that borrows roguish features – permadeath and procedurally generated elements – and infuses them into a card game. This sub-genre works because cards are a wonderful way of explaining and sharing complex mechanics with a player; they give you the opportunity to offer up the kind of detail that simply isn’t possible in most other games.
Instead of sci-fi or fantasy tropes, the deck here is inspired by traditional playing cards, although there is much more going on here than just straights and flushes. Balatro utilises the whole deck and much more besides to create an experience that is both refreshingly new but also reassuringly familiar.
The aim of the game is as simple as you’re probably imagining. You must score big points by playing the best possible hands from the cards that you’ve been dealt. As you progress, the points total that you must reach each time gets more and more daunting; however there is a huge array of tactical options for the player to explore as new cards are added to the game.
Playing your cards right
While it is ostensibly as simple “play good hands”, if you snuffle around just a little you will quickly discover that there is a huge amount of depth in Balatro. This is thanks to the various systems and features that LocalThunk has layered in on top of the more traditional Poker mechanics that most people will already know.
Much of the time, getting a straight, a flush, or even a full house is a good result and they will get you points, however, the rewards will only take you so far, as the target total is constantly rising. This conundrum is solved by multipliers that are added to your deck in a number of different ways.
Your main means of improving your deck is via the jokers that you can pick up between matches. These powerful cards sit aside from your playing cards and, once equipped, they influence every hand that you subsequently play. You can buy them with the money that has been earned in previous rounds, picking up new cards that can enhance your deck in new and interesting ways.
You can usually hold up to five jokers at once, and these high value cards give you a range of different multipliers and points boosts. Each one is activated by its own type of card or hand, so they give you a points bonus based on what you play. In fact, they really help focus your play as you look to build a hand that triggers as many multipliers as possible. Still with me? Good.
Planets, Tarot cards, and upgrading your deck
Each level has three rounds: the small blind, the big blind, and then you must beat the third to up the ante and raise the stakes. You can sometimes skip a small blind, but I tend to play most of them. The third round in each level is essentially the boss battle, and these challenges are made more difficult via modifiers that introduce new wrinkles for you to overcome. For example, all clubs might be debuffed, or you might lose two cards from your deck during a pause between hands, restricting your options as you play the round.
One of these bosses had me so frustrated that I was ready to use this review to have a good old moan. However, adversity is often the mother of invention, and it was in the subsequent exploration of the joker deck, and then finding new synergies with the planet and tarot cards, that, actually, I became convinced of Balatro’s genius. One particular challenge wanted me to win without discarding any cards; during a normal hand you have three or four opportunities to swap the crappier cards that you’re holding with different ones drawn at random from your deck.
My whole strategy at this point had been built on using the discard action to fluff up my hand with better cards. The first two times I encountered this challenge, being stuck with the cards I had been dealt was essentially a guaranteed Game Over screen, as previously I’d built my tactics around trying to make high scoring straights and flushes. These failures prompted a reevaluation of how I could earn points from unhelpful cards, and so I started using the tools at my disposal in different ways.
One example of this shift came about via my deployment of the planet cards. Planets are one-use disposable cards that allow you to boost the base multiplier of a specific hand. I’d been trying to make my straights and flushes as high scoring as possible, but now I started focusing on levelling up my pairs and high cards.
The tarot cards, on the other hand, allow you to change and/or upgrade the more traditional cards in your deck. That meant that I could turn a disproportionate number of my cards into hearts, or upgrade my kings and queens with additional multipliers. Because I was choosing new jokers and then upgrading my deck in different ways, I wasn’t worrying about getting a straight flush; I could play a simple pair and still trigger a bunch of multipliers and get a big score.
Things get even more exciting when you get to the so-called spectral cards. These are cards that can super-charge your deck with new abilities. For example, in one game almost a quarter of my deck was converted into threes, massively increasing my chances of get four-of-a-kind and so on. As you move through the levels, finding creative ways to utilise and enhance your deck becomes utterly essential – and you’ll still lose most of the time.
Cards on the table time
Sampling the demo during Steam Next Fest was enough to persuade me that Balatro was a very good game. Now, after spending the best part of a week playing it non-stop, I’ve determined that Balatro is a small slice of brilliance. In fact, I think I’ve found a game that I’ll be playing long into the future – and I don’t say that lightly.
I have been so impressed by the amount of variety already offered by the cards and jokers that I’ve unlocked, and there’s still plenty more left for me to discover. For example, there are different starting decks and a challenge mode to unlock, and more mechanics that I’ve not mentioned for fear of overwhelming you with too much detail.
I can’t wait to get stuck back in, to play more hands, to discover more interesting synergies, and to experience more of those satisfying moments when a plan comes together and you’re able to beat a boss in one turn with a pair of sixes.
Balatro is an exceptional video game, a tactical triumph, and the perfect twist on Poker that I never knew I needed. I don’t put scores on games, so I’ll just say that this one is ace and leave it at that.
Balatro is out on February 20 on PC, PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox platforms. I played on PC, and it worked like a charm on my Steam Deck.
