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Maddmike Steam Curator
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Balatro is so excellent that it feels like it was discovered, not created. It effortlessly evokes the brainy strategies of the best roguelike deckbuilders while also tying itself back to a poker theming that all those games were mechanically riffing from anyway.
An approachable UI welcomes players who don’t know their flushes from their straights, but there’s still plenty of challenge to be found in the management of your deck and economy—all wrapped up in an intuitive package that would make your grandpa take pause and watch over your shoulder.
The result is a simple yet compelling deckbuilder that’s as infinite and as classic as a deck of 52.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3165517353
Balatro is a roguelike solitaire version of poker. Each run starts by dealing you eight cards and asking you to produce the best five-card-hand you can. Repeat over the course of a few rounds.
Rather than having a table of opponents, you’re attempting to hit a score threshold. Each hand has its own score and its own multiplier. The short term strategy is born from Balatro’s drawing and discard rules; you get a few free per card mulligans each turn, and in a deckbuilder-like fashion you refuel your hand after each play.
Within your first minute you’re being asked to answer strategic questions about your risk tolerance: do you discard a guaranteed hand in pursuit of a better one? Or do you play it safe and work with what you got?
The fact that each card replaces itself on play makes them act as a secondary discard, too. Have a hand that’s just short of a flush? Why not open round one with playing a modest pair from different suits and chucking in three other random cards alongside them: even if they’re not contributing towards that pair and its point value, they are freeing up those hand slots and give you greater flush opportunities the following turn. It’s not guaranteed to work but that’s the beauty of it: you’re always looking for little ways to stack the deck in your favor.
That's just one example among dozens where Balatro is constantly giving you decisions in small but provocative ways.
That philosophy becomes multiplied after your first few hands when Balatro exposes you to some of its run-wide systems. You get a shop with “booster packs”, which sounds corny for a deck-of-52 game like this until it gets coupled with the game's concept of “jokers”.
These would be your “relics” or “artifacts” in a title with a more “video-gamey” theme, they’re passive bonuses that will stay with you for an entire run and you can hold up to five of them under normal conditions.
One run I got a joker that multiplied my score if I only played three card hands instead of five. Now all of the sudden I’m pivoting to a style that boosts three of a kinds and pairs, and flushes are near useless because they force me above that three-card limit by their very nature.
That changed how I looked at those “booster packs”: now suit was less relevant with flushes off the table, allowing me to target specific numbers and faces to maximize my three-card-hand potential.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3165517772
Almost every joker can warp a game in this way, so you get this long term strategy of crafting good jokers for your deck and crafting good decks for your jokers. It’s so deep and so fun, once you start to see all the pieces come together it’s easy to imagine all the ways you can arrange them to make for truly unique runs every single attempt.
It’s a time black hole, the hours just melt in front of you.
Part of that is probably because of how well produced it is, too. Not only does it have a simple, replayable little gameplay style but it also has a presentation that makes infinite play so appealing. Mechanically the ‘blinds’ are kind of like enemies, but they don’t really feel that way. You don’t get any smashing or crashing animations into them when you successfully score points, just little bleeps and the sound of stacking chips.
It gives Balatro a very non-confrontational vibe, where the focus is always just you and your cards. Each turned in hand gives you a brief animation of your cards cashing in their point values but also a little visual indicator that shows your jokers boosting their power. It makes it obvious who your load bearing jokers are and the fact that the score acquisition is so multiplication heavy gives you this big explosion of points once every card has done its little dance that makes the result so satisfying.
Beyond just being a game with immediately interesting rules and endless strategy, Balatro is also just a damn good roguelike in the conventional sense, too. The meta progression is a steady increase in options and scope. You’ll get more potential jokers, more consumable power ups, and more card types.
There are multiple ‘boss encounters’ that you’ll want to start building around, too. They apply modifiers that can be a counter to your exact strategy. One of my first almost successful runs leaned on beefing up easy hands like pairs and giving myself additional hands per round: going for consistent additive plays instead of singularly big ones. Imagine my frustration upon meeting the Needle, an encounter that allowed only a single hand to be played.
Obviously, I lost; but the lesson might not be what you think it was. The standard approach would be to have a more flexible deck next time, but there’s nothing wrong with single-mindedness in Balatro as long as you bring insurance: either jokers or consumables that let you re-roll or nullify a boss encounters’ modifiers.
There’s also thought that needs to be given to the relative strength of your deck. Maybe that consistent ‘two of a kind’ will get you through the early game, but it may not yield the points you need as the run gets tough (and it literally ups the ante). A strategic pivot into strengthening higher point value hands is always on your mind, and you need to be aware of how much hand manipulation you currently have and if you’re ready for that pivot.
Balatro isn’t just a loving ode to standard playing card decks but also a subtle homage to cards and collectables more generally. It creates intrigue in opening up a ‘booster pack’ of regular cards by sprinkling in lots of modifiers. There are ‘lucky’ cards that have a chance of giving a small bonus in addition to their regular effects, steel cards are incentivized to be held and give multipliers to played hands they aren’t in, and golden cards help boost your economy.
Holographics, foils, and more are attributes you can find on jokers in addition to their regular behaviors, which give you this exciting boost and maybe a reason to alter strategies into a joker that may otherwise be suboptimal for your deck.
In Conclusion
Balatro does so much with so little. With a deck of playing cards and some powerups, it’s created a timeless card system with high stakes but low pressure. This game of probability manipulation and strategy is one of the best deckbuilders of all time, and its intuitive ‘playing-card’ presentation might also make it one of the best versions of Solitaire ever made, too.
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