Balatro is one of the shining examples of the relatively new ‘roguelike deckbuilder’ genre, which combines the randomly procedurally generated levels of roguelikes with the dynamic card management system of deckbuilders.
The genre’s been present for around a decade, but has received a recent outburst of online virality, with games like Slay the Spire and Luck Be a Landlord being staples of Twitch and YouTube streams. Something about the relaxed progression and the cerebral gameplay pulls people in and keeps them hooked. It’s this feeling that Balatro has in spades (no pun intended).
LocalThunk, the one-person developer of the game, originally conceived of it as a variation of the Hong Kong game Big Two. The main element that influenced the game was the mechanic of playing specific hand types, such as pairs or full houses, and earning points based on them. LocalThunk thought of ways to modify this mechanic into a single player experience with a goal to reach, and deliberately avoided playing other roguelike deckbuilders to ensure his game was original as possible. After a demo release in 2023, and some modifications based on player feedback, Balatro was released to the public in February 2024.
Your first Balatro run starts off pretty unassumingly. You get dealt seven cards and have to play a set number of hands that all have ‘chip’ and ‘mult’ values. Multiplying these two values together gives you a point score for that hand, and you have to beat arbitrary values referred to as ‘blinds’. It seems pretty simple, if maybe a little boring, but when you get to the first shop, everything changes.
The core of this game is in its ‘joker’ system. You can buy jokers of varying rarity in the shop, which all have unique effects: +8 mult if a hand contains a pair, +2 chips per each remaining card in the deck, x3 mult if the played poker hand type has already been played this round, and so on. The key to mastering the game lies in recognising which jokers synergise with each other, which ones are good late game and early game, which fit your preferred hand type, and which help your economy out if necessary.
With only five beginning joker slots, you’ll have to buy and sell throughout the game, pivoting between different strategies as the run calls for it. And with 150 jokers to choose from, there is an obscene number of potential strategies to keep a player on their toes, encouraging smart and creative plays to achieve the maximum score.
Adding to the strategy are the three different types of consumable cards: ‘planets’, ‘tarots’, and ‘spectrals’. Planets upgrade the base chips and mult for a specific hand type – for example, pairs or flushes. Tarots have various effects, including changing card suits, increasing card ranks, or adding extra chips or mult to a specific card. Spectrals are the most powerful of the consumables, and can do very important things like create more joker space, or add card seals that generate planets or tarots.
What starts as a regular 52-card deck can slowly evolve into a deck with sixteen queens, or a deck where every card is a king of spades that multiplies your mult by two. One ‘voucher’ also appears each round, providing expensive but important effects that permanently affect the whole duration of the run.
So, how do you win? The game is split into three rounds, each containing a small blind, a big blind, and a boss blind. The score you need to beat these blinds increases per round, and each round’s boss blind also contains a stipulation, such as all heart cards being debuffed or -1 hand size. You are allowed to see the stipulation at the start of a round, giving you a couple of chances to rethink your strategy if you’re at a disadvantage. Additionally, the non-boss blinds can be skipped for ‘tags’, giving you certain rewards, but also missing the potential money or items earned during that blind. If you beat the eighth round, you win that run.
But once you win a run, the game’s not over. Not even close. There are 15 decks in Balatro, each with a game-changing condition. The Painted Deck starts you with +2 hand size but -1 joker slots, encouraging playstyles focused around drawing rarer hands with higher base scores such as four-of-a-kinds or straights. The Abandoned Deck completely removes all face cards, giving the player more freedom to fix the smaller sized deck but also taking away the utility of many jokers and consumables. My favourite, the Erratic Deck, generates 52 random cards as your initial deck, making every playthrough unique and challenging.
Additionally, each deck has eight different-coloured difficulty stakes. These difficulty modifiers stack until the highest tier, Gold Stake, where you’ll really have to master the game’s mechanics and be able to create winning combos on the fly to make it all the way to the eighth round. Your jokers can be perishable, making them disappear in five rounds, or rentals, which cost $3 per round, or eternals, which can never be sold to make room for other jokers.
This creates intense situations such as having to judge whether a joker is strong enough to be worth the cost of keeping around, or the worrying feeling as that run-carrying joker you have is on its last round before extinction. These difficulty additions never feel like the typical lazy ‘inflated HP more enemies less damage’ stipulations that plague other games, but rather encourage you to think about already seen game mechanics in a new light and re-strategise based on what you’ve been presented with.
All these things that I’ve mentioned contribute to why Balatro works so well – re-playability. You can shoot for highscore runs in the relative ease of White Stake Plasma Deck, or force yourself to suffer through the harsh economic challenge of Gold Stake Black Deck. The requirements to unlock certain jokers encourage distinctive ways of play, such as shrinking your hand size down to five.
And if you want more specific challenges, the game comes with 20 premade decks with modified conditions ranging from the simple (one in four cards being drawn face down) to the insane (beating the game without using any jokers). There’s never an opportunity to feel bored, and there are lots of options to set a run up for the playstyle you find most comfortable. If there was ever a pick for a ‘Desert Island Game’, this might be mine.
Balatro‘s success doesn’t seem to be slowing down, with a mobile port releasing two months ago reaching #1 on the paid games section of the App Store, and being downloaded over 100,000 times on the Play Store. For people unsatisfied with the unoriginality that certain big-name AAA games have been giving us recently, or those who want a game that allows a player to learn and become better in a satisfying and intelligent way, Balatro is the game for you. Just remember to take a break every once in a while.
