BALATRO
LocalThunk
PC, Switch, PS5, Phone

Balatro has swindled a lot of people into believing it is a simple game. In Balatro, you are given a deck of playing cards, draw a hand of eight, and are tasked with making five card poker hands to score points. Score enough points before you run out of hands, and you move on to the next round, which requires even more points. Between each round, you get access to the shop – the shop is where the game of Balatro is truly played. With the money you earn by playing well and quickly, you can level up your played hands (for example, buying the Uranus card will increase the number of points you get for playing two pair), enhance your cards so that they give more points (or more cash), and buy Jokers, which provide various special effects to score more, enhance more, or earn more cash.

The game genre of “deck building,” where players turn a modest starting deck into a monster of superpowered cards and special synergies, has its roots in collectible trading card games like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon. But deckbuilding games as their own, contained genre, which give access to all four players a shared pool of cards to buy up and trick out, equalize the playing field by only insisting on static, non-randomized purchases, and if you’ve ever played Dominion, Ascension, or Dune: Imperium, you’ve likely been inducted into the thinking that drives the best Balatro players. Video games have hit a wave of deckbuilders themselves after the popularity of Slay the Spire, and most video games in the genre have imitated that game’s focus on RPG combat.

By eschewing these combat oriented aesthetics, Balatro is capable of refocusing its collection of Jokers and enhancements on simply making the most efficient deck imaginable. You are not buying cards to heal your character or gain armor – you are buying a Lucky King of Spades, which synergizes with the jokers you bought that double your multiplier when you play a face card and add three mult when you play a spades card. The fact that it’s Lucky means there’s a 1 in 5 chance for it to give you more points and a 1 in 20 chance it gives you more cash.

Almost everything you do feeds back into the points, the cards themselves, your cash, or giving you better odds of finding the cards you need in the shop. It’s that intense focus that allows for so many fine tuned opportunities for crafting a deck that blows away all of the possibility you’ve ever imagined for the game. You start the game scoring 100, 200 points per hand, and yet the numbers eventually go so high that they’re printed in scientific notation. And this isn’t pinball scores – you really did create a machine that is that kind of efficient!

While using poker as its basis, Balatro resists both gambling and casino aesthetics. It avoids flashing lights, slot sounds, a mountain of coins and chips pushed as appetizing. There is randomness in drawing cards from a deck, and some jokers (or enhancements like the Lucky cards) have a random chance of triggering. But except for those circumstances, the math you submit for your scores is perfect math – you have the information in front of you to determine whether or not you’re going to score enough points to proceed.

And even though the game is avoiding its Vegas level of addictive aesthetics, the sound of the shuffling cards, the rising tone as your points go up, and the synthwave grooves are so pleasurable to experience. The aesthetics are charming, too, with lots of great art for the jokers, snappy movement of the in-game cards, and an always exciting effect when your points light on fire when you score enough points to win in a single hand. Hell, if you play on mobile, the haptic feedback even gives you a little rumble every time you shuffle the deck.

The thing about Balatro is that from the outside, it sounds obtuse, but to spend time playing or watching someone play Balatro very quickly unfolds its pleasures. When Balatro was announced for Geoff Keighley’s dubious Game Awards as a Game of the Year nominee this year, some people balked at the idea of a “simple little card game” meriting championship. Those who have played it generally recognize that within those simple confines, thousands of hours of combinations, complexities, and stratagems have emerged, comparing the game to landmarks of game design like Tetris that are endlessly replayable. This game merits at least one game study book – understanding precisely which kinds of thinking it rewards, the probabilities of its highest efficiency, which mechanics are maybe extraneous. Like Tetris itself, maybe you’ll play it for a half hour and say “this is pretty cool, I dunno!”