If you ever get a chance to talk to Tim Clare about the history of playing cards, you should. I’ve seen him talk at length about the subject with passion and knowledge. It’s a fascinating history of gambling, sabotage, secrets, and surprise. All to create the 52 card deck most folk are now familiar with.
Poker is the most iconic game that you can play with this deck. There are variants for all ages and occasions. It has appeared in countless films, books, and plays. The developer LocalThunk, is a one person operation. They took the cloak of Poker and wrapped a score-attack roguelike up in to create Balatro.
Balatro is a simple idea that is a little tricky to describe. Your aim is to survive 8 antes of the game. Each ante is split into a small blind, big blind, and a boss blind. The game wears the terminology of poker without adhering to it. Blinds have a target number of points you need to hit in order to pass them. You do this by playing poker hands: two pair, flush, full house etc.
Each of these hands is worth a certain number of chips, points, multiplied by a number. For instance a simple two pair is worth 20 chips and is multiplied by 2. When you play your hand the value of the cards played is added to the chips total and then the result is multiplied. Royal cards are worth 10 and the Ace is worth 11. This gives you your score which gets you towards the blind target. You only have a certain number of hands in each blind to do this.
At the end of each Ante you go up against a Boss Blind. These are tough to beat as they bring new restrictions to what, and how, you play. One may turn all your royal cards, face down making it harder to play hands. Another may neuter all diamond cards making them worth nothing but still counting for the hands you play. The variety here is impressive meaning you can never predict exactly which bosses you’ll see. Sometimes this will bring you low, but a run is so quick you can just press play once more.
The hand of cards you get to choose from is larger than a normal poker hand, at 8 cards. You also get some discards to use to try and improve your fortunes. When you surpass the target, the blind is over and you get rewards. Each blind is worth a dollar amount when you beat it, and the more efficiently you do so, the more money you will get. This money is not for gambling, the designer has been clear about never wanting the game to be connected to actual gambling, though risk and reward do have their part to play.
This cash is instead to be used for shopping in between blinds. This is where things start to get really funky. The eagle eyed will notice that the deck in Balatro is 52 cards, missing out the jokers that you get in most packs. The jokers are just one of many things we can buy in the shop.
Each of the jokers can help us on our journey, and we can have up to 5 at a time. From simply making odd cards worth more chips, or making heart suited cards add to the multiplier to really, really esoteric powers I am not going to spoil for you. Discovering combinations and being delighted by possibilities is all part of the fun of Balatro.
Now the shop is not just for jokers. You can also buy a variety of booster packs, each giving you a choice from multiple options for tools to improve your deck. Celestial packs give you planet cards that can increase the number of chips and multiplier for different types of hands. Spectral packs can alter the structure of your deck and put tokens on cards that give you effects when those cards are played or held.
Tarot packs are probably the most common one to see, and give you various ways to enhance cards in your deck, making them worth more, give you cash when played, and more besides. Finally playing card packs allow you to add cards to your deck. Some of these will be enhanced already with the powers from the other available packs.
Oh, and let’s not forget vouchers as well which can alter the way you interact with the shop, increasing the frequency of certain packs and doing other strange things. That’s a lot to take in and as the realisation of what you can do in Balatro becomes apparent, it can feel overwhelming. Figuring out where to put your money and when is part of the challenge. The possibilities feel limitless.
There is no question that Balatro may be the ultimate expression of the ‘just one more turn’ game. When you play a hand and the system grabs hold of it, each bonus you have crafted into your deck pings and shakes. Points go up. If you have loads of bonus sources the frequency of pings and shakes go up reaching a crescendo of sound and fury. It is very, very satisfying and I have found myself laughing with delight as I pull off something particularly ridiculous.
As you play you unlock new toys, as is common in this type of game. New jokers, vouchers, enhancements and more. One of the nice things Balatro does is give you information as to how to unlock these, and these can become objective to aim for. Mechanisms emerge, and you learn that some rules are meant to be broken. Not all decks are made equal.
Alongside new powers, you unlock new base decks to play with. Extra hands, more discards, larger cash amounts to start with are all some of the more mundane ones you meet early on. When things start to become too easy you can raise the ante type, bringing new restrictions to your playthroughs. As you meet and defeat these goals, you unlock even more options. These restrictions breed creativity. You choose powers you may not have previously considered, diving into the toybox that is Balatro and emerging with a a combination you never thought valid.
Like many games of this type, when you beat the 8th ante on a run and ‘win’, you can keep going into an ‘endless mode’. In a lot of roguelikes this feels sort of pointless but in Balatro it gives you a chance to really challenge yourself. Can you hold onto your pace as the antes reach the millions and ascend into the need for scientific notation to express the huge numbers? It is a compelling prospect and I have pushed into the heady heights of Ante 11 and 12 before now.
I haven’t really talked about the aesthetic much. Balatro looks like it is being displayed on a CRT monitor with the lines inherent to that format of Television. To me it evokes the sort of game you might find on a casino floor in the past. A poker like game that will eat your money and keep the house rich. It looks absolutely perfect. The jokers all have their own aesthetic and it means you can quickly recognise what you are being offered as you get more familiar with the game.
Balatro is a dangerous game for those of a certain mindset, like me. It will possess you. You’ll find yourself thinking about combos. Remembering those fist pumping moments when you defeat a difficult run. Laughing as you recall a particular hand and the sounds that go along with it. It is a truly innovative piece of design, with a simple and compelling premise that has been honed to absolute perfection.
I bought Balatro on Switch with my own money.
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