Balatro is an amazing game. That is basically all you need to know about Balatro. It is one of my favourite games of all time and, accordingly, it is no surprise that it is one of my most played games on Steam now. I started playing it back in March last year, and it is a game I keep coming back to. Even after I completed it (i.e., achieved 100% of the achievements on Steam).
Balatro is a game that is easy to pick up, especially if you are familiar with Texas Hold’em poker or deck building games. However, most importantly, Balatro is a single-player game and you do not pay-to-play. You do not play against other players or even an AI. The objective of the game is to play hands and obtain a minimum number of points before you run out of hands to play. This number is easy to reach in the beginning but increases a lot during a run.
You begin with a standard deck of 52 cards. You are dealt a hand of eight cards and you need to play a hand of maximum five cards (but you can, if you so desire, play a single card). The better your hand is, the more points you get. If your best hand is a pair, you get less point compared to if your hand was, say, a flush. You do start with a number of discards, so you can discard some of your cards and get new cards to play a better hand (also up to five of your eight cards per discard). The better the cards you play, the more points you get. A pair of aces give more points than a pair of twos. If you reach the minimum threshold of points before running out of hands, you win and can move on. This is the basic mechanic but things are about to get a bit more complicated and fun.
The first game you play is the ‘small blind’. Once you beat a blind you earn some dollars and move to the shop. The shop is where you will end up spending a lot of time contemplating your choices (in Balatro and beyond). In the shop you are presented with a few different things you can buy (if you have the money) or ignore. Here is where your deck of 52 cards is about to become less standard in different ways. First, conditional upon the choices you are given, you can end up with a deck that is smaller or larger than 52 cards. You can, for example, end up not having any 2s in your deck or having five A♥. I guess you can already see where this is going. You can make changes to your deck that will make it easier to make certain combinations of hands and thereby score more points. For example, you can slowly turn your deck into only having hearts, making it easy to make flushes.
You can also upgrade your specific cards. For example, you can upgrade your cards to give extra points, to give extra mult (a multiplication of your points), give extra money if they are left in your hand at the end of a round, being played twice, etc. That is, an A♥ is not simply an A♥ but can be a card that provides several additional benefits to your play.
The ability to upgrade, copy, and remove your cards is not the primary thing that makes Balatro interesting though. The joker in the game is … jokers. Jokers are cards that you cannot play but apply to every hand you play. For example, you can have jokers that give more points if you play a flush. Or econ jokers that give you more cash if you play a specific hand. Or jokers that give you more hands to play. The important thing is that the order you have your jokers in matters, and the interactions between the jokers mean that you rarely end up playing a run that looks like any other run (for more on the design and logic of these jokers, check out this post on Reddit).
Let us take a simple example. I like to play flushes. This means that I like to turn as many of my cards into a specific suit and buy jokers that are friendly towards flushes. Accordingly, how I build my deck and the jokers I buy will all interact and make it more likely that I win. But the challenge is that to make it to the next ante (the next level), you need to beat a boss blind, where there is a specific challenge.
The problem with sticking to one specific strategy is that the boss blind might not be friendly towards your strategy and can make you lose the game if you have all your eggs in one basket. For example, if you build a strategy up around playing only face cards but the boss blind means that your face cards are not played, you will find it difficult to win. For that reason, I often only decide upon a strategy after I have defeated a boss blind. If, for example, the boss blind is deactivating my heart cards, then I will beat the blind and now begin to convert my cards into hearts (as the boss blind will not show up again).
What I love about Balatro is that it turns “multiplayer poker” into a better game. It is much closer to a game like solitaire than poker. The thing is that I do not care much about the relative power of a hand to what other players can have. When playing poker, A♦A♥A♠K♥K♠ is a weaker hand than A♦A♥A♠9♥9♠ (as the former hand leaves more ways to beat your hand with the remaining cards), but I cannot find the motivation to care about such aspects. There is nothing about that in Balatro. I know that there are games such as Figgie that tries to improve poker, but at the end of the day I find single-player games more aligned with what I am looking for in games.
You make decisions under uncertainty, but it is not about strategic interdependence. Instead, it is about uncertainty about the future, and in particular future cards and shops and blinds and whatnot. As you play the game a lot, you will develop a good intuition about how to win and what types of hands to play when (and what strategies to pursue). Also, one reason that the game is chill is that you cannot really do the math after a certain point. You simply have to rely on your intuition and vibes. But the game is not simply random (see, e.g., this video for a completion of the game with no losses).
The game is developed by the anonymous developer, LocalThunk. It is an impressive work of art and I admire the ability to develop such a game as a single developer. There is a funny story to that name which also confirms my intuition about how a lot of people name variables in R:
My partner was learning to code in R at the time, and she asked me “How do you name your variables?” I went on some rant about casing, using descriptive words, underscores, etc. She waits until I am finished and says “I like to call mine thunk”. I thought that was just about the funniest thing I had ever heard.
The way variables are declared in Lua is (sometimes) with the local keyword, thus local thunk was born! I wouldn’t choose this name for quite a while yet but this is the moment I looked back on when I was finally ready to create a developer handle online.
As I have now completed the game (and thereby explored – and won with – all jokers and decks in the game), I primarily return to the game when I stumble upon an interesting seed. The other day I played the seed ALEEB as it gives all the legendary jokers before ante 4 (I found the seed on the Balatro subreddit). There is also a big community that is into modding the game and providing new features in the form of challenges, jokers, etc. See, for example, the GitHub repository awesome-balatro for an overview of different mods and tools. I have not tried out any of these yet as I am not that much into modding, but it clearly shows that there is a lot to explore in Balatro.
There is not a lot I can say about Balatro, if anything, that has not already been said before. And a lot of people have written about their experience with Balatro (see, e.g., this great post by Chris Coyier). Again, all you have to know about Balatro is that it is an amazing game. If you are looking for a new fun game to play or a new addiction, do consider Balatro.