Review: Balatro is the next must-have deck builder

I’m not a poker guy, but I definitely am Balatro guy now.

Created by one anonymous developer who appears under the pseudonym LocalThunk, Balatro is a deck-building roguelite that makes poker an infinitely replayable and highly addictive game by adding cards that break the rules of poker in the most delightful way possible – through lots of math. I didn’t think anyone could do it PEMDAS funny, but Balatro proved me wrong.

Image: LocalThunk/Playstack via Polygon

Every run starts simply. You play a series of levels (called “Antes”), each consisting of three encounters (called “Blinds”): Small, Big, and Boss. In each game you have to get a high score in a limited number of hands. Your score is determined using a simple mathematical formula: X times Y. Both numbers are influenced by the hands you play. Stronger cards and stronger hands net more points, and like any good roguelike, you can add multipliers on top of the multipliers to keep increasing those numbers. The poker rules apply to the strength of the hands; A four of a kind gets you more chips than a full house, which gets you more chips than a flush, which gets you more chips than a straight, etc. When you win rounds, you get money that you then spend Balatro‘s Shop – this is where the real game begins.

After each blind is defeated you enter the shop. There you can spend your hard-earned money on a variety of options to further strengthen and make your deck stand out: rule-breaking joker cards, deck-modifying tarot cards, booster packs of holofoil cards, cards that could be ghosts, and more. Hand types such as three of a kind or flush can be upgraded via planetary cards, increasing their multiplier.

Image: LocalThunk/Playstack via Polygon

The store is the be-all and end-all of winning Balatro Run, because after the opening phase you won’t be able to beat any of the antes without a little help from these cards. Boss blinds introduce hard-to-beat mechanics, such as: Such as blocking a single suit from winning points, or requiring you to only play one type of hand for the entire blind, and each successive ante requires increasingly higher points for each blind. The game is about collecting score modifiers from these additive cards to make individual hands stronger – adding chips and multipliers, then multipliers To these multipliers – in the case of my first one Balatro If you win, even a weak pair of nines can win the game.

Image: LocalThunk/Playstack via Polygon

At the start of this run I treated myself to a Marble Joker. After each level, a stone card was added to my deck; These are colorless and numberless cards that add 50 chips to each hand you play them with. Marble Joker itself isn’t great. For example, too many Stone cards can hurt your chance of playing literally any hand since they have no number or suit. But I also picked two other important jokers: Hologram, which adds a 0.25x multiplier per card added to your deck, and Driver’s License, which adds a flat 3x multiplier when you upgrade at least 16 Have cards in your deck. I combined this with some other wilds that added multipliers to every hand I played, and by the end of the game, what started out as a 20-point hand was consistently earning over 500,000 points, all thanks to the +10 accumulation here and one twice there. In the correct order (card abilities are read from left to right, so make sure you add before multiplying), I saw a score multiplier of more than 1,300x that a pair of nines – an objectively not good poker hand – turned into my first glorious taste of victory.

If this all sounds very mathematical, that’s because it is. Not since Universal paper clips Have I played a game about the joy of making numbers interact with each other? Other top deck builders like Kill the tower or Monster move Add at least a minimum of narrative flair to your gameplay. Even hell Universal paper clips, the simplest number simulator I’ve ever played, ultimately serves a story about the consequences of using artificial intelligence in the pursuit of maximizing industry. With Balatro, there is no narrative other than your own headcanon, which in my case imagined that the video poker machine at my hometown pizzeria suddenly began malfunctioning, spitting out cursed cards as the smell of cheese and marinara filled the air. (If it is proven one day that Balatro is secretly a Encryption-Style deck builder, I expect all of you to give me my flowers, thank you.)

But I made it all up. Balatro is just numbers and probability. Balatro is just mathematics.

Of course, all video games involve a lot of math – more math than I, a guy who was by no means a mathematician, can claim to understand. That’s the magic of such games, so to speak Balatro, although. You make me like math. A lot. While other games obscure the countless calculations required to make the game work, Balatro shows his work. Every blind, every ante, Balatro shows you his hand: his calculations are all visible to the player, step by step.

So what, in Balatro‘s case, makes all the math this Fun? What fascinated me so much about what I was doing that I lost track of how much I was playing and somehow poured 20 hours into a deck of cards over the course of a few days? When I wasn’t playing the game, I thought about the fantasy of these kinds of “numbers go up” games where I can manipulate numbers to my personal advantage in a world where fluctuating interest rates and the whims of hyper-wealth can costing someone their job or the circumstances of your birth may come with modifiers that you can’t simply discard. There’s something deeply appealing about that sense of control in games like… Balatro in a world that sometimes feels more random than a roguelite.

But I’ll be honest, that’s not what I think about when I’m actually playing Balatro. I think of the perfect learning curve, with early games turning even the most poker newbies among us into card sharks. I think of its deceptive simplicity, which draws you in before revealing its almost infinite complexity. I’m thinking about how Balatro is so confident in one of gaming’s basest pleasures – the unironic thrill of optimization – that the spell he casts on hand one remains just as effective on hand 1,000. I think about how damn good it feels to win.

Image: LocalThunk/Playstack via Polygon

Balatro makes you a card counter in a game where every card counts. Before you know it, you’re all in. Deck builder fans can’t afford to sleep here. Ante up.