Anyone who has ever played cards, visited a casino or simply placed a bet knows the warnings and advice given by the great Kenny Rogers in his timeless song The Gambler. That song about knowing when to hold, deal, and discard cards rings truer than ever when it comes to LocalThunk’s roguelike poker game Balatro, a title dedicated to a card game that has long been popular delighted, a unique and interesting touch gives generations.
The idea of Balatro is not very different from that of regular poker. You must use the cards you have been dealt to form multiple hands. The problem is that unlike regular poker, where you simply have to beat the other players at your table, here you have to use your cards and the hands you make to score points and beat the dealer. Each card counts as one point: a 2 equals two points, an 8 equals eight, and face cards and aces equal 10 and 11 points, respectively. Depending on the hands you form, a multiplier will be assigned to the number of points you receive. For example, a full house multiplies your score for that round by four. Additionally, there are wild cards that can greatly influence your score, and even tarot cards that act as disposable consumables, helping you score a mega multiplier that can knock over the points the dealer needs in a single move.
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In practice it may seem simple, and assuming a basic understanding of poker and the different hands that can be scored, the core of the game is very accessible and easy to learn. The challenge and difficulty lies in using the roguelike elements to assemble a team of wild cards and tarot cards that will help you score important points. For example, a wild card might give you a 15x multiplier, but to activate it on every hand you must have used up all of your discarded cards, a feature that allows you to return up to five discarded cards to the deck in exchange for Substitutions. randomly. With this wild card, the main danger is that once you run out of discards, you will have to make scoring hands each round using only the cards in front of you, and that is very risky as it could result in you making low scoring hands receive. like a pair of deuces.
Tarot cards work in a similar way, except that they have the power to change a card into a different suit or make a scoring hand much more effective (for example, three of a kind gets an additional multiplier). this hand). You can buy and purchase tarot cards and jokers from the store at the end of each game and use the money you win to beat the dealer in as few rounds as possible. The Shop is essentially where you create your scoring strategy for this round, as you need to collect wildcards that apply to your intended playstyle. Creating a collection of wild combos may not seem like a big deal at first, but as the rounds progress and the points you need to generate to beat the dealer increase into the tens and hundreds of thousands, even millions , you will end up feeling the anger of not developing a cohesive and cohesive play style.
Since Balatro is a roguelike game, it faces the problems of randomness of the genre. There will be rounds where it seems like the game is going against you and there is no hope of winning. This leads to rounds where the cards simply don’t fit your needs. Sometimes you can make up for it with tarot cards, but as Kenny Rogers says, sometimes you just have to walk away.
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To keep things interesting, Balatro offers different decks of cards that offer slightly different bonuses. It can be an additional card per hand or an additional discard that can be used in every encounter. There are also various difficulty levels and even a challenge mode, which is unlocked if you manage to beat the game with a selection of different decks. The selection of jokers and tarot cards, as well as the playable cards you can create with tarot cards, is also so vast that every time you play it feels like Balatro is throwing you a curve ball. Every time you get used to the game, the game will surprise you with something new, forcing you to respond with a new strategy. Boss fights are some of the best examples of this, as these more challenging encounters pit you against modifiers that dramatically increase the game’s difficulty, such as: Such as cards drawn face down, certain suits becoming zero and virtually useless, or even one that causes you to lose money every time you play a card, meaning you’ll end up with zero or have a negative balance.
Balatro is truly a fantastic, imaginative and truly unique game. It offers the perfect blend of simple and accessible game mechanics combined with comprehensive, deep and complex mathematical systems that will entertain and challenge experienced card players. It’s a brilliant example of how the roguelike formula can be put into practice, and I recommend anyone with even the slightest interest in card games take a look at this title because you won’t be disappointed.
