Like anyone with a beating heart, I’ve grown weary (and wary) of the world. When this happens, I usually find myself picking up a controller and hitting up a video game. The escapism aspect is certainly part of it, but the main reason is to get more of that short-term solution to a trying existence: dopamine. Ah, beautiful dopamine. That sweet, sweet sugar of neural exchange. That little chemical with the big slice of Happy. Our lives wouldn’t mean half as much without it, and in many ways, gaming can provide it in the deluge.
Balatro, an unassuming indie card game that has swiftly become a massive hit online, has clearly been built around these rushes of joy. It’s a rogue-like deck builder that focuses entirely on playing poker hands, and it siphons its bliss through the very decks you build.
I’ll get into detail about the hows and whys of it in a bit. But at a high level, the crux is this: every round of play requires you to play a limited number of hands from a shuffled deck of cards to beat that round’s score. Different poker hands translate to different base totals - chips - and multipliers that can rack up these chips. Aside from your regular playing cards, you have a deck of special ‘Joker’ cards: cards you pick up across each round that’ll also enhance your hands, totals, and multipliers in additional ways.
You’ll know you’ve hit a good hand when you’ve laid it down and the game begins to count the score. Your hand total on the left notches up. Cards begin to trigger. Then they re-trigger. One of your jokers triggers. Then the cards trigger again. The score on the left keeps on climbing. The multipliers are doubling - tripling even. The triggers are getting faster. They’re sounding more urgent. The numbers - they’re catching fire. The numbers are catching fire. You’ve already thumped the target score by 100,000, but it still keeps going. Who knows when it’ll end? We’re in euphoria, and it’s only Tuesday evening!
Okay, maybe a bit of that heady dopamine got the better of me there. But it’s safe to say I really freaking love Balatro. (But, ahem, I’ll still do my best to be as impartial about it here as I can.)
I called Balatro ‘unassuming’ earlier which, given how addictive it eventually gets, was probably a bit patronizing. Better words based on the early play of it would probably be ‘veiled’ or ‘mysterious’. It doesn’t give much away about itself initially, save for its mesmerizing, fever-dream-like atmosphere. Its hypnotic lounge-synth main theme is like a tranquilizer to the ears, and the hazy background of its main screen constantly billows and warps like you’re in the back of a smoke-filled casino from Vegas’ golden age. If there was a more enticing way to be drawn into playing mere poker games, I’d like to experience it. But of course, Balatro is no mere poker game.
The tutorial for the game lays it all out really well and without tedium. You’ll breeze through it in the early rounds of your first game, as you lay down your first few hands and get the gist of what scores which, and how Jokers come into play. Then you’re on your own. A game of Balatro - or run as the game calls it - is broken up across eight levels, called antes, which themselves consist of three rounds each. As mentioned, you have a score target - called a blind - to beat each round.
Not every blind is created equal. Each one is a bigger target than the last. And the final blind of each ante is something even more intimidating. Otherwise known as the Boss Blind, these will test your deck’s ability to the max. They’ll not just have the highest target you’ve faced so far, but they’ll also impose an impediment on your playing ability. These impediments can go from just adding challenge (i.e. removing any scoring for cards from a particular suit) to being downright nefarious (demanding you beat the target score with one hand). You do get some advantage on being able to look ahead each ante to see which boss you’ll face before you actually do. This can be pretty useful for quick strategy shifts (more about that in a bit). But more often than not, these blinds will be the ones that will end your run early, and most likely leave you cursing under your breath that you should have waited for a Full House to come in before you played that Two Pair. But hey, what’s life without a gamble?
Luckily, as tough as Balatro initially is, it’s the learning of it that provides the fun. Much of this learning is done by picking up Jokers across your runs which will enhance your poker hands for bigger scores. There are 150 Jokers in total to find - each of which has its own theme (and its own fantastic artwork). And they will unquestionably make or break your run.
Once you’ve beaten a blind, you’ll be taken to the Shop to potentially buy whichever Jokers have been made available (by random chance). There’s so much variance on what they can do - some just add chip bonuses based on your current Poker deck, others will exponentially increase score multipliers as hands are played. Others may not provide much short-term benefit but will scale into score-maxing monsters as you perform other tasks during your run. Best of all, they chain. This means that as you build your Joker deck (up to 5 maximum in normal circumstances), you can build truly massive totals as they all complement each other, leading to those numbers catching fire again and again as your Jokers repeatedly spark off. Leading you to get that dizzy head rush and needing a lie down because you’re past 40.
With so many Jokers you can put together and strategize around, there’s already a lot of depth to Balatro’s play. But the Jokers alone are only the start. There are also a multitude of other card types you can draw - again from packs in the Shop - that can provide additional benefits. Tarot cards have transformative abilities that can be applied to your individual playing cards, making them trigger their own multipliers when played or become ‘wild’ (behave as any suit). Spectral cards have even bigger effects - enhancing multiple cards at once for a more expensive fee. Meanwhile, Celestial cards play a massive role in leveling up the basic total and multiplier values for each of your poker hands. Want to win a run playing only Flushes? Weirdly enough, it’s doable - all thanks to the configurability made available not just by your Jokers but also by these extra cards. Adding another layer of fun but complex detail to an already fun but complex game.
Besides their depth, the breadth of the ways to play Balatro also becomes more apparent with every playthrough. You’ll eventually unlock more Jokers as you play, completing certain feats and racking up the totals. Some you will love. Some you will hate. But the right combination is always there to be found. And these ‘right’ ones will not so much help you win your first run, but pick you up and practically hurl you over the finish line. Of course, it feels great when you do finally win. You’ll even be rewarded with an ‘endless mode’ for your winning deck to see how far you can truly go, with increasingly impossible targets to hit. But it does introduce a potentially bad habit with subsequent runs, where you might go back to the same Joker deck again once your favourites start appearing in the Shop, ignoring all the other possibilities the game has to offer.
It does seem like developers LocalThunk foresaw this issue, which is why the game is also packed with different starter decks, each of which adds a different ‘play mode’ to your run such as reducing the number of hands you can play, or the number of times you can discard anything unuseable from your play hand. To an extent, this does work - there’s not a single universal winning strategy for every starter deck run or difficulty level. But old habits can die hard, and if you’re between a rock and a hard place and that ante-saving, blind-busting, home run-hitting Baseball Card Joker suddenly appears, it can be very difficult to say ‘no’ to a style of play that you’ve worn out by now.
Still, Balatro’s potential for a different play path every run, and the ludicrous totals you can rack up with the right combinations, are sublime. $15 might be steep for some dry card game, but this is anything but. The ability to craft deep strategies, be rewarded by risking everything on a final hand, and just the trippy, maddening presentation of it all will bring you back again and again. The joke’ll be on you if you don’t at least give it a try.
