A few weeks ago, I picked up Balatro on the recommendation of a friend. It looked interesting enough thanks to its throwback visual style and seemingly simplistic gameplay loop. But I still figured that I wouldn’t actually end up spending a ton of time on it. After all, it was just a poker simulator with an interesting twist or two, right?  Well a few weeks and a hundred hours later, I can most definitely confirm that there’s a lot more to it than what you see on the surface. It really is the kind of game that can and will suck you in if you’re not careful!

First off, Balatro is not a poker simulator. It just resembles one thanks to using poker hands and standard playing cards as part of standard play. What Balatro actually is, is a roguelike deck-builder. You play the game in runs, with the goal of each being to improve and modify your deck well enough to earn lots of points and eventually clear the final point hurdle.

Your deck can be manipulated by modifying the cards themselves, making duplicates or outright cutting them from the deck entirely. Which method you use depends both on your strategy and which enabling cards you actually manage to pull at each shop. It also depends on which difficulty or “stake” you’re playing on, with each one introducing new modifiers to keep you on your toes.

The main attraction of Balatro, though, are the jokers. There are 150 jokers in Balatro, and each one modifies the game in some way. Some just award extra points to your chips or multiplier counts. Others give money, and still others adjust the very rules of the game, like making everything into a “face” card or allowing gaps in straights. One even turns-off boss blind abilities, making your run that much more smooth.

You can never know which jokers you’ll get, which is why you have to think on your feet and modify as you go for each run. If everything lines up just right, though, you can advance past the normal game into Endless Mode and try to achieve an insanely high score. Balatro allows you to score up into the realm of numbers you’d never think about, numbers like 60 septillion and even way higher! All it takes is getting that awesome run where everything lines up just right. So, you keep playing, hoping to get just one more amazing run.

That’s how it’s been for me, at least. It’s been a blast trying to clear all the different difficulties and trying out different decks with different rules. I even got one monster run that got me scoring in the tens of billions! If you like roguelike games and deckbuilding, then you gotta check out Balatro. No doubt it’ll be a real blast for you!

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Have you played Balatro? What was your best run? How do you feel about roguelike games in general?

Image from the Steam page