Since the success of Slay The Spire in 2019, the roguelike deckbuilder genre has become increasingly competitive and complicated. All of these games need a big twist so they can stand out in a crowded field. I love this genre, but it feels like a large chunk of the games in it aren’t quite as easy to pick up and play immediately in the same way that Slay The Spire was.
Balatro is another roguelike deckbuilder with a big twist on the standard formula. But instead of making things crazier, it’s a twist that makes this the easiest game to pick up and play of any in this genre, and maybe in all of video games.
Pick Up And Play With Some Twists
Balatro’s big twist is implementing poker hands with the deckbuilder genre. By doing this, it takes away a large chunk of the learning curve associated with these games and allows you to hit the ground running immediately. Within 5 minutes of playing, I felt right at home and was already thinking about big picture strategy elements instead of just trying to figure out how everything works. Even if you know absolutely nothing about poker, I don’t believe it would take much longer to get into the swing of things here.
The core gameplay of Balatro involves playing a slight variation of 5 card draw poker. You start with 8 cards, and then you can discard some of them to try and build a poker hand to score points. The better the poker hand, the more points you score. If you beat the target score total, you can move on to the next round. Depending on your deck, you get a certain amount of hands to play and discards to use each round. While this makes it incredibly simple to play this game, this would obviously get boring within a few runs if that was all there was to it.
Balatro adds several twists to add the strategic depth a game like this needs. There are over a hundred different joker cards that modify your run in all sorts of different ways. Some give you extra points for playing certain cards, some make it easier to get straights, some give you in-game money that you
need to buy other upgrades. I was consistently impressed by how creative these cards can get, and they are the number one element that caused me to modify my runs each time I played. In one of my earliest wins, I unlocked a joker card that became stronger each time I played a hand, but also became weaker each time I used a discard. In that run, I often opted to play a weak hand over trying to discard to find a better hand. Because of this, my card was incredibly powerful by the end of the run and was a key cog in my victory. I have dozens of stories where one Joker card ended up completely defining how I played a run.
There are also “tarot” cards, which can change or modify your existing cards in a variety of ways, and “planet” cards that level up your hands and make them more powerful. These can intersect with strategies from your Jokers in a myriad of creative ways and also add a lot of depth to the proceedings.
Show Me The Money
All these different elements are brought together by a money system that gives you important strategic decisions to make in between every round. After each round, you are given money based on your performance, or perhaps based on joker cards you have. You can then use this money to buy randomly generated cards or “booster packs.”” While it can feel like the easy decision is to just wait for the perfect card to come across, if you wait too long, you can end up falling behind and not have a strong enough deck to clear out some of those early to mid-game bosses. But also, if you go too all in on more mediocre cards early, you might not have enough money to buy that card you really want when it does pop up. I would actually argue that this is the main core of the game even more so than playing the cards themselves.
Once you get set on a strategy, the core poker gameplay ends up being pretty easy. If I’m hunting purely for flushes because of my build, I’m just going to keep discarding cards in an attempt to get those flushes. The same goes for if I’m hunting full houses, and so on. Once you’ve established a “build” with your joker and planet cards, you are generally just going to be hunting one type of hand most of the way.
Because of this, it was between rounds when I was really stressing out and putting the most thought into what actions I wanted to take next. Booster packs can have big rewards, but it can also devastate a run to shell out for one and come away with nothing you need. Managing money is a constant struggle. Finding cards that help you earn money can be even more valuable than cards that strengthen your hand. I loved the balance between managing my money and managing my deck, and that is truly where Balatro shines.
Yes Dealer, It’s Another Flush
While in between rounds never gets old, the actual card gameplay can at times feel a bit too simple. What bugged me the most is that I almost never deviated from one type of strategy, which is to play flushes. Balatro offers a lot of options that help make flushes very easy to get to. There are tarot cards that turn three cards into one suit. There is one special power up card that turns a whole set of cards in your hand to one random suit (if you get this early, you can just build around that suit the rest of the way). There are tarot cards that let you eliminate two cards (so you can destroy cards that aren’t in your preferred suit). I think the card gameplay would be more fun if there was a bit more balance to the types of hands you can play.
I would love to enter a run and decide to go with a full house strategy or a straight strategy. And while those types of runs are certainly possible, and there are joker cards that enhance hands like this, I didn’t feel like there were enough of those. The game feels very skewed towards playing flushes, so while my strategy certainly shifted in many ways depending on what cards I got early on, I also found myself hunting the same types of cards every game because the flush strategy is so clearly the best one to play.
The one way the game kind of decentivizes the flush is with some of its bosses. You must defeat eight bosses to win a run, and they all have different ways to limit you. One only lets you play one hand instead of the default four. One “debuffs” cards you just used in the last round. One causes certain cards to be drawn face down.
And then there are some bosses that debuff a specific suit. So if you happen to be playing a run where you are mostly playing diamond flushes, running into the boss that debuffs diamonds can absolutely kill you. But there are other bosses that can shut down other types of strategies, too, so this never kept me from pursuing flushes. I honestly think the game went the wrong direction by designing a fair number of bosses that are designed to stop one specific strategy. While there are, of course, heavy luck elements in any game like this, running into a boss specifically designed to stop your build is a bit demoralizing and a little too harsh in my view.
However, despite my quips here, even after about 25 hours with the game, I feel not even close to done with it yet because of how much fun I am having.
A Full House of Content
I’m also not close to done with Balatro because they managed to put an absurd amount of content into it. There are 15 “decks,” which all alter the rules of the game in some minor or major ways. Each of these decks has multiple difficulty levels that you can clear as well. There are also 20 challenge runs, which start you off with different joker combos and even crazier rules that really spice the game up. I think 100%ing this game would take at least 100 hours of game time, and probably more.
Generally, when a game needs that much time to 100%, I just resign myself to the fact that I will never 100% it. I’m not someone who is going to spend that much time with one game outside of the rarest exceptions. Usually, once I drop a game, I really don’t want to pick it back up unless I’m going to start back from the beginning.
Balatro might be the one exception to that. I can see myself dropping this one for months and then randomly playing a few rounds on a rainy day. The poker elements brilliantly give this game an old-school “solitaire on your PC in the 1990s” vibe. It’s just an easy game to pick up and play at any time. And even with my nitpicks, I expect that this will be a game people will continue to be talking about for years to come as they continually rediscover it.
Score: 9/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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