Pocket Aces

Balatro‘s secret is that it isn’t really a poker game. It contains some poker, and it uses poker, but it’s not really about poker. Instead, Balatro is a game about breaking systems in as many ways as humanly possible. The poker element is mostly there to help provide some context before fully immersing you in numeric hell, to give you a foundation to shatter. The roguelike deckbuilder niche has been in a bit of a slump of late, with most of its entries languishing in Slay the Spire‘s shadow, but Balatro stands tall amongst the best of the best while proudly doing its own distinct thing.

What do you do? Well, it definitely resembles poker at first. You start the game with a standard 52 card pack, draw 8 of them, and get to assembling a poker hand. The fancier the hand, the more chips it’s worth and the larger the multiplier applied to said chips. It pays out like a modest slot machine, at least at first, as the numbers tick up and deliver your due with satisfying auditory feedback. Sadly you don’t get to keep it; the goal of each blind is to simply reach an ever-increasing value of chips. You then get paid a comparatively tiny sum of dollars and get to go shopping, and unlike the majority of roguelikes, deckbuilder or otherwise, this is where the real game lives.

Balatro‘s upgrades are frankly obscene. I cannot name another game that so enthusiastically encourages you to snap it over your knee at every opportunity. There are tons, more than I will opt to summarize here, but the most important category to understand is jokers. There are 150 of these little bastards and they do everything you could possibly imagine and more. Yeah you can improve how specific hands perform, or juice different types of cards, but that’s bush league. Amateur hour. How about getting some gambling powers, then doubling all their listed probabilities? Maybe you want to scale your multiplier every time you reroll the shop, or redefine the criteria for what constitutes a straight? Fuck it, what if we multiplied your multiplier itself if you played the same hand twice in a row? You will acquire a grip of rule-obliterating cards that turn each run into something completely unrecognizable from any poker game out there, and it’s these goofy guys that give Balatro such a strong sense of personality.

That said, there are other factors to consider. Tarot cards are one-shot powers that do a massive variety of things, including improving the actual cards in your deck themselves with variables like multiplier boosts or incentivizing you to not play the card. The Wheel of Fortune is my favorite; I’ve used it about half a dozen times and it has never once hit the 1/4, but I laugh at the chipper “Nope!” every time. Planets pump your poker hand’s values. New additions to your deck itself can bring a bevy of benefits, up to and including not even having suit or rank. Then there are spectral cards, which are so incredibly busted that I refuse to explain them here. You deserve to see what these things can do mid-run, they will blow your mind. Black Hole rules.

From an implementation perspective Balatro just does everything right. Hands play fast, choices are constant, losses feel like you got unlucky or just barely missed, and wins make you feel like you’re a secret poker genius. I’m broadly not a fan of The Binding of Issac for a variety of reasons, but one thing it does very well is constantly tease you with new unlocks mid-game as you keep playing and achieve new feats. Balatro does the same and it makes the unlock treadmill consistently exciting. New jokers, and especially decks, spark immediate emotional responses. “Oooooh I could use that to finally win with a Pairs build”, you might think. Couple that with the game’s presentation being the perfect balance of flashy and fast while never sacrificing legibility, and you’ve got a bona-fide genuine forever-game that’ll easily hold up for hundreds of runs at least.

Balatro is a monument to math. It is proof positive that there are alchemists out there, people far smarter than you or I, capable of spinning math into gold. The game is exactly as serious as you want it to be, massively satisfying whether you casually play a solid deck for low stakes or crank the game straight to wumbo with a wonky deck that’ll require several failures in a row before taking off, getting by with razor-thin margins and sheer force of will. It is a glorious, fiendishly addictive thing that I am endlessly impressed by and intend to keep playing long after this review is posted. High and a winner, got a hot hand.

9/10