Balatro is a deckbuilding, rule-breaking poker game I can’t get enough of
destructoid.comI realized a long time ago I was probably never going to be good at poker. It’s not that I’m bad at assessing risk; worse, I just don’t care. When I used to play casual games in-between classes in school, I’d go all-in on bad hands. I’d swap cards for a flush that probably wouldn’t show up. So imagine my surprise when Balatro, a deckbuilding poker roguelite, asked me to lean into those bad habits.
Developed by LocalThunk and published by Playstack, Balatro made a bit of a splash during the recent Steam Next Fest. So when people started talking it up in the full release on February 20, I had a feeling I should put this on what I call my “temperature check” radar: dip a toe in, play a few rounds, and see if the hype is real. So I booted it up, expecting a bit of card-counting fun.
Hours passed. I was still sitting there. I’d just lost a run to a bad discard, but I was so close; I’d made it to a high ante! Next one’s a winner, for sure. To be clear, this is not a gambling game; no real money is being exchanged. Balatro‘s poker is all about scoring, where you play poker hands from a deck. It has as much in common with the likes of euchre or cribbage, in my eyes, as it does the game it draws its scoring rubric from.
Each round, you can take on a blind and try to beat a score. Draw cards, then play the best poker hand you can. Score is determined by the numerical value of cards (chips) and the multiplier a combination offers. To make this simple for now, a pair won’t get you many points, but a flush or a straight will see your score climb high.
What gets interesting is that the deck is highly modifiable. You start with a basic deck of 52, with a normal allocation. Shops let you start to modify this, though. Some of these are simple: add a card, like a 5 of Clubs, to the deck, or make a card accrue more chips. But they can get weirder, oh so much weirder.
On an early run, I thought I was brilliant: what’s better than four-of-a-kind? With four discards to play with, and
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