I wasn’t expecting a poker roguelite to be my favorite game of 2024 so far

digitaltrends.com:

Have you ever stopped to think about your average deck of playing cards and what a design feat it is? Those 52 cards have kept people entertained for centuries thanks to limitless creativity. You can use them to play anything from Go Fish to King’s Cup. No matter how many times you shuffle them, there’s seemingly no bottom to the amount of games that can be dealt out.

The new video gameBalatro isn’t just another example of an inventive card game, but a celebration of playing cards themselves. In this roguelite by LocalThunk, players simply have to make poker hands to rack up chips. That task becomes increasingly more complex with each round as players get bonus cards that chop and screw their deck in countless ways. Play your cards right and a pair of twos can become more valuable than a royal flush.

It’s a wildly creative concept, and one that gets at the heart of what makes playing cards such a timeless tool for game makers. You don’t have to throw out kings and queens to reinvent the deck; there’s no limit to the strategic depth in the 52 cards we all know.

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Ante up

Balatro features an easy to understand core premise that quickly becomes complex. When I start my first run, I’m given a standard deck of 52 playing cards. I’m thrown into an ante, which consists of three blinds. In each, I need to earn a certain number of chips by creating poker hands. Each one pays out a base number of chips and has its own point multiplier. The face value of each card in the hand gets added to the chip count too, so a pair of queens will create more chips than twos.

That easy concept gets turned on its head starting in the second blind — and that’s where Balatro immediately got its hooks in me. In-between each round, I’m taken to a shop where I can spend the few