The demo for poker-based roguelike Balatro returns today with nearly 40 new jokers—plus a full release date in February

pcgamer.com:

I had some big gaming plans for the holiday break this year: I was finally going to start a second playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2, build a new city in Farthest Frontier, and grab some friends to dive into Lethal Company.

I didn't do any of that. Instead, I just played poker-inspired deckbuilder Balatro. Every single day I sat on the couch with my Steam Deck and played it for at least a couple hours. And it wasn't even the full game, just the demo, which I still managed to sink 30 hours into. That meant I was pretty bummed when that awesome demo got pulled off Steam by its developer, LocalThunk, on January 1.

Today I'm firing my Steam Deck up again because that deckbuilder demo is suddenly back, and it's got a ton of new cards for you to try out—including nearly 40 brand new jokers. Even better, along with the return of the demo, LocalThunk's poker roguelike also has a launch date: Balatro will release on February 20. Here's the new trailer:

To quickly summarize the game, you begin with a standard deck of 52 cards and start making the best poker hands you can to earn enough chips to proceed to the next round. The chips you win can be spent on special cards: tarot cards that can enchant your deck, planet cards that can improve the multipliers of various hands, and jokers that can do all sorts of nonsense from increasing your score to cloning your cards to twisting and subverting the very rules of poker. Before long your deck may have twice as many hearts as you started with, or fifteen aces, or cards made of stone, steel, or glass.

I had a long chat the other day with LocalThunk and he was nice enough to show me some of the new jokers in the updated Balatro demo, and a few other features coming in February when the game fully launches.

You can already see that two of these, the Rocket and Mail jokers, will help your bank account though discards and accumulation over multiple rounds. Walkie Talkie will reward you with both extra chips and a multiplier whenever