When I say the words ‘poker roguelike’, there’s a certain percentage of gamers that are automatically in. I know because I’m one of them. I don’t get a lot of chances to talk about it on this video game website, but poker has always been a big part of my life. Growing up, basement poker night tournaments were a weekly affair. 🎶Nickel games with friends grew into 30-person all-night tournaments, which then led to higher stakes games in sketchy neighborhoods once I could drive, then a very unhealthy online poker habit in college that neaౠrly got extremely out of hand. I’ve watched countless WPT tournaments, read all the books by poker greats like Daniel Negreanu, Doyle Brunson, and Dan Harrington, and for a time I thought I might even become a professional poker player. Thank god I didn’t - I don’t think being unfathomably rich would suit me.
All this to say, I know poker, so I know that the developers behind Balatro know poker too. This roguelike doesn&rsquo🃏;t just use poker as the theme for a traditional deck builder, it’s a remarkably authentic poker experience that manages to hit a lot of the game’s emotional beats and strategic depth. It won’t give you the rush of flopping the nuts and taking a mark for all their worth, but as a reformed GTO guy, Baltaro brings me back to the glory days.
If you have no clue what I’m talking about, don’t worry. Baltaro is way more accessible than my Poker💃Stars-rotted brain is making it sound. All you need to know to get started is nine types of poker hands, and even if you’re fuzzy on that, Baltaro has simple tools to help you keep track. Each run starts out simple: all you have to do is build hands and earn chips. You can make up to four hands per round, and your goal is to earn enough chips to defeat the Blind, which increases each round. You start with eight cards and you’ll automatically refill to eight after you play each hand, and you’re allowed to discard up to three times.
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Each hand has a chip value and a multiplier, which increases with the power of the hand. A simple high card is only worth five points and a 1x multiplie﷽r, but a straight flush will give you 100 points with an 8x multiplier, or base 800. Every card you play will also add its value to your point total before the🎶 multiplier, so a seven gives you seven points, an eight gives you eight, and face cards and aces give you ten. If you discard efficiently and play high value hands, you can get through the first few rounds no problem.
The genius of Balatro is how quickly the gameplay gets complicated by the roguelike mechanics. You’ll earn money after each round that you can spend on various upgrades. Joker cards will add modifiers that increase the amount of chips you can earn from your hand. There's over 100 joker cards with all kinds of different effects. Some of them will increase your multiplier for every card of a certain suit, or add a flat chip value whenever you play a certain type of hand. You can buy upgrades for cards themselves so that using that card in your hand gives you extra multipliers or chips. You can erase a card’s suit or raise and lower its rank. You can remove cards from your deck or add extra, depending on what your strategy is.
There are various card packs that all have different effects as well. Planet cards increase the level of a specific hand. Level up three of a kind, for example, aܫnd you’ll earn more chips and multipliers whenever that hand is played. With strategic planet upgrades, you can make worse hands become more valuable than better hands, which turns the entire hand building strategy upside down.✱ There are also tarot cards that offer one-time bonuses, and vouchers that offer permanent upgrades for the run like increasing your hand size or adding slots for extra joker cards. As you complete rounds, you’ll unlock new decks with different starting bonuses, which can have a big impact on your deck building strategy.
On my first run, I managed to get a couple of joker cards that offered bonuses for playing diamonds. If you want to use the most diamonds, your best bet is to play a flush, so I used every opportunity that came up to manipulate my dec🃏k to add diamonds, increase the value of my diamonds, and remove cards that weren’t diamonds. I used my planet cards to level up the flush whenever I could, so my strategy ended up revolving ar♐ound using all three of my discards in order to get five diamonds in my hand, then beating the Blind in a single hand. If I ever ran out of discards before I found my flush, I’d just play a trash hand in order to free up space for more cards, and hopefully find the diamonds I needed on the next draw.
That worked great for a while🅷, until I came up a✤gainst a boss Blind with a special condition that nullified all my card modifications. Suddenly my wild cards reverted back to their original suit, and all the bonus chips I’d tacked onto my diamonds were gone. This all-in strategy was a lot like bluffing a suck-out on the river. It might work for a while, but eventually someone is going to catch onto your BS.
I’m having a dangerously good time with Balatro. When you get a few rounds deep and start to round out your deck’s strategy, you’ll end up with some hands that stack up to absurdly high chip values. Watching all the bonus chips and multiplier numbers pile onto your score is a rush when it happens by accident, and incredibly satisfying when it happens𒅌 because you, quite 🧔literally, played your cards right.
There’s a free demo for Balatro available on Steam right now during Steam Next Fest. I can’t recommend it enough, both for fellow degenerate gamblers and roguelike lovers. If yo🦄u happen to be both, then either congratulations, or I’m sorry for doin🎀g this to you.
