I love card games. At TheGamer, that typically means Pokemon, Magic, or Lorcana. But what I really mean is your regular card games - four suits, Ace to King, 52 cards. Your Newmarket, your 7 of Diamonds, your Golf, your Shed (that's the clean version). Proper card games played with a standard deck of regular old playing cards. But Balatoro is the first game to bridge the gap between paper and virtual card games for me, and that's because it's barely a card game at all.
The main problem with virtual card games is that they tend to be focused on very specific, gambling-oriented card games. Poker games are ten-a-penny (or dollar, or yen, or whatever currency you prefer to lose), but no one wants to play 7 of Diamonds with strangers on the internet. That or they're approximations of games like Magic, which is like comparing Snakes & Ladders to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons because they both use dice.
There is another genre of virtual card game that is highly popular these days - the deck-builder. As the name suggests, it asks you to build the best deck for whatever challenge may lay ahead. Sometimes it's all about the pure art of constructing that deck, like in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel Snap. Sometimes the deck-building is but a basis for another game lurking within, like the XCOM stylings of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Midnight Suns.
Non-Marvel deck-builders, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Slay the Spire, also exist. They're also good.
People will tell you Balatro is a deck-building game too, and it is. But it's also not. You start with a standard 52 card deck, and all you can add to this deck are enhanced versions of this base 52. Part of why I find Balatro so compelling is it’s not just developer LocalThunk doing 'here's our game in this popular genre', but it's a new idea entirely. Cards, poker, roguelikes, and deck-builders may be old ideas, but Balatro adds to them as much as it mixes them together.
So Is Balatro Just Poker?
I like platform games, so I play a handful of indie platformers every year. Mostly, they're just 'if I made Mario it would look like this'. That's fine, and they're usually a fun time, but it's just a different mascot and art style on top of a game that, underneath it all, I have played a hundred times before. Balatro uses one of the oldest games in existence as its foundation, and yet it feels completely new.
Balatro Is The Roguelike Poker Game I'm Definitely Going To Stop Playing Right After The Next Hand
Roguelike and poker is a match made in heaven or hell, depending on how you lo🍌ok at it.
I know the rules of Poker and enjoy card games in general, so I suppose Balatro's aesthetic is as familiar to me as something like Pokemon or Lorcana. But I don't know Poker well enough to feel confident of winning a video game with this knowledge - which is why it’s so genius that Balatro doesn't require this. Thanks to the Jokers, Celestials, and Tarots, you're not actually trying to win at Poker. You're inventing rules as you go along and then trying to win by them.
In one run, I got a Joker that gave me extra chips if I played hands that weren't full, so I targeted Celestials that improved Three of a Kind, Pairs, and Two Pair. Usually, the latter two are pretty bad hands, but in my game, they were the most valuable ones to play. Next time, I got two early Tarots that let me change cards into Spades, so my Celestial tactic became built around Flushes (having five cards of the same suit). A knowledge of Poker might help, but basically, you need cards to have the same number, same suit, or be in order.
What Makes Balatro Special?
Poker is complicated by bluffing and bets (and a far smaller hand than Balatro), but the rules are simple. Balatro takes those simple rules and adds its own level of complexity in the form of upgrades to make cards more valuable, Jokers that have unique abilities, and a level of personalisation that challenges you to stick to a game plan. Of course, every three hands, you face a boss with their own rules too - they 🧔may half your scores, debuff your cards, or even turn your cards face down. What worked for you last run might be disastrous here, while a boss that wiped you out might be rendered useless by different planning.
The fact it uses actual playing cards takes away a lot of the extra learning that goes into card games or deck-builders, but it also forces Balatro to be different. You can get away with cute card art and flashy graphics when you've created 100 characters for your cards, even if they only do five basic things in the entire deck with a handful of combos. Balatro's foundation is easy, but it's also boring, and that means it needs to deliver.
It has that classic 'just one more run' feel of a roguelike, but it's special because you're rarely defeated by the same boss twice. Most of the time, you're defeated by yourself. It might look like a card game, but it's unlike any card game out there. It is and it's not. It's Poker and it's not. It's a deck-builder and it’s not. It’s Balatro, baby.
Balatro takes the clasꦆsic card game of poker and add🎃s roguelike gameplay, using Joker cards with various abilities to build your deck and attempt to defeat pesky blinds.
- Developer(s)
- ꦐ LocalThunk
- Platform(s)
- PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series X, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series S
