Now Playing: Balatro

Balatro is a rogue-like deck building game and if you follow this blog you’ll know that’s not the kind of thing I usually play. But after seeing so much praise for the game online in ‘Best of 2024’ lists and GOTY nominations, I guess I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Even so, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it also wasn’t themed around another game I know and like to play – poker. So Balatro may not be my typical type of game – I’m not usually interested in either rogue-likes or deck builders – but the poker angle intrigued me.

You begin by choosing a deck of cards and are tasked with building poker hands to score chips. There are three ‘blinds’ (Small, Big & Boss) to each ‘ante’ of difficulty and each requires an increasing number of chips to progress. You can only play a set number of hands per blind, so the goal is to put together hands that offer the most chips per play.

Individual cards offer a base chip score, and the poker hands offer a base multiplication effect determined by the rarity of the hand. So far, so simple – and after a few failed attempts to progress beyond the third or fourth ante I must admit I was wondering if it just wasn’t a game for me . . . but then things began to click into place.

Because Balatro is all about multipliers (mults) and modifiers that allow you to massively and sometimes ridiculously increase your chip score per hand. You do this by purchasing items at a shop between blinds. Items that let you increase the base mult of specific poker hands, for example, or the mult of a specific card. You can also find and stack ‘Joker’ cards that offer a wide variety of chip boosting effects.

And everything stacks. It just keeps stacking! And you want to find ways to make it stack even higher so you can earn even more ridiculous multipliers. And this is where I went from feeling Balatro might not be for me, to playing Balatro for hours at a time.

There’s something very satisfying about embarking on a run and seeing a strategy pay off. About seeing all those mults align. Once you hit ante 8 you win the run, but you can continue on in an ‘endless’ mode if you choose. And once you do start a new run, everything resets.

So yes, it’s possible to ‘beat’ Balatro fairly easily if you go on a good run, but the game offers multiple decks with their own modifiers as well as harder difficulty options (stakes). And, being a rogue-like, there’s a heavy dose of randomisation to every run so you never know exactly what kind of cards, jokers or modifiers you might get access to as you progress. It’s very much a game of making the best of what you’ve got and what you’ve got changes every run.

Of course, the flip side to this is that some runs just suck balls. I’ve had some runs where I’ve struggled to get through the first couple of antes or even failed them because I’d had such a terrible initial selection of modifiers or jokers to work with. Other times I’ve had runs going super smooth, only to hit a randomised Boss blind that’s the complete antithesis of the strategy I’m relying on.

Because you do kind of have to find and stick to a single strategy each run to maximise your score. Runs aren’t really long enough to give you time to adjust your strategy or spread your mults too thin, especially not when you’re deep into the run. That – and the unavoidable repetition – is the frustrating side of Balatro, but I guess that’s the frustrating side of most rogue-likes.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time with Balatro. I can’t say I’ve found it as addictive as people online like to suggest, but considering it’s not the kind of game I typically play, I’d say it did a pretty great job of hooking me in. It’s fairly cheap too, so there’s no reason not to give it a spin.

8/10