I’m a sucker for card-based roguelikes, and card-games in general, but basic standard deck games like Poker (any variety) have never really been my Jam… save for the hundreds of hours spent playing Spades in high school and incalculable hours in Microsoft Solitaire over the past 30 years.

At first glance Balatro is a Video Poker game: you’re dealt cards and have a set number of hands and discards to form enough Poker hands to meet a set score. Pass it, collect some cash based on how many hands/discards you had left, move on to the next higher score to beat. The core aesthetic is superb, with a tasteful (and tweakable) CRT filter and chunky pixel-art cards that undulate and flit around as you select and hover them. The play field background is an Earthbound- or Milkdrop-esque swirling mass of colors that shifts based on what encounter you’re on, and is a perfect balance of appealing but not distracting. The music is an entrancing loop that strikes a near-identical balance, it’s a certified banger and yet also doesn’t draw too much attention while you’re trying to do math.

But that isn’t what I’m here for – I’m here for the weird stuff. Between rounds you visit a shop where you’re introduced to the game’s actual core mechanic: Jokers. By default you can hold up to 5 of 150 unique Joker cards, which sit at the top of your play field. Jokers passively modify the game rules in an immense variety of ways:

  • Economy - Gives you extra cash for holding certain cards, or playing certain cards, at the end of rounds, scaling over time, etc
  • Chips - Gives you extra base chips per hand, or based on what cards you play, or based on how many cards you have in your deck, or when you play a certain hand type
  • Multiplier - Gives you raw base multiplier for each hand, or card played, or certain cards played, or at random, or whatever
  • Meta - Does stuff with other Jokers or other cards, like duplicating them, or applying multipliers based on how many Jokers you do or don’t have in play
  • OTHER - There’s a lot of Jokers and some of them simply can’t be categorized due to how bizarre they are

Jokers are THE central element of the game, without them it would be physically impossible to score high enough to beat a run. They’re also where so much of the variety in the game comes from, since getting a simple combo of just like two good Jokers that interact with each-other well can be run-defining. They reveal that the game is just pretending to be Video Poker, and is instead actually a deep and intricately complicated masterclass about making and breaking rules.

But Balatro doesn’t stop there, in the shop you can also purchase booster packs of Tarot cards (consumables which modify your deck by shifting suits, deleting cards, duplicating cards, enhancing cards, or giving cash a variety of ways), Planet cards (consumables which increase the value of various hand types), Spectral cards (which WILDLY alter your deck or run, like by standardizing the suit or rank of 10 cards, or deleting a bunch of cards at random in exchange for upgraded cards, or giving you a rare Joker in exchange for all your cash), or just straight up Standard cards (normal deck cards, but they might be enhanced to give more chips, mult, wildcard, etc).

Between Jokers and Consumables basically all rules of the game are malleable and the possible win conditions spiral out of control, and the game is so flexible that you can find your win condition by starting either direction. Get a Joker that adds bonus multiplier for every Spade played? Great, start converting cards to Spades whenever you get the opportunity. So you’re going to be playing a bunch of Flushes? Ok, keep an eye out for those Jupiter cards to crank the value of each Flush. And every round you get another opportunity to mutate your deck further.

Note: These tactics are considered novice or pedestrian. To start challenging higher difficulties you have to engage in advanced rule breaking like juicing high-card to the moon or generating infinite glass red-seal kings.

The only really common “required” part of your win condition is finding a reliable source of base multiplier and pair it with some source of times-multiplier. Each hand type has two numbers associated, a base chip value and a multiplier, but the multiplier can be increased additively or multiplicatively, and obviously the multiplicative multiplier is far more valuable, as that’s how you juice scores into requires-scientific-notation-to-display territory… but there’s thankfully a bunch of ways to actually get multiplier through card enhancements and Jokers.

The deck-building and rule-breaking framework the game offers is one of the most satisfying and well-designed I’ve played. It isn’t quite as off-the-wall as Baba is You, but it’s up there. Nearly everything is viable. Thin deck, thicc deck, face-card-heavy, all one suit, filled with cards of stone/steel/gold/whatever, by the end of the game every hand will result in the game happily plinking out slot-machine style bleeps and bloops and cash-register noises as it visibly and audibly scores each card individually and sends your score skyward.

It’s so good. It’s a forever-game. I need it on iOS so I can put it on my iPad and never delete it. Highly Recommended. Whatever platform you’ve got, it’s there, go play.