Balatro

Balatro is a roguelike deckbuilder about changing your deck to score big at poker. You must upgrade your cards and combine various bonuses to hit an ever-increasing target score. Balatro has been widely praised and received multiple awards for its tantalizing strategy-oriented design and its endless replayability, including Best Debut Game at the BAFTAs.

The game is broken up into antes that each consist of three blinds: a small blind, a big blind, and a boss blind. Each blind, you can play up to four poker hands to score points, trying to beat a target score that grows exponentially. A hand’s total score is a base point value times a multiplier. The values of the cards add to the points, while better poker hands have higher point values and bigger multipliers. The boss blind also has an additional effect, such as debuffing a suit or turning some of your cards face down.

Balatro's strategy is designed around various upgrades. You earn money each blind, which you can spend between blinds to buy various types of upgrade cards. Most cards get consumed to give you a permanent upgrade:

• Planet cards improve your poker hands, increasing their score and multiplier.
• Tarot cards usually modify your deck, changing the suits of cards or adding enhancements like extra points to a particular card.
• Vouchers give you game upgrades like decreasing shop prices or increasing your hand size, but are expensive.
• Spectral cards have powerful effects but are rare and often come with a downside, such as destroying a random card to gain several better cards.

The most important upgrade, and the real core of the strategy, is the jokers. Unlike other types of upgrades, jokers are not usually consumed; they grant a bonus as long as you have them. There are over 100 jokers, with bonuses ranging from giving extra points for playing a particular suit to allowing you to make straights and flushes with just four cards. You have just five slots for jokers, so it’s important to choose ones that work well together and to upgrade your deck to fit your joker strategy. The right combinations create powerful scoring synergies that allow you to keep up with the steeply increasing target scores.

To keep things interesting, there’s also a great deal of meta-progression material, i.e. the game will often unlock pieces of content whenever you get a new win or clear specific conditions. This content includes new jokers, different decks, and extra difficulty levels to master, all of this adding up to countless intriguing strategy options and endless replayability.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz.