It’s another one of those games, people. The kind of game that has you up till the early hours because you failed a run and absolutely have to give it one more try.
Balatro is probably best described as a sort of solitaire poker game, since it is played solo. You’re tasked with forming poker hands [1] from cards dealt to you out of a standard 52 card deck, beating each encounter (or Blind) by racking up enough money to meet, or beat, the total required. To win, you need to continually up the ante, which is essentially going up a level, of which there are eight. Each increasingly difficult ante has three Blinds to conquer (big, small and a boss with a potentially run-ending modifier [2]), but it’s not as simple as that. It never is.
In order to win, you must add various other cards to your deck, from additional playing cards (that increase your total past 52), to jokers that offer perks to help increase different stats, planet cards that increase the effectiveness of a played poker hand [3], and arcana cards which provide their own benefits.
There are so many other mechanics at play here that I don’t have the space to go into, but suffice it to say that all of these parts create an addictive whole. Once you understand the systems, you want to try different things to affect the outcome, and complete a successful run. Even after that, you’ll want to return to try and better yourself.
Yes, this card game is ace.
