On Balatro

The ShopTalk Discord #games channel has been pretty heavy on Balatro for like… a year? I was turned off by the game at first as I think I downloaded some unofficial port or something and it was unplayably janky. But now Balatro+ is on Apple Arcade, which I have anyway, and I’ve got a perfectly nice copy of the game to play.

And play it I have!

So here’a collection of thoughts.

• Poker is a great foundation for the game, as it’s a familiar construct (most people know a full house beats a straight, for example). It’s a pretty loose construct though, only really leaning on the cards and hands. Mostly it feels easier and less nerdy to explain to someone you’re playing a poker game on your phone which is nice.
• It gets the scoring right. It’s a simple concept where you get “chips” and “mult” and the two are multiplied together to get a score for a hand. It’s that perfect mixture of simple and complicated. You can calculate what your score is, but not knowing is a core design decision and adds to the mystery and excitement.
• It gets all the numbers right. Aside from scoring, there are a number of other important numbers like the number of hands and discards you have. They are prominent and easy to understand. Most importantly, you win money when you win hands, and that is also very easy to understand. You essentially get a few bucks when winning and, if you hold onto money across hands, it can accumulate interest, which is also a few bucks. Then you can buy cards and packs, and they cost a few bucks. But the numbers are always small integers. There is no silly dealing with cents. Money is always a very constrained resource and making decisions about how to use it is crucial.
• Jokers are a perfect twist. You need jokers to score more or earn more money, but each of them do it in off kilter ways. Like just your club cards score more, so you have to adjust your choices to play more clubs. Or you get an extra discard, which doesn’t directly help you score, but it makes it easier to make straights, which are a higher scoring hand. There are 150 jokers (!), and all of them are useful in some sort of way. Ultimately, it’s about how you combine the jokers (along with other choices you make) to get through the game.
• But it’s not just jokers. Interestingly, there is even a “jokerless challenge” where you have to beat a game without using any jokers which is extremely challenging but doable. There are other way to manipulate the game you’re playing: 1) Arcana cards 2) Planet cards and 3) Spectral cards 4) Vouchers 5) Tags. All of them interesting an powerful in their own ways. Most runs will involve jokers and all of these to different degrees.
• The art is beautiful. The pixel style is fun. It makes me think if it was all crisply rendered I wouldn’t like it as much. The individual letters float up and down. Each card has a clever name and unique and detailed metaphoric design. But the design of the game is beautiful as well. The layout, the controls, the animations, the fire that shoots off the scoring when you’re crushing a hand. Just great.
• There are so many dials to balance. It’s frankly shocking they got the game balanced. What the jokers do, what they cost, what the rarity is, how it combines with other jokes. What the hands are, how the hands level up, how the hands are affected by card enhancements and the cost and rarity of those enhancements. There are also “bosses” every three blinds which can be quite challenging and are yet another thing to balance. All this stuff is randomized, but it feels like not entirely randomized, like how you always get a joker booster pack after the first blind, and how you always get a planet card that matches a hand you played in the first blind (I think?!).
• The creator wanted it to be played like people play it like solitaire, and I think that rules and he nailed it.
• It’s really a game of skill. You can actually get good at it. If you go slow and really analyze every single choice you have at every single step of the way. Your choices about what to buy, what card to pick, what blinds to skip, etc, are just as important as what hands you are playing. I’m not there yet, but it seems to me if you get really good you’re winning 80% of games you start, even on the the harder difficulty settings (in itself an interesting game mechanic).
• The YouTube scene around Balatro is strong, with channels like Balatro University that are nearly equally fun to watch as playing to me. I feel like they actually help me play better.
• It captures peoples imaginations. The subreddit is full of people doing fan art and inventing new cards and such. Apparently people even feel compelled to blog about it.
• Winning is separated from insane runs. Winning is done by beating the 8 antes. I found the word ante weird/distracting at first. It’s really just a “round”. It doesn’t cost you anything upfront to play the round, which is what an ante is. If you’ve got a killer setup going, you can go past winning, which lets you bask in your genius.
• Unlocking stuff is attainable but not distracting. You don’t get all the decks at the start (each deck having unique characteristics that affect gameplay). You don’t get all the jokers. You don’t get all the vouchers and tags. It’s a satisfying feeling when you play a run and unlock something new. That slows down the more you play, but the satisfaction is replaced by new things like the good results of making good decisions and beating more difficult challenges. You also don’t have to care at all about the accomplishments.
• You’ll never play two runs that feel the same. There is just far too much stuff that can happen differently. This makes is much more fun than something like solitaire or non-variant sudoku to me. Although you can play a “seeded” game if you intentionally want to repeat which “randomized” things came up.