With so much hype around a genre I already enjoy, trying out this poker-based deckbuilder was inevitable.
Balatro is a deck-builder/roguelike game released in 2024, and it has caught a lot of hype—for being a simple poker game, for recently being in a controversy surrounding its rating, and for allegedly being extremely addicting. Being a card game fan, this game should appeal to me.
So, how addictive is it really? Is it worth it even if you don’t like Poker?
Random and Consistent
As with any roguelike, Balatro offers you the same problem any game, but with a randomized set of tools: form poker hands that make as many points (called “chips” in-game) as possible. You will draw 7 cards, and will have varying amount of discards and available plays to get to the score. Here is how your run will probably look like at the start of the game:
I’m not a particular fan of poker, but this setup works fine as a starting point. This is just the scaffolding of Balatro—the actual depth comes later.
Every time you end a round (the 300 chips in the previous clips), you will get some amount of money (based on the round and in how much money you already have) and then have a chance to buy deckbuilding tools and, most importantly, “Jokers”, this game’s main mechanic—Jokers give you base chips, additive multipliers, or multiplicative multipliers to your score.
This creates a very “roguelike” feel. What strategy are you going to play? It depends on what Jokers you roll, on how you have curated your deck, and what your next Tarot card looks like. It can be very engaging once you get a grasp of it, as in its peak, the selection of jokers and deckbuilding effects really does have this “scramble” roguelike effect where you try to make a strategy on the fly.
Speaking of strategies…
A Wide Variety of Strategies
It is very impressive how open-ended Balatro manages to be with its mechanics. At first, I thought Flushes would be the easiest ones to play, as they are very simple to plan for. However, they simply don’t scale that well when compared to other strategies, and I found out the good way in the playthrough that made Balatro “click” for me.
Four-of-a-kind quickly become my favorite strategy, with several efficient ways of forcing it.
The more I played, however, the more I noticed that even meme builds like High Card could work. This reinforces a very good learning loop: at first, getting enough chips for your 8 antes (the game’s official “you win” round) will seem impossible, but as you see how easy it is to accumulate money and get enough good Jokers and buffs to your hands, you will see results quickly.
The Jokers themselves try their best to support as many playstyles as possible, and are easily the best part of the game… but as you play more, the cracks will start showing in this system. You will find Jokers that boost Straights, ones that reward burning cards, or even ones that trigger on certain suits—it’s a huge variety.
Is it Really that Addictive?
Balatro has an infamous reputation for its addictive gameplay, and I can kind of see it: there’s just something really satisfying about seeing your strategy pop off and listen to the increasingly rapid and higher-pitched scoring sounds, and seeing millions of chips been accumulated when you started at the triple-digit mark.
However, the more I played, the more that certain cracks started to show.
At first, it was only the bad Jokers. There are a few of them that are useless in almost every situation, and with such a huge Joker pool, this becomes a problem, as every shop can only show you 2 of them. I understand that we need a lot of them so that you are not guaranteed to see what you want, but surely, having outright bad Jokers is not the solution to this.
Then I became very accustomed to some specific Jokers, and if seeing a couple of other videos is any indication, there seem to be a few Jokers that are not in every playthrough simply because they don’t show up a lot. This wasn’t a huge dealbreaker at first, however, this is completely normal for roguelikes, and it’s not like they homogenize too much, but it did make me feel that I was more limited in possibilities than what I first thought of.
But I started feeling the effects of RNG more as I started creeping up the difficulty. Instead of having fun, I was starting to stress out over not having the right setup to complete a run, and in higher difficulties if you don’t start with a scaling Joker or some sort of early-game buffer, the run feels like it will be decided by the RNG gods.
Another area that felt lacking was the deckbuilding. There are a few ways to manipulate the deck in Balatro, and most of them come in “Arcana packs” and “Card packs”; while I like the Arcana packs in theory, they also feel kind of bloated, and the Card packs are almost always useless; like the name implies, they only give you 1-2 cards that might not even synergize with your deck. I removing the Card packs would be a good idea, and curating the Tarot card list into a shorter and more focused one would be a better suggestion.
There’s also surprisingly few limited ways of deck-thinning, which I guess I kind of understand, as forcing high-tier hands might become too easy, but isn’t that also the point of a deckbuild system? Maybe it’s just a skill issue, but in a lot of runs I found it very frustrating to never roll the deck-thinning cards.
That is not to say I stopped having fun. This could 100% be a skill issue, but as the game got harder, I started to feel like maybe it would just be better to play Balatro as a casual thing in low-difficulty runs. For me, the game shined when I did some dumb, low-pressure synergy, but when I’m struggling to start a run and need to roll it 10 times to get it going, it starts being boring.
This rings especially true since Balatro runs are usually very short for roguelikes, clocking around 10-20 minutes. Compare to other games like Astral Ascent, Wizard of Legend or Crypt of the Necrodancer where you can have an intense run that lasts more than 1 hour, or Invisible, Inc which sometimes took me several hour-long sessions, and while I love those games, they can’t fit the casual “I just have 15 minutes while I wait” mindset that I like to use Balatro for.
Within that casual mindset, Balatro is a great addition to my personal library.
Lots of Content
And that is without even getting into how much content Balatro has. I am honestly not interested in exploring the specific challenges that the game has, but if you truly love this game, it’s almost impossible to run out of it.
As shown in the above pictured, first of all you need to unlock the Jokers, and while at first it’s fun, some of them have some very stupid unlock conditions, such as “discard a Royal Flush” or “have $400”. Some of these Jokers are also really good, so it’s a good idea to have them. I remember spending a lot of hours of runs just trying to get as many as possible, regardless if I won or lost—a few of them were fun challenges, others just obnoxious.
Then, there’s all the different decks that you can unlock. I don’t want to get into detail here, but there’s a lot of ways in which you can customize your experience with them. They offer slight variations in theory, but in practice, the runs are drastically different depending on which one you play. Difficulty also unlocks on every individual deck, so if you want to actually 100% it, you need to clear every difficulty with every deck.
There are also special challenges with specific requirements, but I never got around to doing those. I enjoy this game, but not so much to do a deep-dive or get super good at it—it’s just something I do casually while waiting my League cues or listen to a Youtube video. These seem like fun challenges if you want even more content on what is a very low-priced game.
Final Verdict—What Does This Mean for Gaming?
Balatro’s success among controversies such as rising game prices and increasingly costly AAA games makes me think about how we don’t actually need these super big blockbuster games for everything. Sometimes we can have a solid, low-to-the-ground game with little ambition and that can be a commercial hit as well.
While I do think Balatro is overhyped, I also think it’s a good game. It’s a low-commitment, high-reward kind of game—perfect for short bursts, flawed but fun. I might not chase 100%, but I’ll absolutely keep coming back for a quick run when I have time to kill.
