Gather your limited-edition foil jokers and reach high scores in Balatro, 2024’s most popular indie game.

Balatro is a roguelike card game in which players try to reach an increasingly higher score requirement by playing different poker hands with the help of different modifiers and Joker cards.

So, is it really GOTY material? Aren’t roguelike card games already saturating the indie market? Is it actually fun to play? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our full review for Balatro.

Balatro
Developer: LocalThunk
Publisher: Playstack
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: February 20, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $14.99

Balatro‘s core gameplay consists of drawing cards and trying to play the best poker hand possible. Every poker hand is associated with a base score and multiplier, scaling up in points the more difficult they are to pull off.

This incredibly simple premise is Balatro‘s entire foundation, which it uses to build an insane game of modifiers and synergies on top of. Most of the gameplay is choice-based, requiring players to look for the best keyword combos to score as much as possible in the least amount of moves.

Being essentially a roguelike version of Poker, Balatro also has a certain degree of randomization, which will provide players with unbelievable highs and miserable lows. To put it simply, if this game allowed people to use real money it would destabilize the world’s economy.

The most important elements of any run in Balatro are the Joker cards, which can be acquired during runs to provide special passive effects. Some of these effects only trigger when specific conditions are met, while others are always active.

Getting a good combination of jokers is the key to success in the game, as the player has to constantly be on the lookout for available combinations and synergies

The Jokers are classified into different rarity tiers, ranging from common to legendary, and their effects can vary wildly, from simply giving you more chips to fundamentally changing what constitutes a poker hand.

The jokers aren’t the only important aspect of Balatro, though, as there are also planet and tarot cards that heavily affect the way you’ll play your current run. Planet cards allow you to level up your poker hands, enhancing their base score and multiplier, which adds up substantially when your Joker effects are applied afterwards.

Tarot cards have more varied effects, but they usually serve to directly change some of the cards in your deck, with effects ranging from switching their suit to enchanting them with special properties.

The entire 52 card deck can be modified by using tarot cards, giving the player a good amount of control over the randomized hands received every turn. Want to make every card in your deck an 8 of hearts? That’s possible. Want to make it so every card you have is made of glass and has a one in four chance of breaking when played? That’s also possible.

Every round in Balatro consists of three challenges, the small blind, big blind, and boss blind. These can be played for money, which is used to open card packs at the shop, but can also be skipped to gain a tag, which provides the player different rewards.

Skipping a blind instantly gives you whatever the tag reward is, but also skips the shop visit that happens after clearing a blind. Most of the player choices are made in the shop, and skipping it is one less chance you have to see a Joker you want, so the tag reward needs to be weighed against these opportunities you might miss.

Players can skip directly to the boss blind if they feel like it, although skipping around too much will most likely leave you too weak to clear the current score requirement, since you won’t have the chance to buy any cards or open any packs in the store.

Balatro‘s presentation is also worth highlighting here; the game’s charming visuals and sound effects add a lot to the experience, from the little jingle that plays when opening a card pack to the trippy background effect that continuously changes colors.

The interface and music feel perfectly crafted to keep your brain active and hooked to the game, especially when you continuously add up chips and multiplier points for an insanely high score. Balatro is an incredibly satisfying game to play, which adds a lot to its addictive and replayable nature.

Even if you have no interest in the game itself, take some time to listen to its soundtrack, especially the main menu theme, the vibes are immaculate.

Overall, Balatro is a difficult game to recommend, not because of its quality, more so because of how simple it is. We saw people initially write it off during the Game of the Year awards because the concept is a little out there, but the wave of players that gave the game a shot immediately understood what the hype is about.

Balatro is one of those games that will only click once you experience it firsthand, especially once you get a good run going. I know it took me a couple hours to fully understand what it had going on, but once I did, I was in.

A game that consistently feeds players with such raw dopamine hasn’t come along since Vampire Survivors initially released, and it shows that indie developers can turn anything into a fun roguelike experience. If you are still in the fence about it, give Balatro a try, you won’t regret it.