The videogame Balatro, first released in February of this year, has already established a huge fanbase thanks to its satisfying and addictive gameplay loop. Universally acclaimed (it is currently the third best-reviewed game of 2024 on Metacritic), it’s a shoe-in to make a bunch of critics’ best-of-the-year lists come December. This week it made its debut on iOS and Android mobile platforms, and at its heart lies the game of poker.
‘Fair enough,’ you might think, ‘great videogames come out all the time. I’m a poker player, why should I care?’
Two reasons:
- Balatro is already exposing new people to the game of poker, getting them familiar with the hands, language and some of the strategies involved, and pushing poker more into the mainstream.
- It’s an awful lot of fun to play, and now it fits in your pocket.
Just as Magic: The Gathering (MTG) provided the springboard for many top players to discover poker (Bryn Kenney, Justin Bonomo and David Williams are all known to have played MTG seriously), Balatro could well be the next phenomenon to usher in a new generation of cardplaying talent.
What is Balatro?
To be clear, Balatro has some significant differences from poker: it’s single-player only, there are no betting rounds, no money to be won and your hours of solver study won’t shoot you to the top of the high scores.
But while Balatro is categorically not poker, it has enough of the latter’s DNA to give new players a grounding in strategy, probability and poker hands; close enough to poker, at least, to warrant an ‘18+’ rating from the world’s various game certification bodies.
As with games such as Pokémon TCG or MTG, Balatro is a deckbuilding game in which you construct a deck by collecting, discarding and creating cards with different properties in order to score points or defeat an enemy. The key difference in Balatro is that the main deck you use does not consist of attacks and spells, for example, but a deck of 52 playing cards.
The way you score points to defeat your opponent is through creating poker hands, with cards themselves worth points (Blackjack style: a deuce is worth 2 points, face cards 10, etc.) and higher ranked hands worth bigger multipliers (a pair might have a multiplier of 2x, a straight 4x and a straight flush 8x).
You’ll only ever have access to a certain number of cards at once from which to construct your hand, with a set number of hands and draws to reach the target score for each round.
Variables and variance
Balatro is a deckbuilding roguelike game, meaning that no two playthroughs are the same given the variety of different effects cards in the game - only some of which are available in any one run.
The depth of the game comes from the many ways you can combine the hundreds of different effects cards you purchase - using in-game earnings - from the shop after each battle.
For example, let’s say you have an effects card which allows you to change cards’ suits; another that boosts the multiplier for flushes; and another that allows flushes to be made of only four cards. Such a combo would not only make flushes easier to hit, but pay off more when they do. Synergies like these are at the heart of building decks capable of scoring high enough to reach the later stages and ultimately beating the game.
Effects come in different forms, such as jokers, planet cards, tarot cards, spectral cards and vouchers. Not every one is available on every playthrough, however, so you’ll develop more and more distinct strategies as you gain experience with the game. You’ll also unlock different decks as you play, which have various abilities and effects on gameplay.
Growing the poker audience
An understanding of poker hands and probability is as important as getting to grips with the many variables which can affect the scoring, and it's this area where poker players will have a natural advantage.
Non-poker players, however, will quickly gain a much better understanding of how poker works. And there seems to be a ton of them out there playing it. The app went to #1 on the list of top paid games, and feedback is a) plentiful, b) positive, and c) coming largely from those outside the 'poker bubble'.
Much of the talk around the game is focused on the addictive nature of its core feedback loop.
Is this the game that will get the next generation into poker? Perhaps - assuming they are able to put it down for long enough.
Balatro is available now on iOS, Android, PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Nintendo Switch and Mac OS.
