Balatro Has Me, Please Send Help

I went to the UK Games Expo and felt revived when I received my press pass. I eagerly took down notes, fought through anxious awkwardness to speak with folks and had several ideas for articles. I even started writing on the train.

Then, to articles in, something happened. I started playing Balatro on the Switch. I’d watched Nintendo Life’s video on it and it seemed… fine. I threw it on my wishlist as I like deckbuilding games and roguelikes, and eventually I cracked when it was only 10% off. Just enough to make me feel like I was getting a bargain, something I could take or leave. Little did I know that I was making a deal with some kind of demon. A pact I would find difficult to escape.

The long and short of it is that I ended up being late in getting some articles in and now I’m justifying it by making a review of a card-based video game for a board & roleplaying game website.

What is Balatro?

You start with a standard poker deck. 52 cards, no jokers. You’re playing poker hands, generating an amount of score based on the level of hand and the value of each card. If you don’t meet a target score in a limited number of hands, it’s game over. If you do well then everything pops visually, the screen shakes, the numbers go up and if you do really well, the boxes they’re in go on fire! That dopamine hit, the one I wish happened with me and exercise but never has.

Then after that first game, things start to get weird. You get money based on the ‘blind’ (small, big or boss, but more on that later) and on the amount of hands you’ve got left. Now you’ve got options which allow you to break the game. Cards which can be bought individually or in random booster packs. Yeah, that CCG itch started again seeing those packs.

Jokers are the main engine for this. Instead of going in the deck, you get five slots at the top of the play space and (most of the time) they stick around. One of my first jokers was actually misprinted, with the image off-centre and a score multiplier which kept changing. Another meant that I would score better if I played a four of a kind, or would give me more money if I didn’t spend any of my limited budget of discards. There are 150 Jokers, a ton of which are gated off until you meet certain unlock requirements. The kind of quest-based busywork that I can get behind. I have an index card with the things I’m aiming for jotted down on them.

Planet cards increase the multiplier for different hands of cards. They’re one-off cards and the bastard things will always conspire to throw you a ‘straight flush’ modifier when you’re after something more modest like two of a kind. 

Tarot makes an appearance as Arcana cards. These are one-off modifiers which do things like trash a card from your deck, add certain conditions and modifiers to them (gold gives you money if it’s left in your hand, steel adds to the multiplier if it’s in your hand, etc). They’re a bit more chaotic than the Planets, but sometimes can help you modifying things towards hands you want to play.

Standard cards are just standard playing cards, but a lot of them have modifiers baked in. I’ve only just learnt to look at my deck list before adding things from here, to help push the odds in my favour.

Finally Spectral packs are all a bit weird, but they’re pretty much like Arcana. Some have simple effects like adding a ‘seal’ to a card, making them do something extra when they’re played or discarded. There are some volatile effects here, though, often involving trashing cards or Jokers. I avoided them for the first couple of plays, thinking they’d be more harmful than they were.

Playing Balatro

You’ve played your first game against the small blind and started to modify your deck. Now what? You’ll play through eight rounds of three games. You can skip the ‘small blind’ or ‘big blind’ for a random bonus, but you won’t be generating money if you do. The Boss Blind is where the game shows you it isn’t playing. It’s unskippable. The Boss Blinds each have a different way of messing with your deck, making things harder to beat them. Some disable a whole suit of cards, so if you’re been trying to get 30 Clubs in your deck to unlock a Jokey, it’ll wreck you. Others mean you can’t keep playing the same hand, or eliminate your money if you play your most common hand. Harsh for folks who were trying to become an expert at one specific hand.

When things go well, numbers pop off all over the place; the cards played of course, but also the Jokers and some of the cards held in your hand. The flames in the score boxes reach higher, the screen shakes enough to make you wonder if the Switch is having a fit. Eventually there’s a final Boss Blind which does some catastrophic things and has a massive score to get past.

Eventually you’ll beat one of them! Hooray! Like unlocking Jokers, it’ll unlock another deck to use. The basic ones just add one more hand, one discard, some extra money, that sort of thing. Then they get weirder: A deck with no face cards is a favourite. And each one has several difficulty modes to try and beat. After a while, you’ll unlock challenges which were a great way of keeping me playing even when I was beginning to feel like I might be done with the core gameplay loop. These offer locked in jokers and restrictions to have to figure out. 

The Collection section shows you what you’ve seen and unlocked: Jokers, booster packs, vouchers, Arcana, Planets, Blinds and so on. Another great checklist to go through and some moreish challenges. I spent ages just trying to get five glass cards in my deck. A simple-sounding challenge but you need the shop to align with your wishes and not to get screwed over having to play a hand of cards that features the fragile cards. The sods knew that was what I was aiming for, so suddenly their 25% chance of shattering just kept getting hit.

I love deckbuilding card games and rogue like video games, so of course I was going to get hooked on it. The game shop appeal of opening up booster packs or splurging on a pricy single card was also an appealing move from them. My partner gave it a try after fear that she’d become like me and have to have the Switch pried out of her hands. She found it fine, but it didn’t get its hooks into her the way that games like Bloodborne or Tears of the Kingdom have. So this game isn’t for everybody, and it is a massive time-killer. But it’s a good fun one, and I felt that the audience of a website about board games might well find it a fun diversion.

Me, I’m just pleased it’s not on mobile devices, so I have a place to hide from it. And if I’m late for something, just tell me to stop playing Balatro. Maybe I’ll listen.

Finally, because it feels bad just writing about a video game, I’m going to briefly give a shout out to a single-player RPG where people do things kind of like Balatro. Wreck This Deck has you capturing demons and writing your journal. You do this by carrying out rituals using playing cards. Throughout the game you’ll draw on cards, tear them, burn them and using the Black Armada Discord you can even interact with other hunters to help with your rituals.

It’s a neat idea that crowdfunded a while ago and now has a physical edition you can find here: https://blackarmada.com/product/wreck-this-deck/.