Balatro cast a magic spell that made me like math

This review was published earlier during BalatroFebruary premiere. We’re revisiting this story to celebrate our Game of the Year nomination at The Game Awards.

I’m not a poker player, but I definitely am Balatro guy now.

Created by: anonymous programmer performing under the pseudonym LocalThunk, Balatro is a deck-building roguelite that takes poker and makes it an infinitely replayable and incredibly addictive game by adding cards that break the rules of poker in the most delightful way possible – with all the math. I didn’t think anyone could do it PEMDAS comical, but Balatro proved me wrong.

Every run starts plain. You play a series of levels (called “antes”) consisting of three encounters each (called “blind”): a petite one, a huge one, and a boss. In each of them, you must achieve a high score in a constrained number of hands. Your score is calculated using a plain mathematical formula: X times Y. Both numbers are influenced by the hands you play. Stronger cards and stronger hands earn you more points, and like any good roguelike, you can add multipliers to multipliers to make those numbers go up and up. The rules of poker are about hand strength; a four of a kind earns more chips than a full house, which earns more chips than a flush, which earns more chips than a straight, etc. By winning rounds, you earn money which you then spend Balatroshop – that’s where the real game begins.

After each defeat, you enter the store. There, you can spend your hard-earned cash on a whole host of options that will further enhance and distinguish your deck: rule-breaking Joker cards, deck-modifying Tarot cards, booster packs with holofoil cards, cards that can be ghosted, and more. Hand types such as three of a kind or flush can be improved with Planet cards, increasing their multiplier.

The store is the basis of winning Balatro run away, because after the initial phase you won’t be able to beat any of the antes without a little help from these cards. Boss blinds introduce mechanics that are difficult to overcome, such as locking the scoring of a single suit or requiring only one type of hand to be played for the entire blind, with each subsequent ante requiring increasingly higher scores for each blind. The game is about selecting score modifiers from these additional cards to make individual hands more powerful – adding chips and multipliers, then multipliers Down these multipliers – such that in the case of my first one Balatro win, even a weak pair of 9s can win the game.

At the beginning of this run I took Marble Joker. After each level, he added one Stone card to my deck; these are colorless and uncounted cards that add 50 tokens to whichever hand you play them with. Marble Joker itself isn’t great. Too many Stone cards can ruin your ability to play, say, literally any hand because they have no number or suit. But I also took two other important Jokers: Hologram, which adds a 0.25x multiplier for each card added to your deck, and Driving License, which adds a flat 3x multiplier if you have at least 16 enhanced cards in your deck. I combined this with a few other Jokers that added multipliers to every hand I played, and in the late game a 20 point hand consistently yielded over 500,000 points, all thanks to a +10 here and 2x there rollover. Placed correctly (card abilities read from left to right, so be sure to add them up before multiplying), I was looking at a score multiplier greater than 1300x, turning a pair of nines – objectively not a very good poker hand – into my first great taste of victory.

If this all sounds very mathematical, that’s because it is. Not since Universal paper clips Have I played a game that focuses on the joy of numbers interacting with each other? Other top-notch deck builders such as Kill the Spire Or Monster train add at least a bit of narrative to the gameplay. Even hell Universal paper clipsthe most elaborate numbers simulator I’ve ever played, ultimately serves a story about the consequences of using artificial intelligence in the pursuit of industrial maximization. WITH Balatrothere is no narrative beyond your own headcanon, which in my case was imagining that the video poker machine at my family’s pizzeria suddenly goes haywire, spewing out cursed cards while the smell of cheese and marinara fills the air. (When one day it will be proven Balatro is a secret Writingdeck builder style, I expect you all to give me my flowers, thank you.)

But I made it all up. Balatro it’s just numbers and probabilities. Balatro it’s just math.

All video games, of course, require a lot of math – more math than I, a guy who is by no means a mathematician, can claim to understand. That’s the magic of games like this Balatrothough. They make me like math. Very. Where other games might hide the countless calculations needed to make the game work, Balatro shows his work. Every blind, every ante, Balatro shows you his hand: all its calculations are visible to the player, step by step.

So what, w Balatroin this case, all that math becomes this game? What was so exciting about what I was doing that I lost track of how much I was playing and somehow spent 20 hours playing card games in a matter of days? When I wasn’t playing the game, I started thinking about the fantasies of these kinds of games where the numbers grow, where I could manipulate the numbers to my advantage in a world where variable interest rates and the whims of hyper-wealth could cost someone their job or circumstances birth may involve modifiers that cannot be easily dismissed. There’s something incredibly appealing about that sense of control in games like Balatro in a world that sometimes feels more random than a roguelite.

But honestly, that’s not what I think about when I play Balatro. What I mean is a perfect learning curve where early play turns even the most uninitiated among us into card sharks. I think of its deceptive simplicity that draws you in before revealing its almost infinite complexity. I think about how Balatro he’s so confident in one of gaming’s worst pleasures – the unironic thrill of optimization – that the spell he casts from the first hand remains just as effective in hand 1000. I think about how damn good it feels to win.

Balatro will make you a card counter in a game where every card counts. Before you know it, you’ll be ready for anything. Deckbuilding fans can’t afford to sleep on this game. Raise the stakes.