Good, Great, and Balatro

A few weeks ago, during the peak of summer in Buenos Aires, my Circulo Vicioso co-host, Pablo Wasserman, kept badgering me with the same question: "Have you played Balatro?" My answer was always no because I didn't feel like exploring anything new. Until about two weeks ago when, for some unknown reason, my computer decided it didn't want to turn on -- I moved the plug, checked the power supply, even thought the motherboard was dead -- and I had no choice but to fire up Xbox Cloud Gaming on the living room TV. That's when I saw the smile. Ah, that damn smile. Innocently, I opened Balatro and played a couple of rounds. Since then, it's the only thing I play. It pushed Starcraft II out of the priority queue.

All of this was preconfigured in every recommendation. Even when I mentioned I'd started playing, several followers quickly warned me on Twitter that I was heading toward addiction. I played it cool and ignored the warnings. Now I'm neck-deep in it.

But enough beating around the bush, let's talk about the game. There's no need to emphasize that Balatro is an amazing game, and for that very reason it won three awards at the 2024 Game Awards: best indie game, best debut game, and best mobile game.

Balatro is a card game. It's a poker game on steroids: you can get upgrades that allow you to score more chips. It's single player, and you're constantly fighting against the house, which keeps raising the chip threshold needed to win. This happens in sequences of three "blinds." The small blind, the big blind, and a boss that usually has some variable that messes with your game. Between each blind, and after defeating each boss, you can visit the shop -- and that's where things get interesting.

Basically, Balatro is a game where the goal is to pull off the best "combos" that give you the highest possible score. This works because the modifiers help you both add chips and get multiplier numbers, with your final score being the product of each one after every hand. To achieve this, there are four types of helper cards: Jokers, Planets, Tarots, and Spectrals.

The insane combo

Jokers are responsible for the permanent effects in the game. Usually you can have up to five, and their abilities tend to influence each other, achieving those coveted combos. By the way, "comboing" is a concept that was born from Magic: The Gathering and is basically used when the synergy between cards produces an effect so powerful that it brings the player to the brink of victory or outright gives them the win. The whole trick of Balatro is finding a combination of jokers that lets you combo off. On top of that, they're responsible for the game's Clown-Core, Joker-Core, or Juggalo aesthetic (the part Wasserman described as "cursed").

On the other hand, Planets are used to level up base hands (high card, pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, royal flush). Tarot cards generally modify the deck (though they can also modify and create jokers) and add enhancements to each card (like upgrades and chips with special effects). Lastly, Spectrals are like tarot cards but with stronger effects.

In many ways, Balatro resembles a TCG (trading card game), since it added to the classic poker game the ability to collect money each round and spend it on upgrades that, following the card game theme, can come directly or in random packs like Pokemon, Magic, and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Ultimately, we can say that Balatro is quite similar to poker but with Draft mechanics.

One more won't hurt

And the addictive factor? Well, many say it's explained by all the "visual candy" in the game. Every effect and every reaction has a mini animation, its own sound, that generates dopamine (it does). But I think this has to do with the game's greatest achievement: when you start a run (choosing a deck and a difficulty and trying to get the highest chip score possible), you only have one life to win it. If the house beats you on the last hand, it's all over. That feeling of emptiness after defeat, and the constant thought of "I could have won this run if I had changed that play or bought that joker" -- that's what makes it so addictive.

Something that ultimately falls within the roguelike dynamics typical of other types of games, where although they're usually associated with several more characteristics (procedural levels, turns, grid-based combat), permadeath is one of the most fundamental. That's why every article (this one included) that talks about Balatro places it within that category.

Crossing the point of no return

Like every video game, there's a moment when you as a player hit what I like to call "the threshold." I don't know if this happens to you, but there's a more or less pivotal moment where you either get hooked or drop a game. Maybe you have more nuanced experiences, or feel this isn't as decisive and is part of an indefinite progression. But that's how I feel about it.

There are games I know I'm about to drop because I hit the threshold, and if I keep playing it's because I forced myself to (like Red Dead Redemption 2, which I would have dropped at the very moment of the wagon after the snow). Maybe it has to do with the number of hours played. If you're around 10 or 15 hours in, and the game still hasn't "shown" anything, hasn't sparked any kind of interest, it's likely that things die right there.

With Balatro, it happened to me very clearly. I played that first time on the screen (won a deck on the base difficulty) and then went on a small nocturnal frenzy where I unlocked more decks. The problem came on Sunday afternoon, when I sat down to play again to unlock some other deck and fell into the classic rabbit hole: looking up builds. That is, which types of jokers have the best synergy, best combos, what are the most effective ways to play. Once you cross the threshold, there's no going back.

Right there I found this image, and I knew I hadn't just crossed the threshold -- I was entering the zone of irreparable damage. This single image made me unlock 15/15 decks and beat one of them on every difficulty. From there, things escalated, and now I'm not just looking up the best jokers but what type of play, how much card modifiers matter, and a long path that's already been traveled a thousand times.

When you enter the zone of irreparable damage, you know all that's left is to try to unlock as many achievements as possible. And if you can, all of them. A task that isn't simple or easy, or free. It only happens on certain occasions with certain games. In this case, it seems like a feasible possibility. Mostly because it's the only way to repair the irreparable damage.

We'll see what luck dictates.

Balatro, cheers.

How to play Balatro (update 4/29/25)

Last night, while playing one of my nightly runs, something unexpected happened -- something I'd been working toward for a while: achieving an exponential score. This means, ultimately, creating a combo so broken (powerful) that it upgrades the game's typical notation system to an exponential number. It's not unusual at all; in fact, regular players pull it off quite often. But there's always someone who asks me, "How did you do it?" So here are my rules for playing Balatro and not dying in the process:

• Play Flush. This might sound silly, but it's the foundation of my game. The easiest and highest-yielding play in terms of score is Flush. Then there's the possibility of tuning High Card or playing Three of a Kind or Full House, which also yield very well. But for the early levels, Flush is like kicking a penalty hard and down the middle.
• This is pretty obvious, but you need Jokers that help you add a good amount of chips, that give you multipliers, and fundamentally, that multiply them. That's the subtle difference between cards that say + Mult and x Mult.
• A somewhat solid economy is absolutely necessary to keep buying Jokers, Planets, Tarots, and enhanced cards. There are some great jokers, but pay special attention to Tarot cards that add and multiply money.
• Use hand skips to get extra resources. While you shouldn't abuse it, some of the times you skip a blind (especially the small one), it helps you accumulate resources or get Negative Jokers (the ones that let you have more Joker slots).
• Starting at a certain level (some say four or five), the game enters more of a "midgame" phase. At that point, it's necessary to transform the initial combos that got you there, in search of much more powerful combos. This search will be determined by luck or economy. That's why a solid economy is so important if we want a long run. From here on, your run enters a "decision" zone. Everything before this is just a filter.
• Tune the cards. It might seem trivial, but it's the key to everything. Modifications to cards and the deck are essential in long runs. In principle, anything that adds chips is extremely important: red ones for scoring and purple ones for free Tarots. Also, removing cards you don't need and shrinking the deck adds a ton of consistency in the final stages.