I have tried several times to write about the video game Balatro. And every time, it ended up being paragraph after paragraph of me summarizing the rules and it was just unreadable.
Balatro is a video game that answers the question of how do you make Poker into a solitaire with add a healing scoop of special powers. The elevator pitch for Balatro had to be this is the love child of Poker and Magic the Gathering.
Every round gives you a point goal you have to meet or exceed by playing a given number of hands. You multiply the value of the cards by the value of the hand. It’s only confusing until you play it.
You start with a regular deck of cards but as the game goes on, you can modify, well, everything. You can add or remove cards. You can upgrade cards or hands. And you can get jokers that give you special powers.
There’s a good chance you’ve already played and can testify how ridiculously addictive it is. My incredibly abbreviated summary fails to describe all the variations incorporated into the system. Honestly, I cannot imagine what the play testing had to be like.
What makes Balatro so brilliant is that Poker is baked into it. It’s the heart of Balatro and Poker is like a common language as far as the world of gaming is concerned. The basic idea is intrinsically intuitive. You automatically understand what you need to do. It’s the fine details, and there are a lot of them, that make it interesting.
While someone has developed a version of the game that uses physical cards (Solatro, which isn’t bad), there is no denying that having Balatro really sings in the video game format. A lot of things start happening all at once very quickly in the game and it’s really nice to have a computer keep track of it all.
We have had a lot of fun and a lot of play out of Balatro, sometimes even playing it as a cooperative. It might need a computer interface to work, but it is a card game at heart.
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