Balatro cast a magic spell that made me like math

27.02.2024 - 20:51 / polygon.com

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

Created by an anonymous developer who goes by the pen name LocalThunk, Balatro is a deck-building roguelite that takes poker and makes it an infinitely replayable and utterly engaging game by adding cards that break the rules of poker in the most delightful ways — via a whole lotta math. I didn’t think anyone could make PEMDAS fun, but Balatro proved me wrong.

Each run starts simply. You play a series of levels (called “Antes”) composed of three encounters each (called “Blinds”): Small, Big, and Boss. In each, you must reach a high score in a limited number of hands. Your score is determined with a simple math formula: X times Y. Both numbers are affected by the hands you play. Stronger cards, and stronger hands, score more points, and like any good roguelike, you can add multipliers on top of multipliers to make those numbers go up and up. Poker rules apply to the strength of the hands; 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. Winning rounds earns you money, which is then spent in Balatro’s shop — which is where the real game begins.

After every defeated Blind, you enter the shop. There, you can spend your hard-earned cash on a panoply of options to further strengthen and distinguish your deck: rule-breaking Joker cards, deck-modifying Tarot cards, booster packs with holofoil cards, cards that might be ghosts, and more. Hand types, like three of a kind or flush, can be upgraded via Planet cards, increasing their multiplier.

The shop is the bread and butter of winning a Balatro run, because after the opening stage, you won’t be able to beat any of the Antes without a little help from these cards. Boss Blinds introduce difficult-to-beat mechanics like blocking a single suit from scoring or requiring you play only one type of hand for the entire Blind, and each successive Ante requires higher and higher scores for each Blind. The game becomes about picking up score modifiers from these additive cards to make individual hands more powerful — adding chips and multipliers, then multipliers to those multipliers — such that, in the case of my first Balatro win, even a lowly pair of 9s can win the game.

Early on in that run, I picked up a Marble Joker. After each level, it added one Stone card to my deck; these are colorless and numberless cards that add 50 chips to whatever hand you play them with. Marble Joker by itself is not great. Too many Stone cards can screw up your possibility to play, say, literally any hand, since they don’t have a number or suit. But I also picked up two other crucial Jokers: Hologram, which adds a 0.25x multiplier per card added