One More Go

Balatro, a title that only sounds right if you let it roll out of your mouth in Sean Connery’s distinctive timbre. It may look like a game that would be at home in the smoky casinos of Monte Carlo, but don’t be fooled. Balatro may share its language with Poker, but it’s a distant cousin of the game itself. Unlike in poker, the numbers here never go down. You’re never at risk of going broke, and your only opponent is the score you’re trying to best each round. Succeed and you’re rewarded with cash to upgrade or tweak your deck, fail and you’re sent back to the beginning to contemplate where it all went wrong.

Balatro is a stripped back score chaser in the shape of a rogue-lite, a game where each new run has players starting with a standard set of playing cards. All of the traditional poker hands you would expect to see are here, pairs, flushes, straights, etc. But in Balatro they are all assigned two numbers, chips and multipliers, these base numbers are then modified by the cards played. Aces will add 11 chips, face cards 10, and the remaining cards nine to two. The total score for that hand is the product of all your chips augmented by the multiplier. Players can only play four hands to score as many chips as they can, to maximise that score players can also discard four sets of cards as they hunt for the final pieces to complete their hands.

Seems simple, but once you burst through that first score and into the second round, Balatro reveals its true self. Players can spend their cash reward from each round to give themselves a better chance of passing the next one. The most straightforward way is to simply add more playing cards to your deck, additional aces or face cards will naturally score you more points, but cards can also be modified, increasing their rank by one, adding seals that will score a card twice instead of once, or even swapping them for blank stone cards which have no suit or rank but will always add 50 chips to the pot. There are consumables in the form of planet cards that will upgrade the base stats for a played hand, or tarot and spectral cards that can have more drastic effects such as changing every card in your hand to a single random suit. There are countless ways to spec your deck, but what will drive most of those decisions is the final type of card that can be purchased from the store, the joker cards.

Players can use up to five joker cards during any given round, and their benefits can range from relatively mundane, gain additional chips for playing a certain hand, to the downright irreverent, add one multiplier for each hand played that contained no face cards. Jokers pair language and visual design so that each new card is a treat to discover. The Smeared Joker is exactly that, a smudged image that can no longer tell spade from club or heart from diamond. Egg is a joker that grows in value each round. Sock and Buskin will score all face cards a second time. There are 150 unique jokers to unlock, but only two randomly selected jokers will appear in the shop between rounds. Such limited options force players to experiment with new configurations and strategies. Jokers that were pivotal in one game might be totally useless in the next, with each round offering decisions for players to delicately ponder as they erect their house of cards, balancing their strategy against chance. As with all good rogue-lites the challenge becomes ever greater, until inevitably it all comes crashing down. As you return to the main menu you’re introduced to a host of unlocks, new decks, new difficulties, and new jokers. Rather than succumb to Sisyphean dread, the new roster of abilities immediately pulls players back in with the promise of progressing further.

Balatro is a distillation of the genre, intensely focussed, and fairly simple. The object that you play with is a standard deck of playing cards, an object familiar to most, and easier to manage and recall than the abstracted video game systems of games like Hades or Slay The Spire. Yes, Balatro unfurls into a chaos as the numbers climb ever higher, but those early rounds are some of the most approachable this genre has to offer. Likewise its presentation is in no way intimidating, its CRT style screen curve echoing games of solitaire on an old PC, a game even my Nan played at length. While that may leave it looking a little flat in static screenshots, the game is at its best when in motion. Sound design works in tandem with visual effects to tactilely convey the shuffle of cards and the popping of points. As scoring grows more complicated, the cadence of the animation increases adding tension as you watch the numbers rise, hoping that your modifiers will be set aflame to denote total victory. A testament to how well you’ve played your hand.

While One More Go typically covers games that have been out a little while, games that are worthy of another shot, or are intriguing classics that are worth revisiting, for Balatro we make an exception. There is no doubt that Balatro is a modern classic, available on most platforms, but absolutely at home on Switch, where it can be played in short, sharp bursts. A short game that is simple in nature, but with incredible depth that will have players returning over and over again.