CHENNAI: Listen, I’ve played my fair share of card games. But I’ve never gotten around to playing Poker. I don’t know — maybe it’s my hatred for games that require more chance than I am comfortable with. Maybe it’s because I cannot wrap my head around the specific terms used in the game. ‘Three-of-a-kind’? ‘Straight’? ‘Flush’?? It’s all too confusing. Balatro showed me that there exists a version of Poker that can be fun, without having to bother with all its boring specifics.
But Balatro is not really a game of Poker, is it? I don’t want to get into any trouble. Poker as a topic in gaming, in India, is disputed enough that I’d like to distance myself from that conversation. So to be very clear — Balatro is a single-player game that is more rogue-like than Poker. There’s no actual money involved. Instead of playing against an enemy, your goal is to beat the number on the chips. But how exactly is it a rogue-like? The cards don’t exactly live in dungeons.
In the tutorial round in my first ever game, I did find that it was almost indistinguishable from a game of actual poker. It eased me into it with the comfort of clear rules. They are easily accessible — I hovered over a widget on the screen, which explained in crisp and simple visuals about the different types of hands. However, there were already small elements where it deviated from Poker — like the scoring system. Playing a certain type of hand, like a ‘full house’, would earn me 40 (baseline score) x 4 (a multiplier) chips.
I learnt higher number cards and face cards are good, as they are worth more chips. More complex hands are hard to come by, and correspondingly earn me even more chips. Hovering over my deck also conveniently tells me the number of the cards and suits that remain — so I would discard down till I found my ideal combination of playable cards. The scoring math isn’t easy to explain, but the animation in the game does a wonderful job of showing without telling. Winning the first round was effortless. It earned me negligible in-game currency.
And then, something very weird happened. The game opened up a “shop”, highlighting its wares in bright casino lights. Joker cards, tarot cards, and celestial card packs. It was quite bewildering. What would I do with all of these cards? Turns out that the game has an upgrade system, which allows these cards to either be “consumed” or “equipped”. They provided bonuses that would increase the score generated from any hand that was played. As the rounds progressed, and the ‘ante’ was ‘upped’, I realised that I couldn’t win without the right combination of jokers up my sleeve.
If I was still wondering if this was all just a fancy variation of poker, I only had to wait a couple of rounds before the game went completely off-the-rails. You see, as long as I didn’t lose to the ever-increasing number on the chips, the same deck carries over to future rounds. This meant that I could carefully upgrade and change up my deck with my purchases.
Come Ante 3, my curated deck did not resemble anything that I had ever seen in real-life. I now had 9 kings with strange and shiny embossings on them, 2 “glass” threes that threatened to shatter at any point when played, and numerous cards that were actually just slabs of stone.
This was all exactly as I had planned it. I now had a level of control over the game that was once plain old poker. The upgrades now had me drawing more of a certain type of card, feeding into my hyper-optimised, bonus-multiplying engine. Balatro is no simple game of chance — it’s a deck-building dream.
Now this is the kind of card game I can get in on — one that’s an infinitely replayable video game, with over 100s of joker cards to unlock. Balatro has had all of my attention over the last weekend, and it’s easily one of the best games I’ve played this year so far. It is currently available on multiple platforms, including the PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Nintendo Switch.
Anusha Ganapathi
@quofles
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)
