Holism: Breaking Balatro

Thanks to Cart Boy for edits.

By this point, near the end of 2024, most people reading this are well aware of Balatro. The roguelike card game by anonymous Canadian developer LocalThunk took the world by storm when it launched in February. Its expert game feel, brilliant gameplay, wildly deep mechanics, and support for incredible levels of experimentation have all been well documented. The AV Club argued that it had finally “fixed” the well-trod game of poker; Polygon claimed that it makes math “fun.” Nintendo Life immediately declared it one of the year’s first Game of the Year frontrunners and struggled to find even mild criticisms for their “high and low points” format. It sold over a million copies in its first month and has become a Steam favorite. The biggest controversy it fell into was over age rating in the European market. There’s not really much more to say on the subject. But let me try. Because Balatro is really, really cool.

Image: Source Gaming. Balatro, one of the year’s biggest and most surprising hits, is a beautiful work of excellent game feel, tight roguelike mechanics, and a lot of style.

There’s no story to this one, no characters. You’re just you, going through rounds of a game that isn’t really poker but does involve playing poker hands to reach an ante of chips. You can only play a certain number of hands before you either beat it and move to the next round or not and start over. There are twenty-four rounds and an “endless” mode afterwards for anyone who wants to take their “perfect” system even further. Each one has a different ante to hit and in some cases, special effects like not counting cards of a certain suit. These are, in the roguelike standard, divvied up randomly for every playthrough.

Image: Source Gaming. The powerful Full House requires three of one card and two of another, meaning you’re playing five cards and getting a nice bonus. For this ante, all Diamond cards are worthless, but the King of Diamonds still lets you set up the hand.

You know the hands. Pair, Full House, Flush, Straight, the works. Some stuff are expanded or contracted, so Royal Flushes are treated as Straight Flushes and High Cards are a bit more valuable. Each hand is worth a certain number of Chips, plus some extra scratch from each played card, and that’s multiplied by a number that comes with the hand. So, in theory, you’ll want to make flushes or straights, which are worth more Chips and a higher multiplier, rather than a hand of one or two pairs. You’ll maybe want to discard cards to get the best possible hand, though you can only discard a certain number of times. But let’s keep it simple: you’ve got the blue number (Chips) and the red number (Mult), and the goal is to get them both up.

Image: Source Gaming. Let’s ignore that a Five of a Kind is impossible in normal poker. What matters is that you get the blue number times the red number. The goal, then, is to get them both as high as you can.

However, you’ll notice very quickly that the ante becomes increasingly high, or rather, increasingly impossible. Let’s say you get that royal flush. That’s 100 Chips, 8 Mult, and the bonus points you’d get are 11 for the Ace and 40 for the King, Queen, Jack, and Ten, so that’s… 151 by 8, so 1,208 Chips total. A ton of points! Destroys the 300 ante for the first round. But it’s near-impossible to get that, even if you liberally discard ones you don’t need. This is still poker, sort of, and you are dealt cards at random. More likely, you’re gonna have a little work beating that 300 ante with generic hands, and even more trouble with the 450 one that comes right after it. And by the end, you’re expected to put up tens, even hundreds of thousands of Chips! These numbers are impossible to hit.

Image: Source Gaming. Outside of the similar Royal Flush, the Straight Flush is the best standard hand in poker. However, it’s absurdly difficult to get and is risky—trying to get it means you’re actively avoiding other, useful hands.

So instead… you cheat. And what that entails is using other cards beyond the fifty-two in your deck. It turns Balatro from what could be a somewhat dry math game into a demented roller coaster of Rube Goldbergian mechanisms, wild chance, and shocking upsets. Being a card sharp isn’t just empowering; it makes you an impromptu Dr. Frankenstein whose monster constantly threatens to go out of control.

The first, largest, and loudest cards to help you out are the Jokers. There are 150 of them at present after waves of patches and updates, and you can normally have up to five on hand at once. They all have these amazing designs and just as amazing effects. Let’s take the Mad Joker. He adds 10 Mult to every hand that includes a Three of a Kind, which means he’ll also activate for Four of a Kind, Five of a Kind, and a Full House. Three of a Kind gives you 30 Chips and 3 Mult, so you’ve gone from scoring 90 Chips to 390. The Lusty Joker, meanwhile, gives a small Mult bonus for every Heart card you play, so if you’re throwing out a Flush of Hearts, each one’s gonna add to that bonus. The Drunkard lets you discard cards one more time each round, which can be good for setting up combos.

Image: Source Gaming. Thanks to a bevy of Jokers, this fairly generic Straight is far, far more powerful than a basic Royal Flush. Look at the score just explode in flame.

Those are basic effects, though, and weirder, stronger, and riskier ones abound. An extreme example would be Madness, which multiplies the multiplier itself by increasing amounts every round… but also destroys one of your Jokers at random. Turtle Bean makes your hand size huge, but that buff gets a bit smaller every turn before the card disappears. Many of these are rarer; Balatro distinguishes Jokers by power, and one of them, Baseball Card, does that “multiplying the multiplier” thing for every Uncommon Joker you have. Several of the best have a cumulative effect and are better the earlier you get them. For instance, Hiker will permanently increase the value of your cards every time you play them, so after one play that Two of Spades you mildly resent for being just a Two will be as good as a Seven. After being counted a few times, it’ll be wildly overpowered. Really useful for a style built around replaying the same few cards. The lovely Spare Trousers is like this; it gives you a multiplier boost that is initially set to 0 but gets 2 added every time you play a Two Pair. Play a few of those hands, and you’ll get a decent bonus no matter what hand you play. And Square Joker gives a similar boost to Chips that builds every time you play exactly four cards. If you can find one of these early and keep it going, you can be incredibly powerful by the end—especially the ones with spins on that “multiplaying the multiplier” bonus, which can break the ante in wonderfully nutty ways. In one run, I managed to get the Wee Joker, which strengthens its bonus based on how many 2’s you play over time, to give me over one thousand Chips every single hand.

Image: Source Gaming. Left to right: Space Joker has a 25% chance of upgrading the level of the hand you deal, Square Joker gives a Chip bonus based on every four-card hand, and Spare Trousers gives a Mult bonus based on every two pairs. These work together passively, and you’ll want new Jokers to support them.

And it takes little time for you to notice that they easily synergize. That Mad Joker adds that 10 Mult to Three of a Kind, so keep it and a Clever Joker—which is the same, just with 80 extra Chips as the bonus—in the same pot, and you’ll be getting a double boost every time you play that hand. Oh, and let’s say Spare Trousers and Square Joker are here, too. Remember, one gives you a bonus that gets better after Two Pair and the other gives a bonus for hands with exactly four cards, so if you play only Two Pair or Three of a Kind (and the latter with a junk card that won’t be tallied), you’ll have these wellsprings of power that constantly build. Oh, but that’s not nearly going far enough! The Supernova tallies every time you’ve played a specific hand in that run and adds that to the multiplier on every turn. Now, you’ve got five reasons to keep playing two hands!

Image: Source Gaming. The furthest I’ve gotten in Batro relied heavily on Joker synergies. My strategy was to play Lucky cards, which have a chance of giving you cool effects. The Lucky Cat gives a huge bonus every time one happens. Oops! All 6s makes them more likely to happen. the Hanging Chad makes one score two extra times, giving you multiple chances of it happening. Blueprint copies the Joker to the right. Meanwhile, Yorick gets stronger the more you discard and Castle gets points based on cards you discord. This was a luck factory.

Granted, some Jokers can also work against each other—and I don’t even mean in the way Ceremonial Dagger gets a Mult bonus every time it murders one of your other Jokers. Ones that give you benefits for using discards work against the ones that give you benefits for not using discards. Ones that give you bonuses for different hands mean they’re effectively competing with each other, which is the main problem of that setup from earlier. And, well, you’ve also got the whole issue of still needing to make these hands to begin with, and the fact that your perfect run is dependent on luck. After all, a roguelike isn’t going to give you everything you need, and you actually have to spend in-game money to buy this stuff. You get some cash after every round to spend before the next blind, but it’s never enough to get everything, especially early on. So if the Jokers are the stars, we’ve got to get deeper into the chicanery and break the game even further with some humble day players.

Image: Source Gaming. Take a look at a different Ace-heavy deck. As the Abandoned Deck starts without face cards, I emphasized Aces and built my deck around them. By the end, most of my cards were enhanced, either because I made them that way or bought them as-is. It led to wild and often uncontrollable plays.

First, you can just, like, buy cards. They’re available in adorable “booster packs,” so if your strategy is predicated on having access to Queens or Sevens or Diamonds or whatever, just go and take a chance. Maybe one’ll be there. But many of these cards may be made of steel or glass; they may have a stamp or pattern that’s abnormal. This means they’ve been Enhanced with special effects. Bonus cards are worth thirty more Chips; Foil cards fifty. Wild cards are treated as though they’re in any suit. Stone cards are… weird; they can’t be treated as part of a hand, but if you play it you’ll get 50 extra Chips. If you score a card with a Gold Seal or don’t score a card that’s gold-plated, you’ll get a bit of extra scratch. And rarely, some Jokers may randomly have these, giving them additional perks and potentially making a great one even better. Maybe you’ll wind up with a deck of seventy random cards. Or a hundred!

Image: Source Gaming. This deck was built around the idea of adding cards. The Jokers on the right multiply the Mult itself, and that addition gets larger with every card you add to the deck. Two others add cards each round, and if I buy cards between rounds that’s gonna build two very large multipliers. Of course, you’re also left with quite the unwieldy deck.

There are other types of cards that don’t fit in either the deck or the Jokers. With the exception of Vouchers (which just give you passive benefits like making cards cost less), they fall into a category of “Consumables” that can be used between or during rounds. For instance, the Planet Cards increase the value of an individual hand. Every time you use a Jupiter, the base Chips and Mult of a Flush get a boost. If you want to build your deck around one hand these are a necessity, but even if you’re not they provide a boring but tangible benefit. Naturally, this relationship isn’t the extent of it. Some Jokers have powers based around summoning or getting power from the Planet cards you’ve used. If you can keep a card with a Blue Seal when you finish a round, it’ll give you the card that buffs the winning hand. Other cards may give them as rewards. This is the secret of Balatro; all of these features are weird and overwhelming and kinda inscrutable at the start, but they’re not disparate at all. Everything can interact. The potential for synergies is everywhere.

Image: Source Gaming. A few Vouchers and their upgraded versions; you have to buy the early version first in every run. The blue ones give you more hands, the red ones give you more discards, but the ones on the top right are based around Planet cards and are vital for a setup based around them.

You see this especially with the Tarot cards, which can be bought or won through other methods—some Jokers even summon them as a power. These imbue powers kinda sorta based on their historical use in Tarot readings that let two cards give a Mult bonus (The Empress), increase their level (Strength), or outright destroy ones that work against your strategy (The Hanged Man). My favorite is Death, which turns one of your cards into another; if you’ve got a Polychrome Edition Mult King with a Red Seal, you can literally paper it over a humble three. If you’ve got that Lusty Joker from earlier and want to build your deck around Hearts, the Sun will turn three cards of your choosing into that suit. And while the cards you’re given are random, how you use them isn’t. They’re essential for that perfect deck.

Image: Source Gaming. Up in the top right, in my Consumables collection, are a Tarot card and Spectral card. The Hierophant lets you give two cards a nice Chip bonus, while the Grim destroys a random card in exchange for two random Aces.

Spectral cards are like that, but rarer and scarier. They bestow far more powerful effects, but usually with a cost and usually at random. The Magician of the Tarot will let you give two cards of your choice a Lucky Enhancement, but when you play the Familiar during a match, it’ll flat-out destroy one card in your hand at random to make three (also random) enchanted cards. Wraith will give you a random Joker… but it’ll take all your money. Hex’ll give one random Joker a cool effect and destroy the rest. And The Soul doesn’t come with any downsides, but it’s the only way to get a Legendary Joker. Some are fully under your control, but when you tango with these cards, you’re moving into a dangerous, wild realm. The game holds onto them for a while, only revealing them after you’ve played a few games, and these aren’t the only ones. Many Jokers, Vouchers, and secret upgraded versions thereof are only unlocked from certain conditions, meaning you’ll be regularly finding new things and expanding the range of possible tools.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the my most improbable sets imaginable ended up with eight Jokers, well over the five you’re allowed to have from the start. They’re not organized perfectly, but they certainly are very pretty together.

All of this, together, creates a space of constant, fast movement. It’s not just that there’s an unbelievable depth and breadth with just a few basic mechanics, though that’s part of it. Even the card decks you use play into this, as each has a unique and potentially synergizing effect like adding an extra hand or altering how you earn money or flat-out removing Face cards. But the proceedings also have this gonzo, high stakes energy despite having no plot or writing. Your cards have a weight when you physically drag them around each other to forge the perfect hand. The rumble and noise have this incredible sense of theater and drama. There’s an incredible game feel. If you’re spending more than a couple minutes on a given round, you’re probably moving too slow.

Image: Source Gaming. Balatro also features a lot of things to make the game tactile, playful, and fast. You have to drag cards to put them in ideal places (as bonuses are activated from left to right), every dollar earned or spent comes with a loud cash register sound, everything has movement, and moving from one round to the next is super fast.

These virtues are part and parcel of roguelikes. Synergizes, chance, the feeling of stumbling onto an overpowered kit; this is all standard. But, that and that incredible game feel are it. There’s none of the wonderful brawling or storytelling you see in Hades. There’s none of the cyberpunk sadness from Into the Breach. There’s none of the tight Spelunky and Dead Cells platforming, nor mechanically gimmickry on the level of Crypt of the NecroDancer. Even card RPGs, things like Slay the Spire and Inscryption, enjoy stories or even just the shades of a larger world. Balatro is nothing but the cards, and I think that’s a secret of its popularity. It is about as stripped down to its essence as a video game can be and absolutely perfect in that form. Just draw and draw and see how far you can go. Maybe somewhere in the next hundred hours you’ll get that perfect set.