The power of Balatro lies in a common facet of videogames: the numbers go up. They have to, constantly, or else your run comes to an end, and you have to start again, immediately, as soon as possible, before you’re left alone with your thoughts again. It’s not really poker but builds upon it; you pick up to five cards from a larger hand dealt to you from your deck, with the goal of making a traditional poker hand, from a high card up to a Royal Flush. You’re not competing against any other poker hands, though, nor other players or even the computer. You earn a certain amount of chips for each card played, which is multiplied by the hand you played, and if you make a specific amount of money before you’ve played all your hands for that round you get to move on to the next round. Of course it’s not that simple; you can buy joker cards between each round, each one with its own specific benefits—they’ll multiply your score, or add additional chips, or increase how much money you earn. The goal is to build a deck that will take you through 24 rounds, at which point you “win” that run.
Of course it’s still not that simple, as every individual part of this scoring formula can be upgraded, amplified, and altered. In addition to jokers, you’ll need to buy both tarot and planet cards. Planet cards will level up a poker hand, so that, say, a Full House will now net you more chips and a higher multiplier than it would before. Tarot cards, meanwhile, have a large range of benefits, from adding multiplier bonuses or bonus chips to individual cards in your deck, to earning you extra money, to adding permanent bonuses to your jokers (a crucial path to victory, by the way). A full house that you play on the very first hand of the first round, before you’ve bought any jokers or bonuses, might pay out, say, 320 chips; after buying five jokers, upgrading the full house hand via planet cards, and enhancing some of the standard cards with with the tarot bonuses, a full house could easily net you over 10000 chips.
Consistently juicing those chips is the only way to do well in Balatro. The blinds—how many chips you need to score to win a round—steadily go up, and you need to go up with them. And every third round is a “boss blind,” which introduces a new, one-off rule that might force you to change up how you play—it’ll prevent you from playing the same hand twice, or make you play five cards per hand, or deal cards face down, or some other unpredictable bullshit that can just totally wreck your run. And earning the money you need to buy new cards to boost your chip totals can be difficult; you’ll get a little bit after finishing a round, but the quickest way to earn money is to have money, which nets you interest, so there’s a constant balance between how much to spend and what to spend it on. Basically, though, the main rule of Balatro is this: the numbers always go up, and so your numbers need to, as well.
I don’t know if that rough description captures how genuinely mind-consuming this game can be. It’s almost at the level of Tetris on that front—and now, like Tetris at its most dangerous, Balatro is now playable anywhere, on a platform you almost definitely already own. Of course, Balatro has technically been mobile all along for anybody who plays it on the Switch, as I do. Traveling with the Switch is kind of a hassle, though, so I never took it on the road, despite flying so much that Atlanta TSA agents recognize me. Putting it on a phone is a whole different thing than being able to play it on the larger, clunkier, more conspicuous Switch. Balatro is now always on my person, waiting for me to tap that icon and let it devour all my free time once again, no matter where I may roam. If you’re ever next to me on a plane and see me playing Balatro while ordering those tiny bottles of Bacardi with muffled Ornette Coleman on my headphones, please help.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, music, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.
