Balatro
Release Date Developer Publisher 2024 LocalThunk Playstack
Balatro is a recent indie hit turning the well-known knowledge of poker hands into a tight, engaging roguelike which sucked hours out of me after I first started playing. The game is straightforward: score enough points based on cards played from your hand, and you’ll advance to the next level (called the Ante).
After each round, you can buy items such as:
- Tarot Cards: upgrades cards in your deck with a variety of modifiers (e.g. Lovers: this card counts as any suit)
- Planet Cards: upgrades the points scored for a specific poker hand (e.g. Flush)
- Playing Cards: normal playing cards that can unlock new hands (e.g. Five of a Kind)
- Jokers: always in play and affect the game in a variety of ways (e.g. +4 Mult for every Heart; +30 Chips for every card with an odd rank).
As I continued playing, though, I came to realize that the strategy is fairly limited compared to other games in the genre. This is part of what keeps the game so focused, but it also is what burned me out on it. Ultimately, runs became made or lost based on luck, devolving the game into gambling, true to its poker roots.
How Scoring Works
To better understand the balance of Balatro, we first need to understand how scoring works. The formula is as follows:
There are three parts of a score:
- Chips: The base score of a hand using the summation of cards. Each card is worth it’s value in Chips. Other modifiers can improve this (e.g. Heirophant: this card is worth +30 Chips)
- Mult: A multiplier that is cumulative. Two cards with +3 Mult will result in +6 Mult
- MultX: A multiplier that is multiplicative. Two cards with 3 MultX will result in 9 MultX
For example, a hand worth 250 Chips with 20 Mult and two MultX modifiers of 1.5 each would be scored as:
Each hand has a base Chips and Mult which can be upgraded by Planet Cards. The stronger hands in poker are also worth more in Balatro. This makes the difficult to find hands more attractive to players, as they’ll score more points initially. Below is the table of starting values:
MultX, on the other hand, is much harder to come by, but very important to scale into the late game hands. Most MultX comes from Jokers, though it can also be added to cards via Tarot Cards or occasionally cards will randomly appear in Polychrome Edition, letting them score with 1.5 MultX.
These three components form the scoring economy of the game. Initially, the player will only work with Chips and Mult. The ideal balance is to keep them roughly equal, as a square forms the greatest value of multiplied numbers that sum to the same value.
Building the Engine
Chips are easy to come by in large values (4 Mult is roughly valued at 30 Chips) so players can get their engine going with a baseline of Chips while opting into Mult as much as possible, since a single Mult is worth as much as all of the scored Chips.
While slow to start, MultX eventually zooms past Mult for the same reason — 1.5 MultX means at least 50% of all existing Mult. This isn’t worth much early game, with 1.5 MultX applied to 10 Mult yielding only +5 Mult, but late game, when the player will have hundreds of Mult, the scaling becomes exceptional.
But its multiplicative nature of the MultX cards that skyrockets the score. By adding just one more 1.5 MultX card to, say, 100 Mult, we get +50 Mult from the first MultX and then scale off the new value to get +75 Mult from the second! For this reason, MultX cards become a hot commodity in the late game.
In the early games of Balatro, I hadn’t made this connection yet. The game obfuscates much of the score, only showing the baseline value for the hand you’ve selected. Most of the fun in the game lies in playing your hand, not knowing whether you’ll make the cut or not. (This is a somewhat contentious point of the game, which GTMK’s albeit click-baity article gives a good overview of.)
MultX is especially tricky — it’s not even shown as part of the calculation, it’s applied to the Mult immediately when scored. For example, since the Jokers are evaluated from left to right, you’ll want to make sure to put MultX cards furthest to the right so that any Mult additions are made before applying MultX.
As I got more games under my belt and learned what was and wasn’t working, though, the game started to condense down into fewer reasonable paths for strategy. With MultX being the only way to scale, players must incorporate it into their strategy if they want to beat the Boss Blind.
Converging Strategies
As I continued playing Balatro, I experimented with strategies to keep the game fresh. However, I was disappointed to find that many didn’t pay off. While MultX was the most obvious offender, there were other non-aspects of the game that were interesting to explore but didn’t end up scaling with the difficulty of the blinds.
MultX
Of the 150 Jokers in Balatro, around 30 of them are MultX cards. And notably, a third of those are either Legendary or Rare, making them difficult to find regularly. (As of writing this, with ~30 hours of playtime, I have yet to find a Legendary Joker.)
As such, players might feel forced into pivoting their strategy to whichever MultX Joker they find first in their run. For example, the Bloodstone is a Joker which gives Hearts a 1 in 3 chance give 2 MultX when scored. Guess it’s time to play around Hearts now!
The conditional nature of these Jokers means that players must engage with some of the design space, but the set of viable strategies is much more condensed.
Given the MultX cards are not very common, players will need to invest in Chips and Mult, but eventually decks are going to converge onto MultX, so players must be ready to make the transition. While pure Chips/Mult strategies can win, they are not as consistent, since the scaling on MultX cards are just so good.
Five-Card Hands
Played hands can contain up to five cards, but only those which are used in the hand type will be scored (e.g. the pair in a Pair would score, any other cards played would not). Most of the time, though, it’s beneficial for players to use all five cards, effectively discarding any low-value cards.
To go one step further, even most of the non-five-card hands, like Two Pair and Three of a Kind, weren’t very good in my experimentation, due to their low base values for Chips and Mult. There were some ways to make scoring those worth it, but it involved a lot of investment in Planet Cards and it didn’t end up being as consistent in later Antes.
There are a couple niche Jokers that lead players not wanting to playing a five-card hand, like Square Joker, which is worth more Chips each time a hand of exactly four cards is played. But for the most part, those extra cards can be seen as a free discard — it’s rare that the player has a hand full of excellent cards except in the later stages of the game.
As such, players aren’t incentivized to explore this design space much. They can take a risk on committing to four-card hands, but rigid strategies aren’t often viable when needing to pivot to whichever MultX card you might run into later.
Certain Modifier Cards
As mentioned above, some of the small hands aren’t often worth investing in. This makes their associated Planet Card relatively worthless. Similarly, some Tarot Cards don’t provide much value, either, rendering them dead.
Take the Planet Card, Pluto for example. It upgrades the High Card hand by one level. That’s great if you’re playing a High Card strategy, but why would you ever do so? I’m sure there’s some viable Pluto strategy, but it’s low-odds, so in my opinion, not worth pursuing.
The Lovers card is a good example of a modifying card that can tank your deck. It turns a card into a Wild suit, which is marginally better at making Flushes and Straight Flushes, but is also leveled by Boss Blinds which debuff cards of a single suit, since it’ll always count as that suit.
Although there is some initial fun in exploring the impacts of these cards, they ultimately become dead cards once the meta is established. Seeing them feels like you lost a roll rather than you couldn’t adapt your strategy to what you found.
Skipping Blinds
One mechanic not outlined in above is the ability to skip a Blind. Players can forgo the reward for winning a round, instead receiving a bonus like, “+3 cards in hand next round” or “items at the next shop are free”.
In later difficulties, players don’t even get a reward for some of the Blinds. This means that they’re always incentivized to skip the Blind, since they’ll get either the bonus or nothing at all. However, in practice, this doesn’t feel very exciting.
At the Red Stake difficulty, for example, players no longer get a reward for defeating the Small Blind, which is the first in every run. This means if I roll a bad reward for skipping the Small Blind, I’ll just immediately start a new run until I get one that’s good. This isn’t a satisfying part of the game, but feels more like you’re rolling the dice.
At later difficulties, you might not hit that "roll" moment until a few Antes in, which can feel especially bad if your run is ruined by a bad bonus.
My Favorite Aspects
Despite my gripes above with some parts of the strategy, Balatro is an excellent game. It’s well-polished, exhilarating, and the roguelike nature keeps the game relatively fresh. In particular, a few pieces of the game kept me coming back: the Decks, the Challenges, and the soundtrack.
I also wanted to call out a few ways Designer LocalThunk could improve the game by expanding on some ideas or by introducing new ones. In particular, more cards or modes in the game could drastically improve variety.
Starter Deck Types
Some of the initial starter Decks vary only slightly, offering some more money at the start or perhaps extra cards in your hand, but the later decks alter the playstyle significantly.
For example, the Checkered Deck is one of my favorites, and is a deck of only Spades and Hearts, with Clubs and Diamonds having been converted. This makes it much easier to play into Flushes or Straight Flushes.
The consistency in this Deck made it great for the higher difficulties, though also narrows the strategy. Some of the Tarot Cards, like the Moon, which lets you change three cards into Clubs, I’d never want to use, given they’d be the only Clubs in my deck!
Another, the Abandoned Deck, has no face cards, which means your cards score less points on average, but also you have more consistency with a 40-card Deck. You’re much more likely to draw upgraded cards with a smaller deck.
Although both Decks slightly narrow the set of viable strategies, they do it in a way which encourages the player to radically change how they play. They shake up the meta, or vastly improve the power of Jokers like Ride the Bus, which gets +1 Mult each time a hand is played without a face card.
The Challenges
I didn’t learn about the Challenges until I was almost burnt out of Balatro, but I think they gave the game new life much in the same way the Decks did: by diversifying the way the player is forced to play by agreeing to a set of pre-conditions.
Each Challenge is almost like a Deck, where the starting situation has a radical twist. But unlike the Decks, the differences extend into the overarching mechanics of the game. For example, here are some of the first few Challenges:
- X-ray Vision: 1 in 4 cards are drawn face down
- Luxury Tax: Hold -1 card in hand for each $5 you have; Larger base hand size
- Inflation: Permanently raise prices by $1 on every purchase
Some of the Challenges create interesting new strategies. Both Luxury Tax and Inflation force players to change how they spend their money. In the former, you may want to spend your money so you can have more cards in your hand. In the latter, you’ll need to be careful not to buy too much, since prices will rise quickly!
Other Challenges miss the mark, like X-ray Vision, which left me doing logic puzzles in my head, since cards can still be sorted by Rank or Suit, even when face down. An interesting idea, but it took the snappiness out of the game, since I had to stop and think with every play.
Overall, the Challenges force me to find new ways to play around with the systems. While I still end up needing MultX, I might try playing differently if I always start with the same problem to work around.
Sound Design
The soundtrack and effects contribute to the game’s cohesion and immersion. It reminds me of the sounds you might hear when walking by a Vegas slot machine, only these are pleasant and enticing. Each bell or clap is the sound of Chips rolling in across the table.
From what I could tell, the game only has one song. But wow does it slap. It’s a slow, surfy jam which I found myself head-bobbing to many times. It never felt repetitive, which is hard to do for ~30 hours. For many games I end up eventually disabling the soundtrack, but not Balatro!
I’d recommend watching some gameplay to see what I mean. Or try it out yourself!
Suggestions
To start things off, I think a lot could be added to Balatro just by introducing some new mechanics into the game, tying into some common elements I mentioned liking above. I think some of the best improvements would be to add challenge by forcing play to be fundamentally different.
Here are some ideas for other Decks / Challenges:
- Fifth Suit Deck: 50-card deck with A - 10 of each suit, including a new, fifth suit. Would give players easier access to five-of-a-kind initially
- Four Card Deck: Player can only play up to four cards. They’d also probably get a benefit, which would take some experimentation. Maybe +1 Hand? +2 Hand Size?
- True Rarity: Only Rare Jokers, but all Jokers cannot be sold
From a balance perspective, they might also consider rebalancing MultX as a mechanic. Maybe by adding more MultX Jokers so they’re more accessible or by reducing Mult scaling and possibly adding more Chips cards, so that Mult, and thus MultX, are less powerful overall. But generally, I think adding more Jokers would add enough variety that MultX wouldn’t feel so restrictive in the design space.
That being said, here are a couple other Joker ideas:
- Hedonist Joker: Bonus Cards are worth +100 Chips instead of +30
- Raiser of Spirits: Whenever a 2 - 9 is played, it becomes a Bonus Card
- Big Pockets: Worth Chips equal to 5X your Money
Conclusion
Without a doubt, Balatro is a cornerstone title in recent roguelike card games. It’s addictive formula pulled me in until I had seen all of the variety the game has to offer. For only $15, I got my money’s worth, with ~30 hours of exploring the systems of the game before I got tired.
Roguelikes traditionally have longer replayability due to the complex, randomly-generated gameplay systems. I’ve recently returned to Hades and was still able to experiment with its difficulty system called Heat to increase the challenge of combat in fresh ways, but I think there’s a bit of a gap here for Balatro.
Tuning difficulty is harder with less systems to play with. Often times simpler is better, but perhaps some new mechanics or ways to modify the difficulty of Balatro would go a long way! It feels like a powerful start to something more.
I’m excited to see if or how LocalThunk iterates on the design of the game. But don’t think you shouldn’t check out this beautifully bound box of betting: Balatro!