5/5 ★ – nldemo's review of Balatro.

Balatro Review Despite the hype, I was a little hesitant to play Balatro. It was after all, a game that appears to be a card game, centered around Poker… and I am not really one for card games. Not really one for random chance. Not really one for spending money on cracking packs. Despite all this, Balatro manages to gamify all of these things and more with its roguelite spin, which makes it so much more than a card game. For me, Balatro is definitely more skill than chance and every bit deserving of its GotY awards. It has instantly ascended to replace the nostalgia of Solitaire as the de facto “card game” to play when I’m flying solo. So why do I like it? Well, for one - I do enjoy some poker with the boys; but this is not poker, and it’s not with the boys. It is really more of a strategy roguelite game with a poker skin. The only real resemblance to poker is the base poker hands that you can make, but veteran and/or skilled players will soon learn that there are three more secret hands that you could never make in Poker. Can you name them all? The roguelite elements are limited to quick runs and permanent deck upgrades, but not really making YOU the player more powerful in between runs. What you are gathering is knowledge, and with enough knowledge you truly can make any single run a win in Balatro. But are you trying to win, or generate a winning hand that scores so high the game can no longer calculate the number? It really all comes down to your strategy. This is why I consider Balatro a true GotY contender. As I started to play and learn the game, I was thinking too small - like a poker player. The more I played, I realised math is important - maybe this is actually just a math game? After about two hours it clicked, yes the math is important but really this is an order of operations game! For example, do your additions first… then your multipliers. But it really is so much more than that. It is about the order of operations of your jokers, opening your packs, rerolling the shop, making use of your consumables and everything you have available to you in order to manipulate the shop so that you can create the perfect deck and always get the hands you want. I felt I really started to master Balatro when I realized it is not just an order of operations game. It is both that AND an economy game. Those two things are most essential for making you the best Balatro player you can be, and really just multiplying your wins to always be successful… just how successful may be tweaked by a little RNG. Sometimes, it takes a little patience and you might not always get exactly what you want. But if you think about it, if you are able to play wisely and accumulate 200$ vs 20$ for every shop, you will have a huge boost to your success rate as you can freely reroll the shop every round multiple times to get exactly what you are looking for. If you are trying to play flushes and only have hearts in your deck - you’re probably going to be fine. Likewise, if you’re relying on four of a kind and over half your deck is 6’s, you’re not going to have issues pulling it. Even high card hands can generate massive scores (in fact they may have the highest cap in the game - if you know what you are doing and pair up the correct jokers). On that note, I would like to simply end this review with some tips for new players. 1) Extra leftover hands will give you extra money, discards will not. So feel free to burn through your discards to get a winning hand (or to dig and try and find certain cards in your deck) 2) Early on, a little + mult will go a long way. Jimbo (+4 mult) will increase most poker hands score by double, if not more. Even larger mults make life extra easy (+10 from holographic is huge early on). 3) After you know you’re able to generate enough points to guarantee you won’t die to a boss, then it’s time to focus on your economy. Ideally, we want over 20$ for each time we enter the shop (to make use of specific tarot cards), and ideally we get to 30$ after beating a boss, in case there is a voucher we want to pick up right away. 4) Interest caps at 5$ (when you have 25$), without vouchers. However, with vouchers we can get an extra 20$ per every blind. Pretty rad. In order to do this, we need to purchase those vouchers AND have a resting bank of 100$. 5) It can be fun to take skips and collect those tags, but generally it is better to visit each and every shop. In shops, you can incrementally level up your deck every blind pretty much no matter what. By beating the blind, at a minimum you can increase your economy. Skip tags often are not worth it, but they can be selected simply for fun. Negative jokers typically won’t hit on something you want or need, but when they do it’s a great feeling. Big gamble, but are you trying to gamble or trying to win? 6) Econ econ econ. Don’t spend all your money just because you have it. If you don’t need a random planet card, don’t buy a planet pack. 7) Certain jokers (eg Blueprint) have a lot more power because they can be slid around in your joker slots to give different benefits. Eg) When initiating a blind you can copy a money joker, tarot creating joker, etc… and then move it to a points generating joker afterwards. 8) More hands are more points and more money. More discards mean you can get the hands you want. Hands can also be used as discards. Tarot cards are your best friend, and the most reliable factor to help you win. You should be generating as many as you can, and definitely get those tarot vouchers if they show up. 9) Different planet cards scale up at different rates. All hands are viable in the end game, just be aware that flushes will not scale up as well as straights, etc. 10) Scan your collection for things you haven’t unlocked yet, and keep this in mind on your runs. Maybe you wouldn’t normally think to discard a full house - but you should, at least once, in order to permanently unlock an extra joker for your collection. There are several of these that you probably wouldn’t do just playing on your own, so it is useful to scan the collection frequently once the unlocks begin to slow down. 11) If you have a card in your consumables, it won’t appear in the shop or when opening packs. You can hold on to things you may not want in order to manipulate the shop into giving you things that you DO want. 12) Joker synergy. There are so many jokers that seem like they may be weak at first glance, however it is important that you experiment with different jokers to find sometimes unexpected but extremely powerful synergies. For example, there is a joker called the Egg. Each blind, egg generates 3$ extra sell value. There is a tarot card that gives you $ based on the total sell value of all your jokers, capping at 50$. This is one of the most reliable ways to earn money in the game! Further, you can get a joker that gives you +mult based on the sell value of your remaining jokers. How does an extra +50 mult sound? Not too shabby, right? This is just one example, there are so many more! Feel free to play around. A great way to do this is play through all 20 of the challenges. Some of them are much harder than others, but they really do feel like an advanced tutorial for the game. Highly recommend 🙂 13) Just have fun! If you lost a run, don’t take it personally; just think of what you could have done differently in order to win. Remember… this is a game :D I rate Balatro 5 jimbos out of 5. It really is a perfectly crafted game that I envision I will be coming back to in future patches or when I just need to scratch that itch. My personal how long to beat was ~100 hours, including completing gold stakes, beating every deck once, completing the collection, and clearing all 20 of the challenges.