Balatro

Game of the Year Review

You've ever just wanted to say fuck you to the rules of poker? Mess up it's mechanics, and make it beg for forgiveness? Throw out half the deck, paint the rest red with a sharpie, and throw in a MTG card for good measure? Play nonsense poker hands like five of a kind, or win using a pair of twos? Balatro lets you do that and so much more.

Balatro adores numbers in the way that Idle Game nerds or Diablo players loves numbers. The entire game revolves around stacking a deck of poker so much in your favour that you automatically win halfway though. You need to exploit each and every of the game's many interacting mechanics.

The numbers game start by you playing individual poker hands of 1 to 5 cards, to score so called "chips". The first-order optimization is to use Tarot cards to transform individual cards of your deck to something that matches your playing style better (unfortunately, in my case this was overwhelmingly a Hearts Flush Deck,) mostly by improving the chances of getting a useful hand. The second order optimization is to improve your chances of getting Tarot or other upgrade cards, such that you can better perform a first order optimization; for example by adding a purple stamp to a card (gives a tarot card on discard.) The third order optimization is then...

In some ways it's like a city builder or an idle game: You are playing progressively more meta games of optimizations: You need to ensure that you produce enough chips per round, but you also need to ensure that your scaling up your chip production in a timely fashion. And you need to ensure your chip scaling is scaling up...

It's a hypnotic game, that like Factorio steals your time, perfect catharsis for the depressed or autistic. Feel your worries dissipate in haze of poker cards and numbers, in this weird power fantasy about being so good at disregarding the rules of the game, that the game eventually relents, tired and broken, hoping that this time was the last time. But it won't be, you will return, addicted to the victory of (cheatingly) beating the odds. Again and again, to beat another bloody victory out of the game. And if you lose you will declare that the game cheats, bad seed, unfair! Though you never play fair yourself. But fairness doesn't matter in the game; only growing numbers, however you create them.

Final Rating: ♥️/🃏