Balatro is for people who love probability and cheating
0I'm honestly shocked we don't have more deckbuilders based on classic card games.
Balatro on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2379780/Balatro/
Balatro is a roguelike deckbuilder based on the rules of poker. You have a starting hand size of 8, and can play up to 5 cards each turn. The highest hand among those 5 cards is scored and you get points based on the rank of the played cards multiplied by a bonus based on the hand (cards not included in the hand do not get scored, so you can use the extra card slots to chuck bad cards). Because of the way the probabilities shake out, there are some interesting quirks to the scoring chart. Namely, a two pair and a single pair have the same multiplier (two pair is still better because you can score more cards at a time, but it's worth keeping in mind).
The goal in each stage is to reach a certain goal threshold within a certain number of hands. If at any point you fail to reach the score threshold, the run is over. The biggest challenge in this game is the scaling in the late game. The scoring requirements spike HARD in the 7th and 8th loops, so you need to make sure your scoring bonuses scale harder.
At the end of each round, the shop sells a number of cards:
- Jokers are your artifacts/relics/whatever. The passives that define your loadout each run.
- Arcana have a variety of effects but are mostly deck manipulation like changing ranks or suits or whatever.
- Planets level up the scoring formula of specific hands.
- Vouchers are powerful run-wide passives
- Spectral cards are very rare and very powerful cards that affect your deck composition.
Although the arcana and planet cards are useful in achieving consistency in early game, far and away the most important part of a run is obtaining a joker loadout with high bonuses. The jokers that have a "X for every Y this game" effects are especially powerful. For example, Spare Trousers increases its multiplier bonus for every two pair played in the run, which in this video handed me 38 to my multiplier. Consistency is great, but just being able to guarantee a flush every hand doesn't achieve much if each flush is only scoring like 4000 points.
This is where a lot of the nuance comes in. Card and joker bonuses are applied left-to-right, and jokers can be rearranged freely. It's important to note that bonus application is not associative, the order matters very much. In general, you want your additive bonuses to trigger before your multiplicative bonuses (so that the multipliers also hit your additives).
You'll need to decide pretty early what your final build will look like, and your deck build will want to facilitate consistency. The key here is reducing the Shannon entropy of your deck as early as possible. Having a perfectly uniform distribution of cards in your deck makes it really really hard to predict draws with any consistency.
In terms of difficulty, having only played a couple of intro runs, I'd put Balatro somewhere in the middle, with a lot of variance depending on your stomach for randomness. Even though there is a lot of RNG, building a strong multiplier base isn't super super hard, and I haven't encountered too many runs where the shop completely screws me.
Overall, the game is really fun, and there's something that feels kind of nostalgic about the experience. It's an easy recommend for poker nerds.