I had been looking forward to the grand opening of the casino, and at 7 AM, I almost immediately bought my way in. I played and played as much fucked up poker as I could, even only getting 5 hours of sleep. Then the next morning, I looked at my stats: I already spent 8 hours in it. This is the time sink in the casino known as Balatro.

Balatro is a hot new game by LocalThunk, which is a poker game loaded with roguelike elements that I previously played from Steam Next Fest a few weeks ago. I normally don’t talk about things hot off the presses, let alone games that are already popular. But look. If you literally spend a third of a day playing one thing, you just gotta talk about it.

Balatro is poker. If you don’t know what poker is, I’m not gonna explain it to you like a Youtube analysis doing a plot summary. But by virtue of being poker at its base form, it’s very accessible. People that already know what poker is can swing right in, and its rules are easy for complete newcomers to grasp onto. If this ever got a mobile port, I honestly think this would be a hot casual game to play for general audiences.

You gain chips based on the hands you play, with the individual cards contributing to the chip count to get multiplied. But how on Earth do you meet the increasingly growing chip requirements for each blind? That’s where the roguelike elements come in. You acquire jokers that give passive benefits to chips and multipliers, or you can use consumable cards to improve the payouts of hands or essentially edit your deck.

Like an ideal roguelike, Balatro offers the players a lot of tools and encourages the player to explore synergies to get through. There’s the basic bitch Joker that just adds 4 to the multiplier – useful for the first few antes, but essentially nothing in the later rounds. But maybe you can support it with the Baron joker, which multiplies the whole multiplier by every unused king in your hand, But hmm, maybe you’ll need more kings to help things out. You can use tarot cards to transform some cards into kings, like using Strength to upgrade 10s or getting Death to make one card copy a king in your hand – and hold the phone, the Fortune Teller joker adds more to the multiplier for every tarot used… hmm…

Of course, you’ll still need a little luck to stumble into a heavenly ideal, but what can you expect? At its very core, it’s all still poker! You can rely on card counting and you can rig your deck as much as you want, but in the end, the luck of the draw dictates how far you’re going.

I do enjoy roguelikes, but sometimes the luck factor feels like a detriment, wherein you’re putting a lot of effort into what you’re playing, but just don’t get any of the stats to compliment you. Yes this is me being mad about The Binding of Isaac. But applying roguelike elements to a card game, something that’s easy to pick up and play, something that already intrinsically has luck tied to it? That’s free real estate. By virtue of literally just being poker, I don’t feel frustrated about spending half an hour on a failed run because I’m not putting a lot of myself into it as I normally would with other roguelikes. I accept luck and failure the moment I step into the casino, and if I actually pull out a W, more power to me.

I discussed this a long time ago, but I fucking love gambling. I refuse to ever touch a gacha game anymore because I’m scared of what I could become and also most of the ones I was ever interested in stopped services. I have a compulsive, completionist itch that’s insatiable when it’s drawn out. I still play Mini Motorways to chase achievements, for one thing. But Balatro? Balatro scratches that itch with the joys of a casino game that has a lot of shiny stuff tacked on – all without the risk of spending money besides buying the game itself. Balatro’s definitely going to be a game I’ll constantly go back to when I just want to pass the time, and is a contender for game of the year for me.

Honestly? This game just has no flaws to me. It’s very focused at what it tries to do and does those things well. If I had any wishes for the game, maybe it’s to let players change the colors of suits because I often got diamonds and hearts mixed up on the Steam Deck screen, but otherwise, it’s an all around solid game.

(The Arm is a pretty fucking rude boss blind though.)