Balatro Game Review

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - For a game about Jokers, its ability to create addiction is no joke!

It is likely a sign of a great game—or maybe it is a sign of me becoming a very undisciplined writer—that every time I try to play that game in order to be able to write about it fresh in my head, I spend far more time playing and far less time writing. This is my struggle with Balatro, a game that many people have recommended to me and that I bought two weeks after April Fools Day 2025. I had at least three different groups of people I regularly interfaced that had significant and regular dedicated discussions about Balatro before and after my purchase, so you could say you peer pressured me into this. But now, over the course of this review... I will recommend Balatro to you.

I'll present my information in a slightly different order than how I usually present my reviews. Gameplay-first, since my criticisms on non-gameplay matters will make more sense once I explain how the gameplay works. As a disclaimer... I've never played a roguelite deckbuilder before, and my roguelite experience is as narrow as the Side Order DLC from Splatoon 3, as well as the PokéRogue fan game.

Balatro Fast Facts

Name

Balatro

Consoles

Nintendo Switch (2)—note, this review is specifically of the Switch version (no modifications) on what Balatro internally calls version 1.0.1o-FULL (the Switch calls it Version 1.1.3)

Steam

PlayStation 4/5

Xbox One / Xbox Series X|S

Developer and Publisher

LocalThunk and Playstack Limited

Genre

Roguelite deckbuilder

Space Required

On the Switch, ~200 MB between game data and save data

ESRB rating

E10+ for Gambling Themes [no actual money is gambled or wagered]

Number of Players

One

Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price

14.99

Demo?

None

Balatro's Gameplay

Basics and Modes

Choose your Deck (each Deck is like a different playable character and has unique attributes or abilities) and a Stake (akin to the difficulty level; higher Stakes have certain resource restrictions or give you higher score goals to meet; each Stake is also inclusive of the restrictions set by the Stakes before it). By making poker hands (like Pair, Full House, or Straight—if you're not a poker player like Ludwig, Sakura, Emi, Yui, Misaki, Mika, or Ryoko, it's fine—the legal hands are marked in the game and it's quite intuitive), you will earn a certain number of points, which are Chips multiplied by Mult. Phases are called Antes—there are 8 for a normal playthrough—and each Ante has a Small Blind, a Big Blind, and a Boss Blind. The Small and Big Blinds are just a point value to overcome, while Boss Blinds place a restriction on you. (Examples include The Needle, which means you only can play one hand; The Plant, which debuffs all face cards; or THE WALL, which is an extra large amount of points). You have a finite number of Hands and Discards in each Blind encounter.

Antes progressively pose larger point goals to clear their Blinds, so you must find ways to increase your Chips and/or Mult values. There are many ways of doing this and that's where the real strategy of Balatro comes to play. Your methods are as follows:

• Acquire Joker cards: These have many, wide-ranging effects; you can hold five by default, and the order they are in your Joker area sometimes matters for scoring because they apply from left to right; the timing of how a Joker activates is dependent on the Joker
• Consume Tarot cards: These affect your cards (some affect your money), like changing their suits or adding enhancements to them
• Consume Planet cards: These affect the level of your poker hands, raising their base Chips and Mult
• Consume Spectral cards: These also affect your cards, but with greater potency (and risks) compared to Tarots
• Consume Tags: You may skip a Small Blind or Big Blind and receive a Tag—you'll know ahead of time which Tag you'll get if you skip. Effects range from getting a free (and possibly rare) Joker in the Shop to getting an Investment of $25 after defeating the next Boss Blind
• Consume Vouchers: Normally, one Voucher is available per Ante, and once a Voucher is claimed in an Ante, its benefit is claimed for the rest of the run. These effects range from lowering all prices in the shop to permanently gaining one extra hand per round

Every time you play a Blind, you get access to the Shop after beating the Blind. If you skip a Blind, you also skip going to the Shop. You cannot skip Boss Blinds. The contents of the Shop are random (including Vouchers), and which Tags and Boss Blinds are in each Ante are also random. And of course, your Deck's cards are shuffled before each Blind.

Money is a very important resource, since you must spend it to acquire most of the above (except Tags) from the Shop.
You get money from beating Blinds and special card effects. And Tags. Like I did in this screenshot with THREE Investment Tags.

As a point-and-click game, Balatro is very easy to control. Because it's so simple, the developer had more than enough ways to provide three to four control methods with console controllers!

1. Left-stick auto-snap
2. Right-stick cursor move
3. Touch screen selection
4. Button shortcuts (for key commands like see what cards are left in your deck, discard, play, etc.)—you can't do everything with only buttons, though

Balatro also offers a completion Stats screen, which is based on completing all of the Decks (which have to be unlocked) at the highest level Gold Stake (each Stake difficulty is unlocked per Deck, so you have to beat all Decks at all Stakes for max completion), as well as unlocking every card in the game. On top of that, Balatro is keeping track of which Jokers you're using upon clearing Ante 8 and on which Stake. The game will place a sticker on your card visible from your Collection (and during normal gameplay if you set the option for it) for the highest completion rate. To 100% complete the game, you need to clear with all of the Jokers on the maximum difficulty, which is absurd, and I'm not going to do that.

When this sounds tiring or repetitive, Balatro also offers a Challenges mode of 20 curated scenarios with special rules. Challenges are a nice break from standard play and I appreciate their inclusion in Balatro. You cannot unlock things for your Collection in these scenarios, and they force you to really learn and explore some of the game's deeper mechanics. Speaking of which...

More Advanced Concepts and Analysis

I'm not writing this review to share my tips or anything, but I just want to appreciate what makes Balatro so fascinating. Let's analyse the screenshot below.

Jokers from left to right: Misprint, Blueprint, Cartomancer, Shoot the Moon, and Juggler (Polychrome).
Strength Tarot card in the Consumables area. (That's the top right corner.)
Magic Deck.

First, let's note what's unlockable and what these cards do. The Magic Deck, which starts you with a Crystal Ball Voucher and two copies of The Fool Tarot, is unlocked when you win a run with the Red Deck (your starting Deck that gives you +1 Discard). Normally you have two Consumables you can hold, but the Crystal Ball Voucher makes that three. The Fool transforms into a copy of the last Tarot or Planet card you used, not counting The Fool.

Misprint is available from the beginning, and it randomly adds a Mult between +0 to +23 to your hand.

Blueprint is unlocked after you win a run for the first time. It copies the effect of the Joker directly to its right.

Cartomancer is unlocked once you've discovered every Tarot card in the game; it has a powerful effect of creating a new Tarot card every time a Blind is selected (if you have room in your Consumables area).

Shoot the Moon is unlocked when you've played every Heart card in your deck in a round. Shoot the Moon's effect is that, for every Queen held in your hand (cards being played for scoring are not considered held in your hand), you get +13 Mult to your calculation.

The Juggler is available from the start, and gives you +1 hand size. That brings you from a default of eight to nine cards in your hand, giving you more options. It cannot be copied by Blueprint. The Polychrome Edition multiplies your Mult by X1.5 when your Joker is reached in the scoring order when you've played your hand.

Finally, the Strength Tarot is available from the start, and it increases the rank of up to two selected cards by one rank. For example, you can increase the rank of two Jack cards to become two Queen cards. You can consume this any time you have a hand out, which includes in the Shop when you have an Arcana Pack (for Tarot cards for immediate use) booster and it gives you eight (or nine if holding the Juggler!) cards to apply Tarots from the booster pack to. Note that the effects of cards that affect your playing cards like this are permanent for the rest of your run. This is how you can bend your deck to your will over time.

Have you thought about why I've purposefully dragged my Blueprint to be to the left of Cartomancer in the screenshot? That's because when I enter a Blind, I'll get TWO Tarot cards for my Consumables Area instead of just one. And then I can drag my Blueprint over to my Shoot the Moon or to my Misprint, depending on if I have any Queens held in hand or not. (The Strength Tarot card is being held just for the purpose of trying to get more Queens.) All of these game mechanics working together let me perform fun feats like this in emergent ways. It's exhilarating, and a lot of it is improvisational, since I don't know ahead of time what tools I'll get access to in any given run. That's a big part of the fun of why I'd want to play again and again—what creative combos will I be able to pull off next time? And that feeling applies whether I just won or I just lost—RNG plays a factor, but so does player skill and creativity.

Here's a video example of me manipulating the make-up of my deck specifically to unlock the Seeing Double Joker card.

The requirement to unlock the Joker, making it available in this and any subsequent run, was actually to play Four 7 of Clubs, but I... went for 5, and used the secret Hand, Flush Five (play five cards with the same rank and the same suit), in the process, which also allowed me to get the Planet card for Eris for the first time, which unlocked the Astronomer Joker card for the future—unlocked by discovering every Planet card. Eris only appears if you've used Flush Five at some point in the current run, and that's hard to do normally when your default deck starts with one card for each suit (four) and rank (thirteen).

High-level Balatro play often involves cloning cards to have multiple copies of the same card, and then destroying every other card in the deck, so you have a deck with very few (single digits or teens) cards left, all of the same rank (like King—pairs well with the Baron Joker, which gets you X1.5 Mult for every King held in your hand) and with enhancements, namely Steel (gives a X1.5 Mult for each Steel card in your hand that isn't played). It's not a strategy I've ever pulled off, nor am I a fan of it. There are a lot of good ways to get through the main part of a run, but very few ways to get much further past Ante 8 for the so-called Endless Mode. I'll put it this way for why I find this an issue:

The basic strategy as the game progresses is to scrape together enough Mult via Jokers and Planets to get through the first three Antes—Ante 1 is completable without any upgrades, but Ante 3 will require boosted numbers. You'll also want to have a working economy and a money reserve—certain Jokers and Tarots can help with this, as well as certain Vouchers that reduce costs or increase the interest you collect. Well, or you could be lucky with Tags like in the screenshot where I cashed out $87. (Unspent money acquires interest after each Blind, which is another reason to play Blinds and not skip them.) As the game progresses, you need to be optimising your deck and Joker strategy so you can continue to keep up with the Blinds’ point-scaling requirements, which can easily outpace you if you're not racking up means to get a higher Mult.

Focusing on Chips won't work—you can only add Chips, while Mult can be both added to and multiplied, and it's that multiplication effect that will help meet the increasing point requirements. That's why it's important to drag your cards so your additive Mult is to the left of your multiplicative Mult, to mathematically get the most out of your resources. You'll also need to learn when to pivot from the junk you've collected in the early game to what you'll need to clear the later Antes. Pivot too soon and you might end up failing because you aren't able to collect the resources you need when you thought you could. Pivot too late, and, well, you just won't score high enough. That's a lot of the skill in Balatro.

I gave a lot of praise to Balatro for giving the player the tools to express themselves and pivot and improvise given what they have, and I feel like the fact that there is a definitive best strategy that really goes contrary to a lot of what's even possible to obtain or accomplish in most runs is a weakness, not a strength. Just to be clear, in most cases, you won't have to go for the best meta strategy to accomplish completionist goals. But I also haven't cleared the Gold Stake, so...

Balatro's Story and Characters

Balatro does not have a story, and it only vaguely has what you could call character(s). There's Jimbo, the talking base Joker, who gives you a brief, one-time tutorial on your first run, and then only appears when you lose or win a run. That's it. The player character is... you, and doesn't have any in-game presence or reason for participating. Balatro has a very gameplay-first philosophy.

There is actually a lot of potential for characterisation and in-universe lore—there are 150 Jokers (all with unique names and designs!), 22 Tarots, 12 Planets, 18 Spectrals, and 28 Boss Blinds (plus the Small Blind and Big Blind). There is an in-game Collection that keeps track of how many of these you've encountered in the game (and which you have not encountered or unlocked yet)... and all the Collection does is give the same description of what the card does as you can see in-game.

Moof, it is a moossed opportunity to not tell Bull's story. Him and the other Jokers.

What if the Collection had flavour text? What if Jimbo gave his commentary on each game element? I'm basically thinking of the Piklopedia from the Pikmin games, especially Pikmin 2, where Olimar and Louie would just give observational commentary without revealing gameplay substance. That would add incredible value to the Collection section and make everything about Balatro substantially more endearing beyond its addictive gameplay, fully using the potential of its character design ensemble. Balatro already considers its Blinds to be enemies that must be defeated with a certain number of points—that means that they're actual characters, which means they should have some lore and characterisation, even if it's from just Jimbo's perspective. This sort of thinking isn't unprecedented: according to the Balatro Wiki, developer LocalThunk has already shared some lore on certain cards in the Balatro Discord server. That stuff should make its way to the game!

Balatro's Music

There is not that much to say about the music. It's this omnipresent, low-fidelity, catchy background music that sometimes adapts to your current situation. The whole soundtrack is embedded below. It's really just one song with five variants—don't let the 20-minute length of the video fool you (like a Joker might). I used to know someone who listens to it constantly and expects the composer, LouisF, to be their #1 Spotify artist by the end of 2025. (Allegedly, this happened, though I've lost contact with this person.) I like the tune and the music is definitely a strong part of Balatro's identity, but I'm not giving it music of the year or anything.

Balatro's Graphics

Your experience with the graphics will vary greatly depending on how you prefer your Settings... and if you take the time to set the Settings to your liking. On my first runs, I did not touch the Settings and Balatro was somewhat miserable for me. Once I turned off screen shaking, turned off the CRT effects, reduced the motion, and most importantly, set High Contrast Cards to ON, it was so much better. Something about the wriggling cards bothers me—they sway like they're a piece of plywood in the Los Angeles Police Department evidence room. But the cards can only be blue with High Contrast Cards on. I really appreciate that the options are there.

With High Contrast Cards, you can actually differentiate at a glance that your Clubs and Spades cards are in different suits. Same with Hearts and Diamonds.
This is very important when many game mechanics involve your cards' suits, from certain poker hands (flushes) to Jokers giving Mult for certain suits to even certain unlockables being tied to suit use.

There are also several free collaboration card designs with other indie game companies. These change normal playing cards like generic King and Queen to characters from those other media properties. I haven't used them since I don't care about the franchises represented, but maybe they're nice for people who do. As I was writing in the so-called characters section, the designs for the Jokers, other cards, and Boss Blinds are quite good, with a lot of distinct and crisp visual elements packed into relatively small card sprites. A lot of care and skill went into the designs.

The non-card graphics of the game are really things I don't interact with much because I've put on reduced motion, like the distracting vacillating backgrounds.

Balatro runs and performs just fine on my Nintendo Switch, both docked and undocked. Screenshots and videos output at 720p; I don't have any issues with the graphics quality or resolution while playing. The performance might be worse if I didn't turn reduced motion on, since there are a bunch more special effects that play, especially on the later Antes when there is a lot going on all at once. I don't think I'm losing out from the experience, though.

Concluding Thoughts on Balatro

In a few superficial as well as deep ways, Balatro is similar to Pocket Card Jockey (and by transitive property, The Wonderful 1237). They're both based around card games. There are much deeper connections than that—Pocket Card Jockey does not explain its deep and emergent mechanics well in-game, and likely on purpose. I don't hold this against either game—you're expected to fail on your first time playing, and likely for several times after. Assuming you don't just quit after that, and if you put a real effort into observing and learning what's going on, you will find your footing and be successful. It's a fulfilling experience! Both Balatro and Pocket Card Jockey also have unlockable content that can make the game easier upon replay, with potentially powerful Jokers for Balatro, and breeding mechanics for Pocket Card Jockey.

But Balatro differs in other ways, like its lack of focus on anything besides its core gameplay. It's very addicting core gameplay, but there are missed opportunities that come with that. Regardless, I'd still recommend Balatro to anyone reading this review.

This was the best Balatro run I had before publishing the review.
I used both a Blueprint and a Brainstorm Joker (Brainstorm copies the effect of the leftmost Joker) to copy my Constellation Joker (gains X0.1 Mult for every Planet card used), Shortcut (allows for gaps of one or more rank to make Straights), and Juggler for bigger hand sizes.
Earlier on I made use of Mail-In Rebate to acquire vast sums of money and Astronomer to get Planets for free. I got a lot of Saturn cards to level-up my Straight hands’ chips and Mult.
Earning at least 100 million Chips in one hand unlocked the Stuntman Joker, and reaching Ante 12 unlocked access to the Petroglyph Voucher, which is an upgrade of the Hieroglyph Voucher that sets your Ante -1 and also gives you one less Discard each round.

Ludwig wrote this for a videogame review-writing competition, but there are also independent merits around extolling the virtues of Balatro. Ludwig has racked up 65 hours or more playing the game before starting to write this review, with 38% in-game progress. By the time this was published, the progress went up to 49% with 105 hours or more. His stats involve 100% Collection (every card collected), 30% Challenges complete (6/20 Challenges), 25% Joker Stickers (308/1200), and 44% Deck Stake Wins (53/120). He never submitted the review to the competition because it turns out that the organisation behind the competition were incredibly upset that Ludwig has bashed the Islamic State terrorist group, and they banned Ludwig from their site as a result. More details about that to come in 2026. Balatro is not the most addictive game Ludwig played in 2025, either—that is Kirby Air Riders. There may or may not be more about that in 2026, too.