Balatro is an amazing roguelike card game. You have a 52 card deck, which you can enhance with joker cards (there are 150 of these). These appear at random in the shop after every level. You also have planet cards, which level up your hands, and arcane cards which are generally one time use cards.
There are eight levels to beat, 3 rounds in each level, with the last one being a boss that applies various debuffs to you. Your goal is to reach the score on each level.
After each round you can use the item shop where you can purchase joker cards, or other cards that will enhance your deck.
This game is so much fun, and super addictive. It's easy to pick up, but tricky to master, and there are 8 decks to try and beat the game with. There are also lots of challenge decks to try too. Balatro is also super relaxing, sit quietly and play a few rounds as you unwind!
Balatro is awesome, you have to try this game!

LETS GO GAMBLING!!!
*wheel of fortune*
Nope!
*wheel of fortune*
Nope!
*wheel of fortune*
Nope!

This review is specially made for those who like to get all the achievements in games.
Some spoilers ahead.

"And Alexander wept, for there were no more jokers without the gold sticker"

Balatro is a one of a kind deckbuilding indie game based on regular (and a few secret) poker hands. It has a level of complexity that is unusual in card games, where most only have a few variables, Balatro has different types of jokers, three layers of card upgrades and a high degree of deck manipulation, where even completely destroying your deck is possible. This complexity makes the game hard to master and most people will struggle at first. Knowing poker probabilities will help, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The game also offers some costumization options for the face cards and you can also play with 4 color decks to avoid falling Flushes.

Besides having normal decks with a few differences in number of hands, discards, jokers and money scoring systems, there are also decks without face cards, with a random assortment of cards and also a few different mechanics that can influence the way you play, and all of them have different stakes ranging from white (easiest) to gold (hardest). The game also has challenges that you have to unlock with even more impactful rule changes where you have to completely change the way you play to complete them.

Something curious about the game design is that on each ante (level) you have three blinds (encounters), and after completing each level the scoring requirements increase. There is an easy blind, a medium blind and a boss blind, which doesn’t simply have a higher scoring requirement but also a “penalty” and they are specifically designed to hinder your progress or completely neutralize some deck strategies, so be prepared to face the frustration of having a very strong deck but finding a boss that you can’t defeat (but the game does also have a few ways to prevent this).

The visual style is pixel art based and very retro and it even has a screen distortion that imitates the look games had on the old Cathode Ray Tube TVs. The pixel art is very well done, the jokers are beautifully designed and easy to distinguish from each other in most cases. The interface is simple, clean and helps keep track of each game element.

Regarding gameplay, as I mentioned, it’s very complex and has a lot of things that help you increase your score, but when you’re starting your goal should be unlocking all the jokers, some are essential to reach the highest scores. You’ll learn what the best ones are by practice or you can watch some videos if you want to take a shortcut and learn things faster.

If you’re planning on getting all achievements be warned that it took me more than 300 hours, but there are some things that I learned later on that maybe will help you reduce this time:
- First, in the options menu you can increase the speed, I only found out about this very late. After learning how the jokers and card upgrades work you can increase the speed to the max to save time.
- Second, the game only auto saves after scoring a hand or buying a package in the store. This means that you can quit before scoring a hand to avoid scoring it by mistake (which will happen a lot) but you can also unlock (buy) jokers you don’t need, quit, and return to the game and continue without them. This can also be used to cheese the “Buy 10 cards” achievement.
- Third, the game can be save-scummed. Doing this too much can ruin the experience, but I’d usually keep a backup just in case I made a mistake and only noticed it after it was scored. This can prevent the frustration of losing a run just because you were distracted but won’t save you if your deck simply isn’t strong enough and if you don’t get the hands you needed.

The last and hardest achievement is getting all the gold stickers, but here are a few tips that might help:
- If you’re scoring way above the minimum requirement in the final ante you can replace some stronger jokers with weaker ones. (Having a backup save will prevent wasting the run if you fail).
- Your first objective should be getting all the legendary jokers first. I was very lucky and didn’t get repeated ones and they all appeared in sequence. The best deck for this is the Ghost Deck because you have access to more spectral cards, and this is the more reliable way of getting the soul card and legendary jokers from it.
- After you get this, you need to get the rest of the jokers. I tried the black deck because it has 6 joker slots but the win rate wasn’t great. Later I figured out a better way by resetting the Chaotic deck until I got 10 to 13 cards of the same rank, preferably 9 or higher, and play 4 or 5 of a kind hands consistently. This helps a lot with the score and if you can level the hands efficiently you only need two good scoring jokers and the rest can be the weaker ones-
- When you already have most of the jokers done, finding the missing ones can be tricky and having a lot of money is critical. If you’re playing 5 of a kind you won’t need scoring jokers in the first antes and you can save money. Any skip that gives you 20 gold or more also helps a lot


Achievements:
How many: 31 Achievements.
How much time: More than 300 hours, maybe a bit less with the tips I mentioned earlier.
Game difficulty: Hard.
Achievements’ Difficulty: Hard, but no missables achievements, only a huge amount of time and hundreds of games to complete everything

Overall opinion:
Balatro is a one-of-a-kind deckbuilding game with a fantastic retro look and pixel art, and lots of different strategies and content to keep you engaged for a long time. It's a genre-defining game that everyone should try, but getting 100 percent on it will require a lot of persistence and some luck, and it might not be for everybody.


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