[SirFozzie]

Putting it here because the game is playable (demo, full release in three days)..


Balatro is fucking digital CRACK.


At its heart, you're building poker hands using a standard deck of card. You play up to 5 cards at a time, and try to make poker hands (Straights/Flushes etcetera require five cards) You get points per scoring card (so if you say, put forward two pair, the fifth card won't score) and the type of hand you play as a modifier. You have a limited number of discards each round to help you get rid of cards that don't fit your goals in poker building.


Sounds pretty yawn inducing, right?

Enter the Jokers, The Planets and the Arcana. they modify the rules in different ways. Jokers for example, may give you a bonus every time you score a card of a certain suit, or odd/even.. Planets allow you to muck about with cards, adding modifiers (like a random chance to earn a ton of bonus/cash), or change their suit and rank.

So, as you get deeper and deeper into a run, you might need a score of say, 6,400 compared to 300 in your first round, but you have a LOT more strategy.

You can have up to five jokers, and there are some extremely busted combos (in my demo beating run, I had a Joker which increased all the Jokers values by 1 after each round, and another Joker that gave you a multiplier bonus for each dollar your Jokers are worth. Needless to say, it ramped up QUICKLY, especially when I had a joker that provided 30 chips (before the multiplier) for each diamond I played in a hand

It's roguelike in that you make decisions on what to do with each run, but progression is limited in the demo


Seriously, if you like brain stretching combo strategy games, try the demo free on Steam, and buy it when it comes out in three days.