Balatro is life, and now you can play real-world card games with your own official deck.
The Power of the Sun in the palm of my hands
Wout, aka @TheHashtag0nist on social media, is the Communications Director at Playstack publishing. He teased the above image of an official card deck featuring the iconic Balatro artwork, stating “these will arrive soon”
Balatro is Life
We reviewed the game back at launch giving it a 10, as it is an unquestionable masterpiece.
Balatro is one of the best deck-building roguelikes I have ever played. Utilizing a deck of playing cards, poker hands, guile, and wit you’ll attempt to build the best combos imaginable to overcome increasingly difficult odds. I have fallen in love with this title, playing it all day, and thinking about it when I’m not.
What will you discard, what will you play, that’s the main gameplay in Balatro. Ten minutes later I’m deep into this run, having worked my way up through to level 6. I have 5 jokers, they give me:
X4 multiplier on any even number card played
X20 multiplier when I play 3 cards or less
An extra 95 chips per play. This decreases by one on every hand
1 extra hand per round (combined with my blue deck I now get 6 in total)
A flat x4 multiplier
I’ve used dozens of planetary and tarot cards to power up my multiplier and chip payouts on 3 of a kind and 2 pairs, along with adding multipliers for score and chips to various cards. It’s a deep, engaging system that never feels the same from run to run.
Accompanying all of this is a gorgeous art style. It’s not pushing any boundaries, and I could see this game running on a ten-year-old phone with little issue. Still, it looks and sounds great. There isn’t a wide variety of music in Balatro. Thankfully the main song is relaxing and catchy enough that even after dozens of hours of listening to it I was never bored.
