Balatro Review

I just wrapped up my time with Balatro by earning the Platinum Trophy, and wow – what a ride. On the surface, this game looks deceptively simple, especially when compared to other roguelike card games like Slay the Spire: play poker hands, score enough points to survive each round, repeat. That was also why I hesitated to start it in the first place. But once you actually dive in, you quickly realize just how deep and addicting Balatro’s gameplay is. Honestly, I’m no longer surprised that this seemingly simple game became such a sensation, and one of the most talked about roguelikes of the past year.

Simple, addicting gameplay

One of the best things about Balatro is how easy it is to pick up. The rules are straightforward: you play with a regular poker deck of 52 cards, and have 8 cards in your hand. Your goal is to beat the target score – which increases each round – using a limited number of discards and plays. But things get more involved fast.

Runs are also short enough that you can squeeze one in during a break or whenever you’re short on time. It’s also perfect for remote play since you don’t need lightning-fast reflexes or to focus on heavy animations. Selecting cards without any time pressure is all that is required, and so the experience translates seamlessly to a mobile device. The UI deserves a shoutout too – it’s clean, charming, and has just the right animations and awesome sound design to make even small actions feel snappy and fun.

But don’t be fooled by that surface-level simplicity. The more you play, the more you uncover how much is going on under the hood. After all, Balatro is a deck builder. You may start the run with a standard poker deck, you won’t end it with one.

Synergies on Synergies

Let’s talk about how a run is structured. You win by reaching and beating Ante 8, with each Ante consisting of three rounds: a Small Blind, Big Blind, and Boss Blind. Bosses space things up with unique modifiers – some disable suits, some cut your base score in half, some force discards, … you always need to adjust on the fly.

After each round, you earn reward money based on different factors – for example, you get 1$ for each unused hand, or 1$ of interest for every 5$ saved (up to 25$). Then comes the shop, where you’ll find Cards or Card Packs that allow you to manipulate your deck, power up your hands, and eventually build toward outrageously high scoring hands.

A hand’s score boils down to Chips × Multiplier, but the ways you can boost those numbers are practically endless. In the first round and without anything but your base deck, one “good” hand might net you around 300 points, which matches the first round’s target score. However, as the game progresses, the target score increases into the thousands, and eventually into the millions… So, how do you get there?

Different poker hands have a base chip and multiplier value, with each played and scoring card adding their value in chips to the base chip value. Easy hands like High Card or Pair start weak, while Full Houses or Royal Flushes begin much stronger – but are also harder to form.

Enter the Planet Cards – one for each poker hand. Buying and consuming one levels up that hand, increasing its base values. Planet Cards are crucial for scaling your score over time, and smart early investments often make the difference between a successful and failed run. But you won’t have enough money to level up everything, so you’ll need to recognize early what will work for the run and double down on the right strategy.

Then there are Tarot Cards, single-use upgrades that enhance your deck in powerful ways. Some add multipliers to individual cards, some transform them into Glass Cards, which give a x2 multiplier when scored, but also have a 25% chance of breaking and being gone from your deck for good! There are also effects that trigger when the card is not played, but held in your hand. Steel Cards for example add a x1.5 multiplier when held, while Gold Cards generate money. Other Tarot Cards can help modify your deck in other ways, such as turning a card into another, or removing cards from your deck entirely. Tarot Cards are essential tools for fine-tuning your deck.

But the real stars of the show are the Jokers. With 150 unique options and only five slots per run, the choices you make here define your strategy, and they completely change the way you approach a run. Many Jokers give flat bonuses to chips or multiplier, sometimes based off other factors – for example the Banner, which gives you +30 Chips for each discard remaining – some have multiplicative effects, and others are value generators; they generate resources, such as money or Tarot Cards, make Planet Cards free, etc… A good resource-generating Joker can be the make or break of a run, especially in higher Stake runs, but more on that later.

There are also Vouchers – one per Ante, and quite the investment – which provide permanent upgrades for your run, like extra hands or shop discounts.

There’s more strategy, too! On top of all this, order matters. Your in-hand card effects trigger after your played cards score, and then Jokers resolve from left to right. That small detail adds a surprising layer of strategy – lining up your multipliers correctly can mean the difference between barely surviving or blowing past the target score with style.

At first, I was calculating exact scores in my head, but over time I found myself playing more on instinct: “Will this hand be enough to beat the target? Do I need to risk playing this glass card, what if it breaks? What do I need to add to my deck to stand a chance against the next boss?” The more you play, these strategies become second nature in the best way – and that’s when Balatro really shines.

And that’s what makes Balatro so replayable. No two runs ever feel the same, because you’re constantly chasing different synergies and adapting to what the game throws at you. Take the Green Joker. It gains +1 to its multiplier whenever you play a hand, but loses -1 when you use a discard. That means it thrives in decks built around easy-to-form hands like High Cards or Pairs, but struggles with Straights or Full Houses. On another run, you might see an early Superposition, which creates a Tarot Card whenever you play a Straight containing an Ace. In this case, you’d start shaping your deck to maximize those specific Straights, maybe even trimming away middle-value cards.

The key is adaptability. You can’t force a strategy that isn’t working – you have to know what to grab, when to save, and where to spend. This becomes especially important at higher difficulties.

The Climb and the Platinum Trophy

The difficulty of a run in Balatro is structured around “Stakes.” You start playing on the White Stake, which is basically the vanilla version of the game. Winning a run on that Stake unlocks the next higher Stake for that particular deck, and each Stake adds a new restriction on top of all previous ones. The ultimate goal is to reach and win on the eight and highest Stake, the Gold Stake. On this difficulty, you have one less discard available, the required scores scale (much) faster, you don’t get any reward money from the Small Blind and Jokers can have a Rental (costs 3$ per turn), Eternal (cannot be sold) or Perishable (only lasts for five rounds) sticker. These restrictions effectively make every single decision much more important. Buying an Eternal Joker early can lock you into a dead-end strategy. Rental Jokers can bankrupt your run if purchased at the wrong time. By the time you’re playing on Gold Stake, every dollar matters – buy the wrong Joker, skip the wrong Booster, fail to build up your economy and it can tank your run.

Let’s talk briefly about the Platinum journey. Not every item is unlocked from the start. Some Jokers or Vouchers for example have unlock conditions, which in turn makes the learning curve much smoother by limiting the size of the item pool beginners have access to. Of course unlocking every single item is mandatory for the platinum, and should be one of the first objectives to focus on.

Then there are the 20 challenge runs, which I actually found super fun to do. These are regular White Stake runs with rule changes that force you to explore new strategies and be creative. My favorite was the final one: winning a full run without using any Jokers at all. That’s when you truly learn to appreciate the power of Planet and Tarot Cards.

But the two real time-sinks are the final two trophies:

• Completionist+: Climb up to and beat a Gold Stake run with each of the available 15 decks… That is 120 successful runs required for that trophy.

• Completionist++: Get a Gold Sticker on all 150 Jokers. A Joker receives a Gold Sticker when used to win a Gold Stake run. This was a massive test of patience and creativity. Some Jokers carry runs, others… not so much. This challenge requires the ability to build around “useless” Jokers, or at least prevent them from costing you a run. Some decks are better suited than others for this challenge, with my personal favorite being the Ghost Deck.

Yes, it was a grind, but finishing those challenges and finally earning the Platinum Trophy felt really rewarding.

Final Thoughts

At first glance, Balatro looks like a game where you’re just hoping for good RNG. But once you get the hang of it, you realize it’s way more about making smart choices and learning how to build around what you’re given. The randomness is there, but it’s never unfair – it just pushes you to adapt.

All in all, Balatro is one of those rare games that’s both super approachable and endlessly deep. Whether you just want a quick run here and there or you’re crazy enough to chase the Platinum, it’ll keep you hooked for a long time.