What makes a "Game of the Year?" Is it a graphical powerhouse? Is it a story that moves you to emotions you didn't think you had? Is it something that fits Bushnell's Law of "easy to learn, but difficult to master?" Or is it fun? I don't know, but one thing I do know is I don't disagree with Balatro being considered Game of the Year for 2024.

I read, and watch, a lot of people declaring that video games "died" in 2024. I'm not going to sugarcoat things and pretend things are a-ok. I know they aren't. Thousands are being laid off every year from a variety of studios. Explotative labor practices and "crunch" are still a major issue for many studios. Budgets continue ballooning to sizes that make the number of games sold more and more unrealistic. On top of that, an ugly "anti-woke" movement is happening where ANYTHING even remotely "progressive" like female lead characters, or LGBTQ characters, or themes such a pacifism or racial equality are deemed "woke" and the game bad, even if the player declaring such never touched the game. It's resulting in a landscape of homogenization, more games looking similar to each other. familiar IPs getting the bulk of attention, reboots, remasters and sequels given preference over brand new ideas. Creative stagnation has become a major problem.

Enter Balatro. Balatro is basically a mobile poker game, but it's so much more than that. It's a deck builder meets a rogue-like meets poker meets Astrology. It's something so simple, yet so unique. Something so familiar, yet so different. Something so basic, yet so deep.

I heard from many that this was "the game" for 2024. I like poker, so I figured why not. It'll be a fun game playing every now and then. Every now and then has resulted in 10 hours put into the game, and I only downloaded it last week onto my Switch.

All of the best games, in my opinion, have elements of skill, strategy and luck. Balatro fits that to a T. You need to know how to play poker, you need to plan out what to do based on the cards you have, and you have to hope the computer AI deals you some good cards.

The premise is pretty simple: you play up to 8 "antes" (rounds) of 3 hands of poker: small bind, medium bind and large bind. Small and medium are your basic rounds of poker, but the large bind is basically a card equivalent of a "boss fight." It might be a suite of cards is debuffed, or specific cards are dealt face down, or you can only discard once. It adds a big element of challenge.

Along the way, you can purchase with your winnings "jokers", which each add twists to the game. Many of them help you rack up more points for pairs, or straights, or flushes, or they might emphasize certain card suites, or much more. There are also "planet" cards, as well as tarot cards, that can also add new cards to your hand, and give you new abilities. As the binds increase, and boy, do they increase, you will need jokers, planet cards and tarot cards bigly. Winning gets much more difficult without these the further along you go.

What's so great about this game are the little things. It's very user friendly and helpful to players, giving it great accessibility. The sound effects are fun. It's colorful. There are so many secrets to discover. And best of all, no loot boxes, no paid DLC, it's all a part of the game.

Like another rogue like indie I loved (Hades), I expect I will get to a point where I will get what I needed from the game and I'll move on, but in this landscape of frills, bloat, and excess, playing a fun game that keeps it simple has never been more refreshing.

Highly recommended.

I think my game of the year has already been decided.

Balatro is the epitome of taking a simple idea and making the most of it. It's a poker roguelike where you need to rack up enough points by playing poker hands. Each poker hand has a base score (chips) and multiplier (mult) that determines how much points you get. Get enough points and you beat that round. Beating rounds earns you money. Money lets you level up the poker hands to increase their base values, buy and upgrade cards to make your deck more effective as well as buy jokers and vouchers to access a REALLY versatile pool of buffs. Every third round is a boss round with a challenging extra rule added. Beat the boss, you'll go to the next ante (set of 3 rounds). Beat 8 antes, you win.

The first 15 minutes you question what the hype is all about. After that, the Balatro has exclusive rights to your brain activity. The game has a nice functional UI, hypnotic smooth jazz music and a sort of "collect them all" vibe of seeing all the cards and boosts. Playing Balatro works the same from game to game but the crazy amount of jokers and buffs give runs tons of versatility. Often strategies emerge as you go, and there's tons of awesome combinations to discover. There's also unlockable decks with different start boosts, harder difficulties and a challenge mode with tricky game scenarios to tackle.

The whole game is pretty much about seeing numbers get bigger by buff synergy but the way the game does it in such a pure, simple way is brilliant.

Game #68/225

A random Steam review of this game that I read described it as "an addiction that I don't even understand" and that has been reverberating in my head as I pick up and put down Balatro. What I do know: it's a deckbuilder roguelike using poker hands, which sounds kind of lame, but the sheer diversity of "joker" modifier cards that you can obtain and strategic paths you can go down to succeed during a run makes for a fantastic formula. I feel that Balatro may be the cornerstone of the current rogue-like renaissance we're going through; it's really just the bare essentials of what makes every game in the genre great (meta progression, snappy gameplay requiring flexible thinking, adapting decisions to match your run's strengths, many unlockables, etc.), but so tightly designed and balanced. The main design strength is its simplicity -- for starters, it has a slightly hazy, pixelated look, with some fascinating and unrestrainedly creative art, but only a single music track (right? admittedly a very good one) -- poker is a universally known game, but it being turned upside-down on its head as a roguelike works unexpectedly and unbelievably well. Really, the "poker mechanics," limited to the presence of poker hands and standard playing cards, are simply a vehicle for the deckbuilding to work. The actual joy of playing comes from selecting your jokers, upgrades, etc. and managing your funds from winning a blind. The difficulty seems to scale really well with your level of improvement as you select higher challenge levels that reduce your advantages on a run (kind of like Slay the Spire's ascension mechanic). There are also various decks that act as different "characters" with their own perks. I have yet to check out challenge mode but that seems fun, if a bit intimidating, too. I'm hoping to enjoy Balatro for a long time to come. It's certainly one of the best games for passing by an obscene number of hours in a flash.

I don't really play roguelikes or cardbuilders. Hell, I've barely ever played poker, and hardly know how. But hearing all the buzz about Balatro all throughout 2024, I knew I wanted to check out this game that everyone was addicted to. And brother, I got addicted too.

I said I don't play roguelikes, and that's mostly true, but Balatro reminded me more of Hades than poker or even solitaire, in the way that each game, I could find some new way to attack my problem, and consider what I should do to improve the next time. I kept thinking of new ways to play, new ways to maximize my points, which type of hand I should play, which type of suit I should lead with, etc. It's all about how you play the hands you're given, but more importantly, how to cheat the system to boost your points, and that's way more fun to me than poker.

My only problem with Balatro (and to be fair, this is probably more of a personal problem than a problem with the game) is that I found that the only way I could beat the game was to follow the same path that led me to victory before. For me, winning a game was reliant on me finding a specific joker that I knew I could exploit, then maxing the hell out of that. While I attempted to play with other strategies, I only found success with this one.

I also just don't think I'm built for the type of extreme strategizing that it seems like so many people have embraced with this game. I watched a few videos where people would do these insane plays, to the point that the scores were in the millions and above, and it looked like the game was going to break. I admire the ability to do this, but I don't think I can get there, even though it feels like doing such tricks is the only way to "beat" the game.

But I will say that there are only a few games that I'll play where I can turn the TV on, watch something, and get lost in a game while I do other things, and Balatro is absolutely one of those games now for me. It's like Tetris and Balatro, and that's a great company to be in. Maybe I'm not a Balatro master yet, but if I keep playing it this much, who knows where I'll end up with this game?