Balatro
The card roguelike Balatro starts you with a plain 52-card deck. You play poker hands, Jokers add points and multipliers to them, and some change the rules outright. You get only a few hands and discards per round, and the target keeps climbing.
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It was made by one person, an anonymous developer from Canada called LocalThunk, who says he doesn't play poker himself. He started out building an online version of Big Two, a Cantonese card game. Then he watched the streamer Northernlion play Luck Be a Landlord, a slot machine roguelike, and turned his clone into a single-player roguelike.
He deliberately stayed away from other deckbuilders so he wouldn't borrow their ideas. He only opened Slay the Spire near the end of development, to look at its controls. And balatro is Latin for a professional jester.
By January 2025 it had sold more than 5 million copies. Praise was nearly universal, though one reviewer was bothered by rare difficulty spikes, when a boss proves too much for the deck you've built. Players give it 97% positive across 162,731 reviews, and critics 90 on Metacritic. On our Recommended Score it ranks 26 of 4,736 games.
Liked it? Try Slay the Spire itself, where you build your deck on the climb to the top of a tower, and Monster Train, where monsters summoned from cards defend a fire on the top floor of a train.
Major updates
Welcoming Friends of Jimbo 4! · Feb 2025All 4
System requirements
Minimum 1 GB RAM · 150 MB✓Steam Deck VerifiedMin & recommended
| Minimum | |
|---|---|
| OS | Windows 7, 8, 10, 11 x64 |
| Processor | Intel Core i3 |
| Memory | 1 GB |
| Graphics | OpenGL 2.1 compatible graphics card, integrated graphics |
| Storage | 150 MB |
From the game’s Steam store page.
