Special Report
How roguelike deckbuilder BALATRO uses poker, without really being poker
As a poker fan I’m always on the lookout for a new poker game. I’m especially keen to find games that use poker in interesting new ways, like RPG We Slay Monsters or roguelike Poker Quest, both of which use poker hands as their combat system. So, when poker-inspired roguelike deckbuilder Balatro came along I was eager to talk to its developer – not just about the game, but also what I assumed would be our shared love of poker.
“It’s funny, I don’t play poker at all,” says LocalThunk, solo developer of Balatro. That is pretty funny, actually, because Balatro has, well, quite a lot of poker in it. You begin with a standard deck of 52 playing cards, you make poker hands like straights, flushes and full houses to score chips, you compete against bosses called blinds, and when you win a round you come away with cash.
But it wasn’t a love of poker that led LocalThunk to create Balatro. “The game itself is really more based on Big Two,” he says, “which uses poker hands, but you play them out of your hand of eight or 13 cards or something. And so it’s based on that game, not poker, but I knew that poker would be a really good thematic tie-in that a lot of people could use as a launching point to understand some of the mechanics in this game.
“I could use the terminology in poker, I could use some of the visuals like blinds and antes and chips, and stuff like that, as a way to kind of make the whole thing feel cohesive, but I don’t play poker. I don’t really care very much about poker.”
FAMILIAR GROUND
As someone who has played over 40 hours of Balatro over the past couple months – not the full game, I’m just talking about the free demo – I can attest to the effectiveness of using common playing cards and poker hands as a simple entry into the game. I know the cards, the suits, and the hands, so even on my first try I already understood the basics. I don’t play a lot of other deckbuilders, so it usually takes me a while to come to grips with them, even friendly ones like Slay the Spire. But with Balatro, I immediately felt like I was on familiar ground.
“[That] was done very intentionally because that’s something about other games… personally, it turns me off when I play a game and it uses a bunch of terminology like HP and poison damage and experience, those kinds of terms,” LocalThunk says. “They’re very gamer-y terms, and I don’t play games a ton. So, those things to me, they feel like they’re adding so many layers of complexity. When I made my game, I wanted to make it so there’s no hit points, there’s no damage, you’re not attacking something. It’s almost like solitaire.”
