Balatro cast a magic spell that made me love math

By James On Feb 27, 2024

I’m not a poker guy, but I certainly am one Balatro dude now.

Made by one anonymous developer who goes by the pseudonym LocalThunk, Balatro is a roguelite that takes poker and turns it into an infinitely replayable and utterly engaging game by adding cards that break the rules of poker in the most delightful ways – via a whole lot of math. I didn’t think anyone could make it PEMDAS nice, but Balatro proved me wrong.

Image: LocalThunk/Playstack via Polygon

Every run starts simple. You play a series of levels (called “Antes”) each consisting of three encounters (called “Blinds”): Small, Big, and Boss. In each hand you have to achieve a high score in a limited number of hands. Your score is determined by a simple mathematical formula: X times Y. Both numbers are affected by the hands you play. Stronger cards and stronger hands score more points, and like any good roguelike you can add multipliers on top of the multipliers to keep making those numbers higher. Poker rules apply to the strength of the hands; four of a kind earns more chips than a full house, which earns more chips than a flush, which earns more chips than a straight, etc. Winning rounds earn you money, which you then put into Balatro‘s store — that’s where the real game begins.

After each defeated Blind, enter the shop. There you can spend your hard-earned money on a range of options to further strengthen and differentiate your deck: rule-breaking Joker cards, deck-customizing Tarot cards, booster packs of holofoil cards, cards that may be ghosts, and more. Hand types, such as three of a kind or flush, can be upgraded via Planet cards, increasing their multiplier.

A screenshot from Balatro, showing an overhead view of cards on a table, with a card marked 'Unusual' to reveal a pop-up window with more information that reads: 'Undiscovered. Prevents death if the chips scored are at least 25% of the required ships. Destroys itself.”

The store is the bread and butter of winning one Balatro run, because after the opening phase you won’t be able to beat any of the Antes without a little help from these cards. Boss Blinds introduce hard-to-beat mechanics, such as blocking a single sequence to score or requiring you to play only one type of hand for the entire Blind, and each successive Ante requires increasingly higher scores for each Blind. The game is about picking up score modifiers from these additive cards to make individual hands more powerful – adding chips and multipliers, and then multipliers Unpleasant those multipliers – such that, in the case of my first Balatro win, even a low pair of nines can win the game.

A screenshot of Balatro, showing an overhead view of cards on a table, with a set of special Joker cards at the top of the screen and the player's hand, with both regular cards and two special Rock cards, at the top of the screen. bottom.

Early in that run I picked up a Marble Joker. After each level, one Stone card was added to my deck; these are colorless and uncountable cards that add 50 chips to the hand you play them with. Marble Joker itself isn’t great. Too many Stone cards can ruin your ability to play literally any hand, for example, because they have no number or suit. But I also picked up two other crucial Jokers: Hologram, which adds a 0.25x multiplier per card added to your deck, and Driver’s License, which adds a flat 3x multiplier if you have at least 16 enhanced cards in your deck . I coupled this with some other Jokers who added multipliers to every hand I played, and by the end of the game what started as a 20 point hand consistently earned over 500,000 points, all thanks to the accumulation of a +10 here and a 2x there. Correctly arranged (card skills read from left to right, so make sure you add before you multiply), I was looking at a score multiplier of over 1,300x, turning a pair of nines – an objectively not a good poker hand – into my first delicious taste of victory.

If this all sounds very mathematical, that’s because it is. Not Since Universal paper clips I played a game that focuses on the joys of making numbers communicate with each other. Other top level deck builders like this Kill the Spire or Monster train at least inject a dash of narrative flavor on top of their gameplay. Hell, even Universal paper clips, the simplest numbers simulator I’ve ever played, is ultimately in service of a story about the consequences of using artificial intelligence in the pursuit of industry maximization. Of Balatro, there’s no story except your own headcanon, which in my case imagined the video poker machine at my hometown pizzeria suddenly glitching and spitting out cursed cards as the smell of cheese and marinara filled the air. (If it is proven one day Balatro is secretly one Encryption-style deck builder, I expect you all to give me my flowers, thank you.)

But I made that all up. Balatro They are just numbers and probabilities. Balatro is just math.

Of course, all video games involve a lot of math – more math than I, a man who was not a mathematician in any sense of the word, can claim to understand. That’s kind of the magic of games like Balatro, although. They make me like math. A lot of. Where other games would choose to obscure the countless calculations required to make the game function, Balatro shows his work. Every Blind, every Ante, Balatro shows you his hand: the calculations are all visible to the player, step by step.

So what, inside Balatro‘s case, all that math makes this happen pleasure? What was so compelling about what I was doing that I lost track of how much I was playing and somehow ended up sinking twenty hours into a card game over the course of a few days? When I wasn’t playing the game, I was thinking about the fantasy of these kinds of “numbers go up” games, where I can manipulate numbers for my personal benefit in a world where fluctuating interest rates and the whims of the hyper-rich can ruin anyone’s job. costs, or where the circumstances of your birth may involve modifiers that you cannot easily ignore. There’s something very appealing about this sense of control in games like Balatro in a world that sometimes feels more random than a rogue-lite.

But I’ll be honest: that’s not what I think about when I’m playing Balatro. I’m thinking of the perfect learning curve, where early games turn even the most uninitiated among us into card sharks. I think of its deceptive simplicity, drawing you in before its almost infinite complexity is revealed. I’m thinking about how Balatro is so confident in one of gaming’s most basic pleasures – the unironic thrill of optimization – that the spell he casts from hand remains just as powerful at hand 1,000. I think about how damn good it feels to win.

A screenshot of a boss battle in Balatro, showing an overhead view of cards on a table, with a set of special Joker cards at the top of the screen, the player's played hand in the center, and the rest of his or her cards. hand at the bottom.

Balatro turns you into a card counter in a game where every card counts. Before you know it, you’re all in. Deckbuilder fans can’t afford to sleep on this one. Ant op.