It’s Poker: Possibility Space Edition.
And yet, it’s still poker underneath it all.
So it feels really, really big - bottomlessly big - and also extremely compact: localised,particular.
There are a few of these, and Balatro is comfortably the best I’ve played.
It really is ingenious - and it’s also ingeniously simple.
Let us get into this.
You are dealt cards.
You make poker hands.
And then you get a shop between rounds.
This is where Balatro lives.
The shop is its big thing.
And here’s why.
Not bad at all.
But there is more, of course.
Stuff to keep in mind!
Then there are jokers.
Jokers create new rules.
And that’s just the slightly weird jokers.
For my first dozen hours, I thought jokers were the absolute apex of Balatro.
I thought they wereit.
But then I got wise.
Because these are where the real long-term marathon fun of a Balatro run kicks in.
You might suddenly have a deck of cards with 53, 56, 60 cards in it!
You might have seven sevens, a dozen queens.
The hands you could make with that.
The likelihood that you’ll get something great!
Somehow, we are still in the shop.
Skimming over the Goldberg Variations - a fast one, a slow one?
Glenn Gould or that new guy?
What I would say to that is: sorry, and also give them a listen!
To quote the maze designer Greg Bright, Bach “made the law sound like freedom”.)
Happily, when you get out of the shop, the game is there to match your growing power.
The blinds go up, but also boss blinds bring in their own wrinkles.
Early on, a suit may be debuffed.
This is where the game is at its best for me, actually.
I like Balatro an awful lot.
I think some people are going to stick with this game and never move on.
Firstly, I don’t have the necessary gifts.
Secondly Balatro’s almost too ingenious and too neat for me.
It all works and it clips together so beautifully that I sometimes find it slightly airless.
But in a way, I even find this to be part of Balatro’s generosity.
It’s the realisation that something can be fundamentally beautiful, but also not quite for you.
And that is fine.
I hope Balatro’s for you, and I hope you have a brilliant time with it.
