I'm terrible at Poker but a deck-building poker roguelike? Balatro has me hooked

Balatro is releasing on February 20th and if you love card games and deck-builders, you're probably going to need to check this one out. It also has a demo available for Steam Next Fest 2024.

A Poker-inspired roguelike, because while the basics are Poker, you do get plenty of tricks up your sleeve to win big with various special cards. It's weirdly hooked its teeth right into me and the demo thankfully plays just fine on Linux with Proton 8. Absolutely no issues found in my time trying out the demo.

Like any good deck-builder it has special cards, and a card shop to keep changing your deck. What really makes it interesting are the Joker cards, there's 150 of them, each with their own special ability to change how your run goes and you can have multiple of them equipped at once. Like Odd Todd above, which gives me +30 chips for odd ranked cards when played.

There's a lot more to it like special Tarot cards, which can enhanced and change your current cards if you're trying to get a particular hand. These cards, along with the Jokers, can really end up massively changing how your run goes and can suddenly dump a whole lot of chips your way.

Now, this is not Traditional Poker by any sense. It has the basics of it, and you play your hands like it's a Poker game as you aim for a Full House, a Flush and so on but rather than playing other players or bots, you're trying to beat the Blind with the score required getting ever-higher so you need to work on those synergies from your hand with your other special cards to score big.

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Balatro is delicious and it's going to steal a lot of time away from you as you come back for seconds and thirds.

Give Balatro a try on Steam.