Balatro Rule

its a poker-themed roguelike deckbuilder. sort of like slay the spire but with playing cards. jokers give effects and theres tarot cards, planet cards, spectral cards and so on and your goal is to get more and more poker chips through chaining things together or adding effects, playing different strategies. its really fun. its rather addictive once you get going

Here's one of many streams Aliensrock did Balatro is a roguelite so it means you've gotta collect some form of items, in case of Balatro it's jokers, tarot or planet cards and more, to make yourself better until there comes a point where you lose and start from scratch but with new things unlocked like other decks or challenges.

I also play it, and rogue like is (I guess) the best way to describe it since it has a few of those elements. I actually don't like likening it to Slay the Spire, though, as even with card modifiers and deck building, it's still really like poker. I get a different satisfaction, and Slay the Spire is notably more exciting to me. Friends and I just call Balatro poker on crack.

But, it is indeed a roguelike in that you: restart every run every time you "die" (fail to earn enough chips for the round), earn permanent unlocks via achievements (like better multipliers for X by winning a run without using X), are at the mercy of RNG which make each run unique (shops and rewards for skipping blinds are random).

Deck building elements make it a card game genre too, like trying to remove cards or modding cards to improve odds of pulling what you want, building to a specific style (like making all your cards Clubs to take advantage of a joker that gives 8 mult per club). Yet at the end of the day you're just trying to get flushes, straights, etc.; good if that's your jam, but a little redundant after a while. I'm starting to lose interest after the 50th loss I'm a row at the higher difficulties on Abandoned Deck because of how punishing it gets.

If you like deck builders and poker style card games this is an excellent imagination of the 2. Very fun.

There's a demo and about a hundred twitch streamers currently playing. It's definitely a good one. Jokers don't actually go into your hand. They sit on the side and provide passive buffs.

You make scoring hands from your deck and try to clear a threshold of X points within Y hands, discarding a bad hand only up to Z times. Jokers change gameplay and scoring rules, and making good use of them is essential to beating blinds past the first boss round.

It's easy to lose track of time while playing