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Anyone play this game? The video on steam doesn’t really give me an idea of how to play, it just shows a poker hand and the player clicks on a bunch of jokers?
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
Has “roguelike” lost all meaning now?
It’s a procedurally generated perma-death deck builder, where the only thing you unlock after death are new decks (which are essentially this game’s characters, of which I believe there are 10) and harder difficulties for each deck. You complete short 15-ish minute runs, where the only thing that makes the game easier is your own skill as you get better.
Sounds like a roguelike/lite to me.
You unlock other things like jokers and vouchers from doing certain things in the game as well.
On the contrary, it gained all other meanings
Haven’t played this game, but it seems it fits closer to “rogue-lite”
It did the moment Rogue Legacy came out and people who’ve never even heard of an actual roguelike described it as a roguelike.
What does roguelike mean to you?
Roguelike (or rogue-like) is a style of role-playing game traditionally characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement, and permanent death of the player character.
If that’s your definition of Rougelike then yes.
Most people understand procedural generation and permadeath to be the core features.
While many feature turn-based gameplay, grid-based movement is not typical.It’s a card game. Decks in card games are shuffled. Card games existed long before Rogue. Shuffling a deck doesn’t make something “roguelike,” much less procedurally generated.
It’s a betting game. You lose when you’re out of money. Betting games existed long before Rogue. Running out of money doesn’t make something “roguelike.”
It’s just poker with extra shit in it.
I like roguelikes and deckbuilders, and I LOVE slay the spire but I’m pretty ambivalent on poker. I’ve had my eye on this but is it just “poker but a little quirky” or would it be worth my time as a non poker fan?
I love STS and I’ve played ~6h of Balatro.
It isn’t clicking with me like STS did. STS has tons of flavour and variety, but Balatro’s main flavour is “poker” with some surrealism on top. The gameplay mostly has you staring at poker cards and thinking about how to stack point multipliers with jokers. It felt pretty monotonous to me after a while.
Balatro is definitely fun and worth its price. Give it a shot if you like STS. I just don’t think it’s the second coming of STS like a lot of people have been saying.
I’ve never played a single game of poker IRL and I have 50+ hours in Balatro. It’s good.
ive never played poker in my life and i love it
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.
Thank you for the detailed response! You gave me a good understanding of how the game feels.
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
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.
If you like deck builders and poker style card games this is an excellent imagination of the 2. Very fun.
The title always makes me think of how Martin Luther invokes the Privilegium Balatrone (Balatro’s Privilege) to claim that monks should be allowed to fuck and jerk off
I just landed in Vegas (waiting to get off the plane lol) and this is perfect
TIL “balatro” is another term for jester, buffoon.
