Poker has been around for many, many decades and has morphed in very different forms. You could play the ever-accessible Texas hold’em poker but not quite get the ins and outs of Omaha hi/lo or five-card poker. Still, the aim is always the same: use the cards at your disposal to get the best hand possible and beat all others at the table.
A quietly released indie video game this year decided to take poker into whole new realms by gamifying it beyond the confines of a 52-card pack. As it turns out, there’s a lot that you can do with the game of poker while still keeping it wonderfully straightforward and easy to play. Best of all, Balatro doesn’t play the obvious hand it could.
Balatro: Your next low-cost obsession
In Balatro, you attempt to make the best poker hands possible from the hand dealt from your customisable deck. You’ll have a set number of hands and discards to reach each blind. If you don’t achieve this, you lose and start the run again with a basic deck. Along the way, you’ll find upgrades like Joker cards and special playing cards.
Perhaps the biggest selling point of this indie gem is its price tag. Balatro, which can be played via a touch screen on platforms like the Nintendo Switch, is £12.79 for the whole game. There isn’t any way to make in-game purchases, nor is there a need to make microtransactions to top up your chip count.
Instead, you play hands to score chips – which are essentially just points – with the aim being to beat the increasingly hefty blind (a score you need to hit or you lose). You do earn VC with each round won, and sometimes by skipping blinds, but this is another variable element of a run.
Sometimes, you may find yourself with stacks of coins to rummage through the store with. On other runs, your deck isn’t as rewarding, and you need to find alternative ways to win, such as by spawning Tarot or Planet cards with enhanced deck cards. Every run is different, making for incredible replayability and renewed challenge.
Passing on the obvious route of monetisation
You’d think that the little indie game based on one of the most popular gambling games in the world would find an understandable way to mix in in-game purchases and microtransactions, but Balatro didn’t. You can easily see the appeal. The online version of GTA, which has a virtual casino, makes some $500,000 per year through its microtransactions.
Plus, there are ways to play both the monetisation route and the free-to-play route. This has been the case at online sweepstakes casinos for years. For these casino-like platforms, you can get some free SC coins to get started and then do stuff like follow on social media for more. It’s free, but there’s also the option to buy more coins.
Balatro could have gone down either of these avenues and not a single person in and around video gaming would bat an eye. Instead, you get a complete, engaging, accessible, and superbly varied play on poker for its upfront cost. Of course, that could all change if the rumours of an online mode come to fruition, but we’ll have to see.
Right now, Balatro is deservedly hailed as one of the indie sensations of 2024. It’s inventive in its design and wonderfully restrained in its monetisation when it would have been acceptable to utilise what continue to be big-selling ways of bringing in more cash through gaming.
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