Jose Zagal's Home Page - Games & Game Studies

Home	Talks and Slides	My GameLog	Research and Projects	Publications	Resume	Teaching
Back // GameBreadth Project // Game Ontology Project // GameLog

Balatro (PC) Status: Played occasionally I started playing this game on Saturday 11 May, 2024
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
May 27, 2024 12:30:04 PM
Still playing once or twice every other day or so. At this point I'm enjoying trying to win with the different "basic" decks (basic as in they have a single color background). I just recently beat the game with the yellow deck and now I'm trying to win with the black one. Yellow was interesting because your deck had to face cards - and for some reason this mean in practice that I found it was really easy to play/get a "full house". What I'm still kind of surprised about is that I'm still playing on the basic difficulty - after you win a game you unlock (for each deck separately) a new difficulty...and there's like 6 levels or something that sounds completely impossible! There's a huge library of jokers and I think it's neat that when you win the game with a joker, it gets a little poker chip in the corner as an indicator. Neat stuff!
May 19, 2024 10:05:30 PM
Having spent the last few months playing a lot of deckbuilders, and then hearing a lot of buzz around this one..well, I had to try it out! (fortunately I got it for my birthday as well, yay!) And, is it fun? Yes. Is it hard? Yes. I got really lucky with wins in 2 of my first 3 games. Really lucky. But, now I have a better idea of how the game works, what's good, not so good, and when to invest in different things. As far as deckbuilding games go it's got a few unusual things going for it... 1. Your deck starts out really large! (a regular deck of playing cards) Generally it's pretty hard to make it smaller - there are a few options you might get, but it's not a general/typical option as you play the game. 2. You can easily add cards to your deck, but mostly you want to upgrade either the cards themselves (not THAT easy, but doable) or (more often?) the value you get from the different poker hands you do. So, increasing the multipliers/base value of two pairs might be better than improving one card that may not appear in a hand all that often. 3. You can sell your jokers - these all have different effects and, if you get a n interesting one at the start you can (hopefully) lean into it and shift your deck in the direction that takes the most advantage of it. (and then hopefully pick up other jokers that "double down" on that option). For example, a joker that gives you money when playing face cards coupled with a joker that treats all cards as face cards is good. So far I've won with a few different decks (there are starter decks that have a different effect) and I'm trying to get the green one to work! (you get money for not playing all the hands). I thought I had it when I last played earlier today - but no luck.

Balatro (PC)