A sort-of recovering gambling addict like me should most likely stay away from relapsing on her gambling addiction, least she does it with Texas Hold’Em or any other similar Poker game which, let me be honest, I was never good at. Poker was for me always a question of having more luck than tactics in mind, especially considering some may tell I’m rather bad at reading some kinds of faces at the Poker table… and I had my experiences with Texas Hold’Em, physically or online, most of them pretty bad, so, while the idea of playing Poker at a real table smoking a cigarette like in a filler scene from the Batman Animated Series was seductive enough, I’d rather stay away from gambling my money on… anything, still. Luckily, I did deposit my 15 bucks into a video game on Steam which not only was a good investment, but brings me a chill entertainment for hours on end (more so than Vampire Survivors, I admit), and while I’m not physically sitting at a table smoking a good ol’ tobacco, I’m there quite enjoying the experience, frankly, albeit at the expense of so many hours spent without being productive into said game; this game is Balatro, a 2024 Poker roguelike game, which captivated many of its players with its unique and rather interesting approach at roguelikes. And it was not short of imitators either, as you’d expect from its success; we interviewed last year a game developer who did Balatro with Yahtzee dice instead called Rogue Rollout, which still remains a bit of a demonstrable underdog in Balatro clones.

Balatro is addictive, not in the sense, fortunately, that you have to constantly spend money on it, but in the sense that with the passing runs, time flies unnoticeably under your radar. The first day I had Balatro, notably, the same day I bought Balatro at the turn of the New Year, I spent 3 and a half hours between runs straight, and while mastering the game’s mechanics was pretty complicated, and as complicated as it is taming RNGesus, getting the basics of its mechanics was simple enough to click on me. All you have to do is “defeat” blinds scoring an established minimum of chips by making Poker hands, and all while you can improve your Poker deck with not just card enhancements, but also Jokers of diverse effects, Tarot cards which mostly enhance your deck, planet cards that improve your hands’ levels and so on. Its simplicity wraps you around like a cozy blanket, as failing runs over and over (and sometimes winning runs) makes time pass like nothin’.

Some might argue that Balatro is comparable to gambling, and that might be an overstatement, even though, it’s a gamble to try to win a run sometimes unless you come well prepared for some of the tougher Boss blinds; not only that, but I find the comparison between Balatro and gambling pretty absurd: TikTok just suspended my stream on there early this morning at the very first minutes because the draconian TikTok moderation AI thought it was “gambling”, blocking me from livestreaming on TikTok ever again; the same way, PEGI rated this game 18+ because of the same assumption of “gambling”, despite the fact that games like EA FC 2025 have literal lootboxes and the Ultimate Team nonsense, which are gateways for gambling for little kids out there, all in the while other AAA titles have literal gambling mechanics for a lesser PEGI rating. Don’t even get me started on Gacha games like Genshin Impact or Nikki if it wasn’t for the façade of cute, stupid sexy anime girls in them. Seems like a reminder that PEGI, as well as the ESRB, is willing to normalize the AAA gaming business’ malpractice of creating gateways to gambling, and disallow indie titles for merely referencing Poker hands. “Oh no,” said the ESRB executive, “lest you want Little Timmy to go to Vegas if he plays Balatro for just a one-time fee of 15 USD!”

Let me clarify: Balatro is far from gambling. The only gamble you’ll have in this game is to spend hours to win a run and have the mercy of RNG to not screw you up for any reason conceivable, but all is just for a one-time price of a Steam sale, and the rest is free. There are no microtransactions, no lootbox shenanigans, no casino mechanics, albeit there are spare casino references in the game for aesthetic purposes only, and for the time being, no bullshit DLC. The game even doesn’t deserve to be called “addictive” the same way a Gacha game does, even though I just titled the article like this because, lmao; but it is really a captivating game that entraps you nicely and cozy into its mechanics, as Balatro serves as a far improved Solitaire experience if it had a baby with The Binding of Isaac.

I think I really like Balatro. It’s become my passtime this 2025; I play it on the commute on my phone even, I play it when I have nothing to do at home, I play it live on stream while I try to talk about topical stuff, and yet, it is so chill - its tranquility, which is heavily contributed by its original soundtrack on loop, is a nice timewaster the same way people waste their time at the office playing Reversi or Solitaire. I think that’s probably the inherent nature of some roguelikes, the ones that do it really well to hook you, but there was never really a roguelike that did it as well as Balatro, where instead of the usual frustration and ragequitting, I just most of the time go for another run, and go with the flow of the game. Even I can recommend this game as a proper replacement for the office environment’s Windows Solitaire, because now Windows 11’s Solitaire is pestered with mobile game tier ads. Fuck Microsoft.

9/10