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Balatro is a poker roguelike that was released February 20th for $15 on steam, where you start with a normal deck of cards with the normal poker hands. Every round has 4 starting hands and 3 discards that you can use to discard up to 5 cards with a hand amount of 8 cards and you want to try to get a good hand to play up to five cards to earn points to continue the game further. Every extra hand you have once you win earns you $2 that you can spend in the shop.
In the shop you can buy multiple different packs which include the starting pack which allows you to add more cards into your deck: The celestial pack which includes cards that upgrade your poker hands to get more chips. The tarot pack which gives you tarot cards that do a variety of things from giving you more money, turning one card into another, and also changing the suits of a card. As well as the spectral pack which is rarer but a lot stronger as it allows you to change all of the cards in a hand into the same suit to help get five of a kind, gives you a legendary joker, but these can come at the cost of losing some of your hand size. During rounds you can hold up to two tarot and celestial cards.
Also in the shop you can buy jokers which you build your deck around as it allows you to get more points for not using face cards, giving a bonus, making straights easier to get, gives you more money based on the amount of rounds it has passed and so many more. These jokers are the main part of your run and you want to balance getting lucky and playing smartly. You start out with a starting limit of five jokers but this number can be increased through upgrading your jokers or finding a rarity that makes your joker amount increase. The shop also has a voucher which you can use to help you win by increasing your hands per round, rerolling the boss and much more.
After the shop you will see that for every ante, which is the amount of ‘floors’ the game has, there are three rounds: the small blind, the big blind, and the boss blind. In every ante you can skip the small and/or the big blind for a reward like money, a rare joker in the shop, rerolling the boss blind’s special abilities, and others. Every blind has more chips that you need to earn in order to win the blind. Every boss blind has a debuff that gets applied to your deck for the remainder of the blind. These debuffs can be from making all of your black suits useless, to making it so that you can only play one kind of hand for the remainder of the blind.
In conclusion, Balatro is a roguelike based on poker that you have to deck build in order to get as far as possible and have lots of fun along the way. You will want to focus on building what you think will either get you a lot of points or a fun synergy you want to find out. Either way the most important thing that you do while playing Balatro is have fun.
Hi, I am Camdon and my interests include reading, playing video games, and having fun with my friends. For more articles from me and some discussions visit me here.
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