Balatro is the brain candy we need right now
Balatro is a game that is very difficult to describe and very, very difficult to stop playing once you’ve started. I mean, if I said it’s a roguelike deckbuilder solitaire game based on poker, that would tell you almost nothing about how addictive and delightful this game is.
The game starts like this, with you drawing eight cards (usually) and making poker hands out of them:
Cute and simple! But then there are various ways to screw with your deck and change the bonuses, so ultimately it ends up looking more like this:
Just how addictive is this game? Well, I’ll let this tweet speak for me:
Balatro has been available for free on Apple Arcade since the beginning of October, but I only got into it this month. It’s been exactly what I needed. This month hasn’t been an easy one, and putting together fun synergies really takes the edge off my dread and despair.
Since Myth Takes is, nominally, a somewhat classics-related newsletter, I’ll digress for a moment to point out that the name “Balatro” comes from the Latin word that means “jester” or “buffoon”. Balatrones seem to have been a class of theatrical performer: in Horace’s Satires 1.2, he refers to “Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, / mendici, mimae, balatrones, hoc genus omne” (“the guild of flute players, quacks, beggars, mimes, jesters… that entire set”). And that’s enough brain kale for me. We can return to the brain candy.
I love a good roguelike, a game played in short runs where you try to build wild synergistic combos or die trying and then try again. I’ve written about a few of my favorites already.
I’m hoping that Balatro, which had sold 2 million copies even BEFORE it hit Apple Arcade, is the gateway game people need for roguelikes (and roguelike deckbuilders specifically) to go mainstream. Because they rock.
Most viral games have some kind of social element, like Wordle. I like that Balatro is solitaire — although you shouldn’t sleep on playing it together with a friend. Putting two brains together can really help you make the best builds, because the other person will see possibilities that you don’t.
When I’m playing alone, I often fall into the trap of looking for one specific thing that will really make my deck come together. When I play with my partner, or my eleven-year-old, they make suggestions I would never have thought of.1 Sometimes they want me to go for the more entertaining choice rather than the choice that is strictly optimal. Which is correct, by the way. It’s easy to forget that games are supposed to be fun, which means it’s actually more optimal to play games for entertainment value and hilarity than to play games like they’re optimization puzzles.
There’s a fantastic Polygon video essay from early 2022 about time-loop games, “a weird genre for an anxious time.” I’m working on a pet theory that if the time-loop game was perfect for our pandemic-era anxiety, maybe roguelikes are the genre of the second Trump administration. Stay with me here. I’m not sure I really believe this argument, but I think it’s worth trying out.
In a time-loop game, you mostly improve your build through knowledge — think Groundhog Day, where Phil becomes an expert pianist. In roguelikes, you don’t have that luxury. I, the player, improve over time, but Zagreus in Hades is exactly as good at swinging a sword on my 100th run as he is on the first. What changes is my perspective and the version of the underworld I’m battling through.
In a time-loop game, if you play everything exactly the same way, you’ll always get the same outcome. That’s sort of what defines the genre: everything stays the same, except for how you interact with and change it. But roguelikes are defined by a degree of randomness and procedural generation. You don’t know what jokers the shop will offer you and which boss blinds you’ll be up against.
I’ve been resolutely staying away from any and all analyses of wHy KaMaLa LoSt, but I can’t help feeling many of these analyses have a bit of a time loop quality to them. And of course they do! It kind of feels like we’ve been reliving the same election over and over again since 2016! It sort of feels like, if we’d only known better, we could have made a few tiny tweaks that could have changed everything.
But while time loops encourage you to obsess over choices you’ve made in the past and how you might change the future, roguelikes keep you resolutely in the present. You don’t retread your old mistakes, you make exciting new ones and have fun doing it.
Roguelikes encourage creativity and taking wild risks. Putting together a deck of good stuff usually isn’t enough to beat the final boss of a roguelike, who is generally pretty overpowered. To win, you need to refine your build so everything is working together perfectly.
Much of the time, it just won’t come together, and that’s ok. You get a “game over” screen, the joker mocks you with some poker-themed puns, and you try again. You don’t spend a lot of time looking at that second screenshot up there and wondering how the run could have been optimized EVEN FURTHER,2 because it’s time for the next run where you’ll try something totally different.
I’ve been wondering what it would be like to live life with more of a roguelike sensibility. To be weirder and more creative and more willing to try things and let them fail and then start over. Maybe that will be the approach I’ll need to get through the next four years.
Maybe it’s the approach we all need. I’m not terribly convinced by any of the arguments I’ve read dissecting the election, and I’m trying not to use my one wild and precious life thinking for a moment longer than I have to about how the clowns who are getting appointed to various cabinet positions are going to demolish our institutions. I’m living in the present moment, dreaming of new ways to be in community with the people who share my radical belief that we should all take care of each other.
Until then, at least I’m never alone when I have Balatro.
I only learned about arguably the best joker in the game — Cavendish, the exploding banana that gives you x3 mult — because my slightly-high partner insisted I go for the “banana strat” and get the first banana joker, Gros Michel, which gives you +15 mult and has a 1 in 6 chance of eating itself. I pretty much never picked that joker, because it seemed bad — why spend money on a joker that will just disappear? But it turns out you will only see Cavendish after Gros Michel has gone extinct! I never would have known that “banana strat” is real if it hadn’t been for a stoned whim.
Another Constellation, obviously.
Any distraction is joyfully welcomed!