Balatro

• 1. Introduction

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  Balatro is a poker-themed card game made by a man who says he does not play poker. The developer goes by LocalThunk, an anonymous solo creator based in Saskatchewan, Canada. He has also said he does not want casinos or gamblers to use his game. He first treated it as a side project to put on a résumé, never expecting the reaction it got. It ended up named Game of the Year at the 25th Game Developers Choice Awards. How does a plain 52-card deck turn into a game this hard to put down? Where did the idea come from, and why did a ratings board decide it looked like gambling? And what does a creator do when his small project outgrows him?

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• 2. Chips and Mult

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  Each run of Balatro is split into antes, and every ante holds three blinds of rising difficulty. The blinds are the Small Blind, the Big Blind and the Boss Blind. In each round the player must reach a target score in chips using a limited number of hands. A limited number of discards lets the player swap up to five cards for new ones. Running out of hands or cards before reaching the target ends the run.

  Scoring has its own vocabulary. The player picks up to five cards from a starting 52-card deck and tries to form a poker hand. That hand's base value becomes Chips, and the Chips are then multiplied by a number called Mult. Cards, hands and Jokers held by the player can all push Mult higher.

  Winning a blind pays out in-game cash, marked with a dollar sign, and opens a shop between rounds. There the player can buy booster packs, Jokers and vouchers. A voucher grants a permanent upgrade, such as an extra hand or an extra discard. The Small and Big Blinds can be skipped instead of played. Skipping gives up the cash and the shop visit, but earns a tag, which usually pays off in the next shop with free cards or booster packs. Every Boss Blind carries a special ability, such as disabling certain cards or limiting hands or discards.

  Ante 8 is the finish line. The only way to win a run is to defeat the first Showdown Blind. Every ante that is a multiple of 8 swaps the Boss Blind for a Showdown Blind, drawn from five special types that appear nowhere else. A player who has beaten ante 8 has won, even if they keep playing.

  Endless mode lets the player continue past that win, and at ante 39 the arithmetic gives out. The required chips, stored in double-precision floating-point format, overflow to infinity, which gets stored as NaN. The game shows this as either "nan" or "naneinf", meaning NaN times ten to the power of infinity in E notation. Every number compares as unordered against NaN, so a score can never be equal to or greater than it. Further progress becomes impossible. Reaching anywhere near that ceiling takes a build of Jokers that feed off one another, and the game ships with a large cast of them.

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• 3. Jokers and Tarot

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  The game launched with 150 Joker cards, and they are the main way players bend the scoring rules. Jokers sit apart from the deck in the player's hand of tools. Many add Chips or Mult when a condition is met, and some multiply the Mult itself. Others reward money, create or duplicate cards, or change the number of hands and discards.

  Foil, Holographic and Polychrome are variants that alter a Joker's effect on Chips or Mult. The Negative variant grants an extra slot, so that Joker effectively takes up no space. Slots are limited, which makes the strategy a puzzle. The player hunts for Jokers that interact with one another and with the cards in the deck.

  Tarot cards in the game are the Major Arcana from the cartomantic Tarot deck. They give one-time effects, such as changing a card's suit, enhancing a card so it pays a bonus when played, or destroying a card. Spectral cards work similarly but hit harder. They can copy a card, apply upgrade variants to Jokers and playing cards, or change the player's cash for a risk or a reward. Planet cards raise the level of one poker hand, increasing its base Chips and Mult for the rest of the run.

  These tools let a deck drift far from an ordinary 52 cards. Players can build unusual hands such as Five of a Kind, Flush House, which is a full house of one suit, and Flush Five, which is five cards of the same suit and rank.

  Decks themselves carry effects. The player begins with a starter set and unlocks more by completing runs. Finishing a run also unlocks stakes for the deck used, which add tougher conditions. The deck underneath it all, the plain 52 cards, was a deliberate choice by its creator.

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• 4. Origins of a Jester

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  In 2021, LocalThunk began work on what he meant as one of several small games to share with friends. The first idea was an online version of Big Two, a Cantonese card game where players lay down poker-like hands. Two things changed his mind. He noticed how many roguelike deckbuilders were on Steam, and he watched Northernlion play Luck Be a Landlord on Twitch. That game is a slot machine-themed roguelike, and it inspired him to turn his Big Two clone into a singleplayer deckbuilder with no online play.

  He has said he mostly plays online competitive games, and that he thinks about roguelikes more than he plays them. He deliberately avoided deckbuilders so he would not borrow their ideas. He tried Slay the Spire only near the end of development, to see how it handled its control scheme. The whole project took about two and a half years.

  He once considered calling the game Joker Poker. He settled instead on Balatro, a Latin word for a professional jester or buffoon. Its classical pronunciation is ˈba:la:tro:, but LocalThunk said it can be "whatever makes people happy." He says it himself as ˈbælətro:, as does the narrator in the launch trailer. Many players and YouTubers stress the second syllable instead.

  On why a standard deck works so well, LocalThunk said, "it's this shared cultural game design tool that has evolved over hundreds of years." He credited part of the game's success to the fact that "you're borrowing from this really tried-and-true tool."

  The code runs on Lua with the Löve game framework. His pseudonym combines "local," the keyword for defining variables, with "Thunk," a common variable name in his partner's projects. For music he contacted LouisF, a freelance artist on Fiverr, in March 2023, and the soundtrack was delivered that same month. In his published production timeline, LocalThunk noted that this was the only money he planned to spend on the game.

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• 5. Finding Playstack

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  A very early build of Balatro circulated among LocalThunk's friends, and after months of playing it they gave it positive reviews. About a year before release, he quit his day job to concentrate on finishing the game.

  Then he put it on Steam. Patrick Johnson, Playstack's Head of Discovery, had the job of looking through every new release on the platform. He thought the game looked "interesting" and "cool-looking," and he reached out to LocalThunk on Twitter. LocalThunk signed a publishing contract with Playstack. Together they built a launch campaign around beta releases and promotion by major video game streamers. Player feedback from those betas shaped the final game, including the addition of boss battles.

  A demo had been available through 2023. LocalThunk pulled it on the 1st of January 2024, then brought it back on the 25th of January with 40 new Jokers, new bosses and new booster packs. The updated demo arrived with a new trailer and a date for the full game, the 20th of February 2024. That day Balatro launched on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

  A macOS port followed on the 1st of March. In April 2024, an experimental balance patch numbered 1.0.1c made the game easier.

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• 6. The Rating Fight

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  Shortly after Balatro's release, the European ratings body PEGI changed its age rating from 3+ to 18+ for "prominent gambling imagery." The shift caused the game to be pulled temporarily from sale in some territories. Playstack said it had discussed the content with PEGI before launch, and that an initial 18+ rating had already been lowered to 3+ after those talks. In Playstack's view, the game is based on poker but does not portray any form of gambling, and it planned to appeal.

  LocalThunk answered with sarcasm. He said, "Maybe I should add microtransactions/loot boxes/real gambling to lower that rating to 3+ like EA Sports FC."

  The appeal succeeded in February 2025. Balatro and Luck be a Landlord were both reclassified at 12+, in recognition that their fantasy elements set them apart from gambling. PEGI said it would introduce more granular classification rules for future games with gambling-like elements.

  The trouble did not stop with PEGI. After YouTube changed its policies in March 2025, many Balatro videos were marked 18+ for "depictions or promotions of online casino sites or apps." That label blocked them from child YouTube accounts.

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• 7. Jimbo Everywhere

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  On the 26th of September 2024, Balatro reached Android and iOS, after LocalThunk and Playstack had confirmed the plan in March of that year. The release included a Balatro+ version for Apple Arcade. The ports grossed $1 million in their first week and $4.4 million in two months. A dedicated Nintendo Switch 2 version followed on the 25th of February 2026.

  Four free "Friends of Jimbo" updates added cosmetic packs that change the look of the face cards, each with crossovers from other games. They arrived on the 27th of August, the 24th of October and the 12th of December 2024, and the 24th of February 2025. The first included The Witcher 3, Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver and Among Us. The second brought Cyberpunk 2077, The Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire and Stardew Valley. The third drew from eight games, among them Divinity: Original Sin II, Shovel Knight, Don't Starve and Warframe. The fourth included Critical Role, Bugsnax, Civilization VII, Rust, Assassin's Creed, Fallout and others.

  The traffic ran both ways. On the 24th of October 2024, a Dave the Diver update added a quest in which characters challenge the player to "Jimbo's Game," a condensed Balatro. A Cyberpunk 2077 update on the 10th of December 2024 added a character named Jim B. who asks the player to remove joker graffiti around the city. The reward is a white T-shirt with a joker design not seen in Balatro. Little Kitty, Big City gave players Jimbo's jester cap on the 25th of February 2025. Monster Train 2 let players meet Jimbo at its launch on the 21st of May 2025. Later came Dying Light 2 on the 26th of June, Rusty's Retirement on the 7th of August, and Vampire Survivors on the 28th of October with its Ante Chamber DLC. Dead by Daylight offered a free killer head cosmetic based on the Madness joker from the 20th of February to the 20th of March 2026.

  The community built on the game too. Steamodded is a third-party mod loader that supports many mods. The Cryptid mod adds over 120 Jokers and is intentionally unbalanced. A Multiplayer mod introduces a Nemesis Blind, where the higher scorer takes a life from the opponent, and a player with no lives left loses. In January 2025, a fan began an unofficial Apple Watch port called Wee Balatro.

  Merchandise also followed. Fangamer released a deck of playing cards with Balatro pixel art and a 2026 calendar of photographs of Ben Starr cosplaying various jokers. Makeship sold plushes, pins and keychains, and Youtooz released three figurines.

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• 8. Acclaim and Anonymity

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  Metacritic lists Balatro under "universal acclaim," and OpenCritic reports that 100% of critics recommend it. Simon Cardy of IGN called it "ludicrously fun" and "remarkably approachable." Jordan Helm of Hardcore Gamer used "addictive" and "expertly-crafted." Keza MacDonald wrote in The Guardian that "Balatro might be the best card game you will ever come across." Abbie Stone of PC Gamer described the play as "strategizing your way to success," and Alessandro Barbosa of GameSpot found each run "surprisingly fresh." Chris Allnutt of the Financial Times praised its "wonderfully retro VCR-style visuals, lo-fi music and irreverent sound effects."

  Charlie Brooker, creator of Black Mirror, called it "possibly the most addictive thing ever created." He predicted that once it reached mobile, "humankind's activity is going to drop about 25%." The game then appeared briefly in the "Hotel Reverie" episode of Black Mirror's seventh season in April 2025. Film director James Gunn called it a "great game" and spent much of the downtime on the production of Superman playing it.

  The sales figures kept pace. Playstack reported significant gross revenue within eight hours of release, and over one million copies sold in the first month. By January 2025 the game had passed 5 million copies, with about half of those coming after the September 2024 mobile releases. That total leaves out Apple Arcade subscribers.

  The awards piled up. At the 2024 Golden Joystick Awards it won Best Indie Game and Breakthrough. At The Game Awards 2024 it won Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game and Best Mobile Game. It was also nominated for Game of the Year there, the first time a solo game project was nominated for the top honor. At the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards it won Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game, Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year and Mobile Game of the Year. It was nominated for the top prize at that ceremony and at the 21st British Academy Games Awards.

  LocalThunk kept his face out of it. He did not want attention on his real-world identity, or the stress that would follow. He used the spotlight to praise other indie games for his "Golden Thunk Awards," naming Animal Well, Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers, Arco, Nova Drift, Ballionaire and Mouthwashing. He and his partner attended The Game Awards but told no one who they were, and Playstack representatives accepted the awards for him. The same arrangement held at the Game Developers Choice Awards. For the British Academy Games Awards, he sent actor Ben Starr, who had played Jimbo the joker in live-action videos for the game, to accept his award.

  He had planned a major update for 2025. In September 2025 he pushed it to 2026, saying he wanted the game to remain his hobby and to avoid crunch.

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