Balatro, LocalThunk’s hit indie deck-building game, has been rapidly gaining traction since its release in February due to its addictive gameplay and compelling mechanics. Now, Balatro is released on mobile, dominating charts – and people’s lunch breaks.
Balatro is a poker-adjacent, deck-building game designed by LocalThunk and published by Playstack, in which players must play hands that earn enough points to defeat progressively higher target scores. Despite having poker-inspired themes, the game is available for ages 10+, and Playstack is pushing for lower. Players can upgrade their hands with special cards and jokers, which modify the rules of the game, but be careful – each joker does something different.
Combining poker mechanics with roguelike elements such as final bosses and upgrades, players can win through the powers of strategy, risk-taking, and a hefty amount of luck.
The rules to the game are easy to learn, but hard to master. The objective of a run is to beat at least 8 different “antes” (levels), which get progressively difficult as the game progresses, by playing high-scoring poker hands. Players have a limited number of hands and discards per round, and start out with 52 cards.
Scoring is determined by base values, or “Chips”, multiplied by “Mults”, which are earned based on the value of the cards played. Each ante contains a Small Blind, a Big Blind (1.5x Small Blind target score) and a Boss Blind (2x Small Blind target score). Boss Blinds give additional challenges to the player, such as limitations on how many cards can be played or debuffing cards of a certain suite.
After defeating a round, players earn cash based on their score, which they can spend at the in-game shop to upgrade their hand. Players can buy or sell various cards to upgrade their hands, vouchers that give them special privileges (eg. ability to re-roll the boss blind, gain +1 discard for the rest of their run, etc.), and jokers. Each joker has a different special ability (eg. +10 Mult if played hand contains a Two Pair, played face cards give +30 Chips when scored, etc.), and as rounds become increasingly more difficult to clear, the player becomes more reliant on these jokers.
Balatro received lots of praise after its initial release on Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation and Windows on February 20. In just 8 hours, Balatro had made over $1 million in gross revenue, faster than any other game ever published by Playstack. Within 3 days, 250,000 copies had been sold, with this number increasing to 500,000 a week later and 1 million within the first month.
Since then, Balatro has released numerous updates to keep players engaged, such as the “Friends of Jimbo” update, which included crossovers with other hit games like The Witcher 3, Among Us, Dave the Diver and Vampire Survivors.
On September 5, following popular demand, LocalThunk announced that Balatro would be coming to mobile, making it available anywhere, anytime. It arrived on Google Play and the App Store just three weeks later on September 26, and within minutes, thousands of people were installing the game on their cell-phones.
Balatro immediately crushed the top-paid charts on The App Store and Google Play where it currently sits, making it the fastest growing game in years and causing “Minecraft” to lose its first place status for the first time in ages. It currently costs $9.99 on mobile, and Appmagic estimates that LocalThunk and Playstack are earning $100,000 a day off of installs as of October 1, which includes the App Store and Google Play’s 30% financial cut.
According to Metacritic, Balatro has achieved “Universal Acclaim,” the highest possible ranking available. The game has received massive attention and high reviews, averaging 4.5-5 stars on nearly every platform. Balatro has 90-100% reviews on 9/10 major publications and aggregations, receiving perfect scores on Opencritic and Nintendo Life.
Most customers were very satisfied with the mobile optimization and layout of the game, but players were quick to point out a couple of bugs that LocalThunk was prompt to fix. Comments are filled with applause for Balatro’s quick rise to the charts and jokes that work productivity is going to decrease by a percentage now that people can play it on their cell-phones Following it’s spike in popularity Balatro was nominated for three “Golden Joystick” awards, many expecting it to win “Best Indie Game” of the year.
Whether lured into the world of LocalThunk’s masterpiece from historically good reviews or Jimbo the Joker’s captivating advertisements, the gaming community has attached itself to Balatro and doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon.
