Have you heard of Balatro? If not, I can’t wait to share with you about the best timekiller of the last decade.
At face value, Balatro is a simple solitaire game. You get dealt a hand from a standard deck of 52 playing cards and discard, draw, and play poker hands. The better the hand, the better the score (e.g. a straight flush is worth more than two pair) and you need to reach a certain point threshold to continue the game. Most of the early rounds can be beaten with a few pairs or three of a kind, but as the game goes on, the required scores go up exponentially. The first time you lose a round, it’s game over, and you start from scratch.
How do you achieve those higher scores? That’s where the fun comes in. Between rounds, you can spend your winnings on upgrades. You can keep up to five jokers with special effects (e.g. if you play a hand with a spade, your score gets multiplied by 5). You can upgrade individual cards with modifiers, add cards, and remove cards. You can even upgrade the hands themselves so that common hands you play a lot yield more points.
The game is deviously deep, and at times, it feels like something that would be on a Korean mind game show. The flow of the game is dictated by what upgrades are randomly offered to you, and it rewards creative thinking to reach astronomical scores.
Get a lot of abilities that remove cards from your deck? Target one or two suits so that it’s easier to get flushes consistently. Having trouble with getting the right cards? Boost low hands like high card or pair to eliminate the randomness.
I picked up the game on Android while spending a lot of time in a waiting room, and it never got old. “Winning” is only the beginning – the game offers lots of variations of decks to start with and challenges to add.
If I have one knock against the game, it’s that it murders my cell phone battery, using battery about 10x faster than pretty much anything else my phone does. A few hours can deplete the full battery to around 30%. It might not be too surprising since the game was initially developed for video game consoles, but it’s something to be careful about when using it on a phone.
I’m happy to see how much traction a simple math/strategy game has gotten. The last time I was this excited about a mobile game was 2014’s “Calculords” – a math-based strategy game that kept me entertained on many a train ride.
Time disappears quickly while playing Balatro, and it’s easy to keep pushing for one more hand, only to realize that an hour has passed. It doesn’t require an internet connection, so battery life notwithstanding, it’s an ideal app for long waits with weak internet connections. It’s also less than $10 (I got it on sale for $7), so if you’re on the fence, it’s not a huge investment to try it!
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