Balatro is a 2024 poker-themed roguelike deck-building game developed by solo developer LocalThunk and published by Playstack. It was released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on February 20, 2024, with a port to macOS on March 1. Ports for Android and iOS were released on September 26, 2024. A dedicated Nintendo Switch 2 version was released on February 25, 2026. In the game, the player must score points by playing poker hands from a starting 52-card deck, with a limited number of hands and discards each round.
Inspired by the card game big two and the roguelike video game Luck Be a Landlord, LocalThunk developed Balatro over two and a half years. Initially, LocalThunk treated it as a side project to put on a résumé, not anticipating its success.
Balatro has received universal acclaim from game critics and sold more than 5 million copies by January 2025. Along with several other awards and nominations, it was named Game of the Year at the 25th Game Developers Choice Awards and nominated for the top prize at The Game Awards 2024, the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, and the 21st British Academy Games Awards.
Gameplay Playthrough Balatro is a singleplayer roguelike deck-building game based on the rules of poker. The player chooses a deck, each with unique effects and cards, before each playthrough or "run". A run is divided into antes, each with three blinds of increasing difficulty. During a "round" against a blind, the player uses their hands and discards to play poker hands and attempt to score the required number of chips (points). To make it easier to defeat blinds, the player may purchase various cards that change the rules or provide an advantage. These are bought in a shop between rounds with an in-game currency.
Blinds Blinds are the obstacles the player must pass in Balatro. Blinds have three major types: Small Blind, Big Blind, and Boss Blind. Small and Big Blinds can either be skipped or played. When skipping a blind, the player forgoes the cash rewards of defeating the blind and an opportunity to use the shop but is rewarded with a tag, granting special rewards. Most tags give some benefit upon entering the next shop, such as free cards or booster packs, but some effects are instant or apply when other criteria are met. Each type of Boss Blind has a special ability, such as disabling certain cards or limiting the player's hands or discards. Ante 8—as well as all antes that are a multiple of 8—have a "Showdown Blind" in place of a Boss Blind, which selects from one of five special types which do not appear in any other circumstance.
Antes and rounds Each ante consists of three rounds, one against a Small Blind, one against a Big Blind, and the final round against a Boss Blind, which allows the player to progress to the next ante. In each round, the player has a limited number of hands within which they must beat a target score, as well as a limited number of discards with which they may replace up to five cards in their hand with different ones. The game ends if the player runs out of hands or cards to play before reaching the target score.
During a round, the player draws playing cards from their deck, initially starting with a standard 52-card deck, while cards can be added, modified, and destroyed throughout the run. The player then selects up to five cards, with the objective of forming poker hands to score points. The hand's base value is calculated and turned into "Chips", which are then multiplied by "Mult", which increases depending on cards, hands, and jokers held by the player. Joker cards affect the game in various ways, such as offering additional Chips or Mult when conditions are met or changing how certain poker hands can be played.
Upon defeating a Blind, the player is awarded with in-game cash ($), and presented with a shop. Here, the player may use their cash to purchase items, such as booster packs, Jokers, and a voucher which grants an immediate permanent upgrade (ex. modifying shop contents, granting an additional hand or discard). It is possible to play until ante 39 in endless mode at which point the amount of required chips, stored under double-precision floating-point format, overflows to infinity, which get stored as NaN under such number format. (Represented in the game as either "nan" or "naneinf", NaN times ten to the power of infinity, written in E notation) Because all numbers (including NaN) will always be compared as unordered against NaN, the player score cannot be evaluated as equal to or greater than NaN, causing further progression to be impossible.
End of a run The player wins a run by completing ante 8. The only way to do this is by defeating the first Showdown Blind. However, the player can still continue playing in endless mode even after beating ante 8. Running out of hands or cards without hitting the score required during a round ends the run. If the player has not completed ante 8 when the game ends, the player has lost. In endless mode, these conditions still cause the game to end, though the player still won by completing ante 8.
Cards
Jokers, special cards which the player holds separately from their deck, are the primary means by which players can alter their scoring in the game, among other effects. The game was released with 150 Joker cards. Many Jokers provide Chips or Mult bonuses based on certain conditions, and some provide Mult multipliers, multiplying the player's Mult. Jokers have a wide range of abilities including rewarding money, creating or duplicating cards, or modifying the player's amount of hands and discards. Jokers often require certain conditions to be met for their abilities to be triggered, or used to their full potential. Jokers can be found with or upgraded to have variants like Foil, Holographic, Polychrome, which affect the player's Chips or Mult, as well as the Negative modifier which grants an additional slot for Joker storage, effectively making the Joker occupy no space. Part of the strategy of Balatro is filling one's limited Joker slots with Jokers that have interactions with each other and other cards to greatly increase scoring opportunities.
Consumables Players can modify their deck of playing cards through various means, which can be used to improve the odds of drawing specific hands, or improve the score output of certain cards. Additional playing cards can be obtained through booster packs at the shop. Existing cards can also be modified, destroyed or copied using Tarot cards and Spectral cards. Utilizing these, it is therefore possible to play non-traditional poker hands such as Five of a Kind, Flush House (full house of all the same suit), and Flush Five (five of the same suit and rank).
Major Arcana from the cartomantic Tarot deck provide various one-time effects, such as changing cards to different playing card suits, enhancing them to provide bonuses when played, or destroying cards. Spectral cards behave similarly, though provide stronger effects, such as creating copies of a card, applying upgrade variants to Jokers and playing cards, or modifying the player's cash in exchange for a negative or positive effect. Planet cards raise the level of a poker hand, increasing their base Chips and Mult values when played. Each planet card applies to a different hand depending on its type, and upgrades that hand for the duration of the run.
Decks The deck of playing cards that the player chooses at the beginning of a run also has its own effects; the player starts out with a "starter" series of decks, and completes runs to unlock new ones. Completing runs also unlocks "stakes" for the deck used, which add more difficult conditions to the run. New special cards and vouchers can be unlocked for future runs by meeting certain conditions.
Modding Balatro has significant support for modification primarily through the third-party mod loader Steamodded. Many mods exist for Balatro; one famous example of this is the Cryptid mod, which adds over 120 Jokers and is designed to be intentionally unbalanced. Another popular mod for Balatro is the Multiplayer mod, which allows players to face off against another player during a Nemesis Blind, in which whoever scores the highest is able to take a life from their opponent. Players lose when they have no more lives.
Development Balatro was developed by LocalThunk, an anonymous solo developer based in Saskatchewan, Canada. In an interview, he said that he mostly plays online competitive games, and that he ponders roguelike games more than actually playing them. Despite the game's theme, LocalThunk said he does not play poker, nor does he want the game to be used for gambling by casinos and players.
Development began in 2021, two-and-a-half years before release, initially intended to be one of several small games that were shared with friends. The initial idea was an online version of the Cantonese card game big two, which has players playing a number of cards to create poker-like hands. After seeing the number of roguelike deckbuilders on Steam, and watching a Twitch stream of Northernlion playing Luck Be a Landlord, a slot machine-themed roguelike, he was inspired to turn his big two clone into a singleplayer roguelike deckbuilder without online play. According to LocalThunk, he avoided playing deckbuilders to avoid taking ideas from these games, and had only played Slay the Spire near the end of development to understand how it implemented its control scheme. He at one point considered the name Joker Poker for the game, before settling on Balatro, from the Ancient Roman term for a professional jester or buffoon.
On using the standard 52 playing card deck as a base LocalThunk said, "it's this shared cultural game design tool that has evolved over hundreds of years", and on the game's success was quoted as being partly "because you're borrowing from this really tried-and-true tool."
The soundtrack for Balatro was written and produced by LouisF, a freelance Fiverr artist. The composer was contacted in March 2023, and the music was released the same month. In his published timeline of the game's production, LocalThunk noted that it was the only money that he planned to spend during the development of Balatro.
A very early version of the game was circulated among his friends, who gave positive reviews after months of playing. About a year prior to release, LocalThunk quit his day job to focus on finishing Balatro "to put on a résumé". The game was uploaded to Steam and was found by Playstack Head of Discovery Patrick Johnson who had the task of looking at all new releases on Steam. Johnson thought the game looked "interesting" and "cool-looking" and so he contacted LocalThunk on Twitter. LocalThunk signed a publishing contract with PlayStack, and with their help developed a launch campaign around beta releases and promotion via major video game streamers. LocalThunk used player feedback from the betas for additional features in the final version of the game, including the addition of boss battles.
Balatro was programmed in Lua with the Löve game framework. LocalThunk's pseudonym derives from the keyword "local" used to define variables and "Thunk", a common variable name in his partner's projects.
Etymology The game is named after the Latin word for "professional jester or buffoon". Developer LocalThunk said that its pronunciation can be "whatever makes people happy," though he personally pronounces it , as does the narrator in the game's launch trailer. Many players and YouTubers pronounce the title with stress on the second syllable.
Release