Balatro's Secret Sauce
One small part of what made Balatro special
Most of the games which situate themselves as Balatro descendants lack the sauce. Not bad, but not IT. I yearn for the sauce. I have sought the sauce in many games, including Ballionaire, CloverPit, Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, Dice with Death, and more. None of which are bad. Some are quite good. However, they all fall short. None of them have the clarity, refinement, discovery, and control that Balatro has.
In this sort of game, you make some choices about your build, test those choices, make some more choices, and so on. These descend from Luck be a Landlord, not quite Slay the Spire. There are choices in the trial and trials in the choices, of course, but that’s the pattern. If there’s some task to perform, like dungeon-crawling, it’s abstract. The “-lite” modifier implies something about the complexity or length of the trial, as far as I can tell. I guess it’s to indicate something about the distance, design wise, the game has from Rogue itself, versus the Rift Wizards series, Caves of Qud, or Dungeons of Dredmor, which are visually and mechanically similar. It’s not important to split the genre hairs except to make a point about what unifies these games, which is not the random dungeon, random enemies, or the difficulty, but the distilled and hastened loop of choices and encounters. Balatro started a trend by distilling that cycle even further. Other games had done this, but not with the same design elegance and polish.
Balatro’s trial is of course the game of poker. You spend the money you earned in the shop, and that’s the choice. You then play some more to trial your choices. The trial is a series of choices about what hands to play and what cards to discard. It is not gambling. At no point in Balatro do you stake money on the outcome of a round of poker, which makes the proliferation of gambling-themed roguelites all the more confusing, especially since they too lack a gambling component. Balatro did not add casino chance to the genre, it added layers of RLDB to an already existing game with a deck. Poker is an interesting game to build a roguelite around because the game of poker is interesting. The choice about what hands to play is interesting. By contrast, spinning a slot machine or a roulette wheel, playing Plinko, or coin pushing machines are not that interesting during the trial. Once you’ve pulled the lever, you’re at the mercy of the RNG and of what you’ve built. Maybe they’re more appropriately called engine-building games, where the trial doesn’t matter anymore except as a push-button test of the engine you built. If so, they’re more like an incremental game than Balatro. Cookie Clicker has its own charm, but I think it’s safe to say that none of the above games are angling for that comparison. As I look at its page, Steam is telling me that Raccoin is most like Balatro and Slay the Spire. Maybe there’s an unmade game out there called Metaprogression, where the entire game is just the shop. That might be fun. Luck be a Landlord is basically there.
As with many of these games, the secret ingredients were found in Magic: The Gathering first. I like a game that has you think on your feet. I like a game that lets you apply your accumulated knowledge and instincts to a totally new situation, and that’s the game of MTG itself, especially the draft variant. Success in Balatro depends on your ability to pivot into a new strategy, both in terms of your build and in terms of the hands played.
Anyway, I don’t think any of the counter-examples I mentioned are bad, for the record. I played through and quite enjoyed CloverPit, for example. But there’s a vast untapped design space that Balatro only barely began to explore, and I’m excited to see what else might emerge.