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Balatro
Balatro's appeal is turning poker hands and Jokers into fresh synergies. At ≈ $6.89 from 
GAMIVO, the confirmed low is a timely entry point for players who want repeatable, varied deck-building runs. Eight campaign difficulties, challenges, and seeded runs offer different ways to tackle the blinds. At $11.99 from GAMIVO, Balatro's confirmed low-price opportunity suits players drawn to variable poker deck-building runs; interface languages include Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, and Spanish-Latin America.
All-time low ~ $10.15across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $6.482026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $11.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+85%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
DLC
01About Balatro
Balatro blends poker hands with roguelike deck-building. Pair valid hands with Jokers to create synergies, earn chips, and get past the blinds; each run can shift as you draw, discard, and discover cards. Steam player rating: 97% from 161,898 reviews. Interface languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, and Spanish-Latin America. Release date: February 20, 2024.
Credits
Developer
LocalThunk
Publisher
Playstack
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$6.482026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 9 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Dutch | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish-Latin America | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Language
The Steam PC version lists 12 interface languages, including English. Full audio is not listed.
Modes and controls
Campaign play includes eight difficulties, alongside challenges and seeded runs. Full controller support is listed.
03Frequently asked questions
What do you do in a run?
Combine valid poker hands with Jokers to build synergies, earn chips, and beat the blinds leading to the boss blind.
What modes are available?
There is a campaign with eight difficulties, plus challenge and seeded runs.
What kinds of cards are included?
Runs can use Jokers, Tarot, Planet and Spectral cards, and Vouchers.
8.8
Overall Score
Graphics7.5
Audio9
Gameplay9.7
Story6.5
Content9.5
“Sweeping The Game Awards, this solo-developed poker-roguelike phenomenon redefines the genre ceiling through 150 jokers and eight escalating stake levels.”
Our Verdict
Balatro earns an 8.8 overall, and that score certifies it as a genre-defining phenomenon — a solo developer's near-perfect addiction engine that took poker, fused it with the roguelike deckbuilder, and produced one of the most compulsively playable games of its era. It is held just short of the absolute summit by its learning curve, its reliance on luck, and the total absence of a story, but within its scope it is close to flawless. The 8.8 reflects a game that does the thing it sets out to do about as well as it can possibly be done.
Buy it for the one-more-run engine
Buy Balatro if you have any taste for strategy, deckbuilding, or the particular thrill of watching numbers explode. This is the game for players who love optimizing a build, chasing synergies, and the deep satisfaction of engineering a deck that breaks the game wide open, and above all for anyone susceptible to the most dangerous compulsion in gaming — the irresistible pull to start just one more run. Its poker foundation makes it instantly accessible to almost anyone, while its joker system offers depth enough for thousands of hours, and its short, complete runs make it perfect for both long sessions and stolen fragments of time, equally at home on a PC, a Switch, or a phone. If any part of that appeals to you, Balatro offers one of the most addictive and elegantly designed experiences in all of gaming, and at its fair price — with no microtransactions anywhere — it is among the easiest recommendations imaginable. For the strategy or roguelike fan, it is close to essential, a phenomenon that earned every one of its five million sales and three Game Awards. Just be warned: it will eat far more of your time than you intend.
Skip it for story, action, or guaranteed fairness
Skip Balatro, or approach it knowingly, if its deliberate limitations are dealbreakers. If you play for narrative, there is absolutely nothing here — no story, no characters, no setting, just cards and numbers. If you want real-time action, reflexes or pace, the slow, deliberate, turn-based nature of the game will feel like the wrong sport entirely; this is a game of thinking, not twitch. And if you cannot tolerate losing to bad luck, the roguelike randomness will frustrate you, because runs can occasionally fail to an unlucky draw or a punishing boss blind despite good play, and only players comfortable with the restart-and-retry rhythm will extract the full enjoyment. There is also a genuine learning curve in the first hours as you come to understand how the jokers and poker base interact, which can briefly bewilder newcomers. These are not flaws so much as the defining characteristics of the genre, but they genuinely exclude players who want story, action or guaranteed fairness, and knowing your own taste here matters before you pick up the deck. Balatro makes no concessions to those it was not built for.
A solo-developer phenomenon
What ultimately lifts the 8.8 to a verdict on something historic is the sheer scale of what Balatro achieved from a single pair of hands. This is a game made by one anonymous developer over three years, with no studio, no marketing machine, and no franchise behind it, and it became one of the defining releases of its year — selling more than five million copies, sweeping three categories at The Game Awards 2024, and earning a place in the conversation about the best roguelikes ever made. It stands alongside Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley as proof that a single brilliant idea, executed with obsessive care, can conquer an industry of giants, and its success reshaped expectations of what solo development can accomplish. That achievement, combined with the game's enduring quality, its bottomless replayability, and its player-respecting pricing, makes Balatro genuinely important as well as deliriously fun. The 8.8 is the verdict of a near-perfect, genre-defining, solo-developer masterpiece — narrow by choice and bottomless by design — that distilled an entire genre into its purest, most addictive form and became a phenomenon in the process. Few games are this easy to recommend, or this hard to put down.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
according to PEGI - this game that allows you to delete and mark cards simulates gambling, but EA's games that have slot machines and keno that require real money per pull don't. The world is mad. Play Balatro.Show moreShow less
15.2 hours at review4,370 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I understand that I'm going against consensus here, but honestly, I find Balatro pretty boring. While it did initially peak my interest as a lover of rogue-likes, after playing it and beating several runs, what is on display really disappointed me. Things I liked: - The music is great! A nice chill vibe with delicious synth. Sound design too. - Top notch UI design. Very neatly and intelligently laid out. - The art and aesthetic is unique and nice to look at. - There is very little fluff and fat to this game. It is straight to the point and doesn't waste your time in getting to the core gameplay loop. Things I disliked: - Said core gameplay loop is VERY dry. Like a combination of solitaire and a cookie-clicker-type game. If Old Maid gets your blood pumping, then you may feel differently. - The luck/skill weighting is heavily weighted towards luck. What cards you draw. What jokers you find. What boss binds you encounter. With most rogue-likes I've played, it's entirely possible to beat a run while taking no buffs using only your own knowledge and skill. It'd be a lot harder, but within the realm of possibility. With Balatro, whether you win or not feels less like you've put together a master plan to pull off a victory and more like the Joker Gods have decided that you're allowed to win this time, as a treat. It's impossible to beat a run using a standard deck and no jokers/planets/tarot. I won't say that this game lacks depth. Poker/solitare has been very cleverly taken to it's most extreme conclusion. It's just when the entirety of these cards games are explored, the results aren't very interesting. Balatro is a game who's main enjoyment stems from seeing a number get bigger and the little dopamine kick you get when finding a foiled card in a pack of Pokemon cards. If you want a skill-based rogue-like, go play Binding of Isaac. If you want a deckbuilder, go play Slay the Spire If you want poker, a deck of cards is about 1/20th the price of this game Guess I'm not the target audience.Show moreShow less
7.1 hours at review182 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
"This looks like it could be a fun time-waste, a poker roguelike? I'll give it a try" 60 hours later: "OK IF I DOUBLE SKIP THE ANTE 1 BLINDS I GET $30 AND I CAN KEEP THE INTEREST RATE GOING UNTIL ANTE 5 THEN I CAN GO FULL HEART DECK AND BEAT 1M+ BLIND IN ANTE 10 WITH LEVEL 5 ROYAL FLUSH" This game is what it must have felt like for people in the 80s when Tetris came out. After playing this for a week straight my dreams are full of card suits and just me discarding deck after deck.. Only play this if you're prepared to not do anything else for a few days. "Just one more hand..." This is the CIV of card games. 100 hour update: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Multipliers on fire after picking Purple Stake difficulty. I watched jokers glitter in the dark near the Ante 16 boss. All those moments will be lost in time, like cards in a deck. Time to fold... 170 hour update: I'm now in Balatro remission.. Stay safe kids, it's highly addictive!Show moreShow less
175.5 hours at review2,402 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Everyone loves this game for some reason, but I can't understand why. I tried searching "Blatro bad game" and "I didn't like Balatro" and the results are "I love Balatro so bad" or "I didn't think I would like Balatro this much". What I think a video game should be/what I like is to solve challenges, either by making decisions or mechanics. Balatro has neither of them, and is boring in a frustrating way. This game is a "strategy game that looks like a casino". What they forgot to tell you is that it's actually a casino pretending to be a strategy game that looks like a casino: - When you first launch the game you will think: "Oh this is really cool I have to make a decision whether I want/have to greed for better hands, or go for something that's easier to make". No, you don't. Once you buy your first jokers/planet card (those upgrade specific hands) you will effectively be locked into that particular hand for the rest of the run. If you want to go for any consistency, the entire way through you will play pairs, two pairs, and high cards, maybe a flush if you feel fancy. There are no other hands you can realistically expect to repeat in a standard deck. Making pairs out of playing cards is not very fun and you can buy a deck of cards much cheaper if you want to do that instead. It is less bad on low difficulties, but if you care about optimal play you are doomed anyway. - "So if the battle has zero decisions/thinking involved, maybe at least the shop does?" Not really, If you decided that your life belongs to the High Card Jail, you buy whatever jokers support that playstyle, and it's not hard to figure out. There are jokers that give you consistent results and you buy them. Planet cards require no thought. Exception are tarot cards, especially the ones you can play during a fight. Those allow for deck interaction, and there's a limited number of situations where you have to think before you clik a button, however: - Difficulty scales in the worst possible way for a game to scale: game gives you less hands, less discards and less gold in shops. All of these things remove already small amount of decisions that you have in this game. Less discards? I guess you play High Cards and Pairs, hope you have fun. Less gold? You probably can't afford to buy those fun tarot cards, because all your money is to be spent on the jokers that give you more power. It turns the game into a restart fiesta, where you go into the first shop or two, and then press restart because you didn't get any of the things that make you win the game, and if you win the joker gamble you reward is playing high card for the next 20 minutes or so, yaay. I like the presentation of this game, it has a great vibe, but it is nothing but flashing lights. Turns out that making poker hands (not even really) is not that great of a gameplay loop as you would think past initial 15 minutes.Show moreShow less
11.3 hours at review160 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I intentionally avoided this game because: 1.) I never cared to play/understand poker. 2.) I don't like gambling. Everything I heard about this game made me want to play it less. I was wrong. This game is simple, elegant, addictive, endlessly replayable, and barely has anything to do with actual poker. It's a simple game where you do the following: 1.) Play card hands to increase your score. Beat a level's specific score to win the level and earn money. (The game lists the card hands you can play in a menu that you can reference any time.) 2.) Spend winnings on upgrades and new cards which make winning future levels easier. That's it. Once it clicks, this game becomes as quintessential as Tetris. From a person who was initially skeptical about playing Balatro, I highly recommend it.Show moreShow less
7.8 hours at review2,385 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
2026 edit : A lot of games have been coming out in the past 2 years that were clearly inspired by Balatro. There's now a whole subgenre of "numbers go up" games that are a bit light on the strategy side, and provide easy power trips to an audience that enjoys that. Though at the time I wrote this review, Balatro just seemed like a new take on the roguelike deckbuilder genre, alongside games that were known (and expected) to be designed with extra focus on balance strategic depth. And sure enough, a lot of people decided it was exactly that, without really putting in the effort to check if it was actually true. If you ask me, it's not. But it was pretty much advertised to be. Basically, it made sense at the time to write this. Please keep that in mind. DISCLAIMER : Yes, I've played this game for 200 hours. Grindy achievements and all that. If you're gonna use that as an excuse to throw a tantrum because you can't tolerate any criticism on your favorite game, you're the reason comments are disabled. If anything, that means I'm not making a snap judgment, and that's something I'd like to see more when I'm browsing reviews before buying games. If you're the same, this review is for you. This was a really fun game to discover. I certainly get all the hype around it. But it also turns out to be very superficial. Contrary to most strategy roguelikes, where you constantly have to adapt and make concessions in order to win, Balatro rewards you for being single-minded. You only need a little flexibility in the beginning, until you figure out what hand and/or couple jokers will carry you, at which point the best (and only move) is to tunnel vision really hard into it, and just play the same hand over and over again, until you win. A process which starts very, very early in a run. Basically, it lacks a whole layer of complexity to keep it fresh in the long run. That, and endgames are super redundant. Worse, the formula for a winning run rarely ever changes. At least a joker that gives chips, at least a joker that gives +mult, ideally a joker that gives xmult, at least one of which has to be a strong-scaling one, and then whatever you can fit in how little space you have left that can complement it. It doesn't matter what kind of hand you play, as long as it fits your joker line-up and you manage to make it spammable (on that note, even though timid steps have been taken in the last update, high card still is the most reliable hand by far). So it feels to me that not only you play the same hand over and over, you actually play the same run, over and over, barring edge cases. You always need the same couple of things. Fair enough. But there's also just not that much variety in how you can gather them. Somehow, it makes sense. After all, you rarely get to make really game-changing tweaks to your deck, and even then, most of the work comes from the jokers, which you only get to carry 5 of, and whose effects very rarely reach beyond a "will reward you X for playing X type of hand" level of complexity. Kind of feels like playing Slay the Spire with only common cards and a hard cap on relics. On top difficulty, while smart thinking obviously does help, the game is primarily won by finding something worth committing to early enough, and then getting lucky enough to find stuff that complements it, or the other way around. It might seem anecdotical at first glance, but the interest system is a perfect example of that. While it made a ton of sense in other games, here, it brings a false sense of depth, and turns out to do the exact opposite of that, as it further incentivizes you to think in black and white (if this isn't a perfect fit for my build and I don't need it to survive right now, here's another excuse to dismiss it). Essentially, what it does is take away liberty from the player, while tricking them into thinking they're getting more of it, and again, rewarding single-mindedness. The game also suffers from a lot of pointless content that doesn't add much to the experience but makes completion more grindy than it needs to be (like, 5-ish starting decks - the equivalent of playable characters - making somewhat significant changes to the gameplay, and another 10 that pretty much all play the same way). There's more I could say, notably in the balance department, but you probably get the idea by now. And also, who cares about balance if game mechanics are that flawed to begin with. I suppose certain folks will be happy with it, as it does very much have that power trip aspect that I've seen lots of people complain is missing in StS/LBAL/other similar games. As far as I'm concerned, though, having to make concessions to make an imperfect build work is what keeps me entertained - and occasionally surprised - in the long run, as opposed to just dismissing everything that isn't a perfect fit. There's a certain kind of magic in these games that I don't see in Balatro. (On a sidenote, there's a lot of micro-managing to do, so if you don't like that, by all means, stay away.) Edit : I waited a few months before playing it again, and having little recollection of some things made it enjoyable for a short while. I tried to keep an open mind, but really, I stand comforted in my views. The game promotes dichotomous thinking, and the impact of strategy vs. RNG (strict sense, not a comment on difficulty) is much lesser than standard in this genre. It's not horrible, or stupid, or wrong. But if you like digging into games even a little, there are much better options out there.Show moreShow less
213 hours at review158 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
in 1989, Tetris was released for the NES. It is commonly regarded as one of the best puzzle games of all time due to its precise design and carefully considered gameplay. It has no fat on it to trim and the fluff was never there to begin with. It needed no balance patches, and to go along with it, that one, continuous song that became etched into the minds of a generation. It was a real life Polybius, and many people called it the perfect game. 35 years later, Balatro was released. Balatro is a special kind of game. It's a game where the success of the player isn't determined by how fast they can act, like tetris, how precise their inputs, like mario, or even how much they know, like pokemon. It's instead about how they use their head to navigate simple systems that play off each other perfectly. A player need not even tab out of the game to access all the information about what could appear in the shop, what cards they might draw, or how much their hand may score. But there's ambiguity there, there's uncertainty. It's the ability to have enough control and information to make an informed decision, like chess, but enough randomness to bring additional excitement that is absent in games with less ambiguity. And so you sit at your computer, hitting that reset shop button, eyes glued to the screen, waiting for that one piece so that your build can all fall into place. 50 gold becomes 45. 45 becomes 39. 32. 25. This next shop needs the card you want if you want to be able to afford it. You hover your mouse over the reroll button. The one, infectious melody playing over and over in your head. And you've travelled back to 1989, you're sitting on the carpet too close to the screen in your pyjamas, it's past your bedtime. Boom. Tetris. It might be 35 years until we get another game quite like Balatro. But I'll keep on watching that number go up, keep on listening to that song, keep on saying "one more go" until we do.Show moreShow less
412.4 hours at review1,947 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
In the spirit of the game's gambling mechanic I flipped a coin to see if I should leave a positive or negative review.Show moreShow less
65.3 hours at review131 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
"If poker is so good, why isn't there a poker 2?" Balatro:Show moreShow less
7.2 hours at review1,819 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
A surprisingly addictive game, ruined by the fact that most runs are impossible to win at high stakes, especially if you do not rely on the boring meta. Don't get me wrong, I love hard games. As a matter of fact, the first thing I look for on rogue-lite negative comments are people saying that the game is too hard. That is a bonus for me. I am a glutton for punishment. However, this is not that. When I say it is impossible to win most runs, I mean it is impossible to win most runs. To show you what I mean, here is a breakdown of how to start your runs at high stakes: 1) Win the first ante with 1 hand to ensure you have enough cash to buy a good joker in the shop. Can you win in 1 hand? No? Time to re-roll your run. 2) Check the shop. Is there a half decent joker there? Great! No? Time to re-roll your run. If you do not follow these steps, you absolutely, without a doubt, will lose your run by the 4th blind due to the crazy high difficulty scaling and have to restart anyways. The biggest problem here is the fact that the shop consistently offers you tarot and planet card, which are not really worth your money until later in the run due to the interest system. When the shop isn't offering you tarot and planet cards, it is offering you a joker that is too niche to be useful at the start of the game. This leads to constant restarts, whether you have the foresight to just re-roll in the first round, or try to defy the inevitable by progressing without decent jokers. I realized that I was spending about 3/4 of my time playing this game just wasting time by restarting my runs. I will mention that the rest of the time that you spend progressing is actually very fun! However, even that fun is bogged down by an incredibly boring and repetitive meta. As it stands, the only consistent way to win the game is with high card. That does not mean you cannot win with other hand types, but high card is certainly the most powerful. This is because of 2 key pieces: 1) Consistency: The inherent problem in a game like this is that, while you can tailor your build to any complex hand you like, your run can get borked at any moment due to bad rng when you don't draw it. Are you doing a flush build? 3 of a kind? Full house? Cool. What if you don't draw that hand? You lose your run, that's what. There are things you can do to mitigate this, but it will never be guaranteed that your hand will be drawn when you need it. 2) Scaling: There are a lot of jokers that have neat scaling ideas like [+ mult for every played hand / - mult for every discard], [+ mult for every time a hand has been played this game], and [+ $ for no discard] to name a few. The problem with these kinds of jokers and their scaling around hands played and discards ties right back up to the consistency piece. What is the one hand you know you can play any time? What is the one hand you will never have to discard to find? High card. Because of this, it has synergy with more jokers than any other hand by a wide margin. All of that to say, there is something really special here. This game can be crazy addictive. What the game needs is to follow through on it's addictive gameplay, by allowing me to actually take part in the addictive gameplay instead of a reroll simulator with the same boring loop of a meta.Show moreShow less
30.7 hours at review122 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/14/2026.