Sometimes, simplicity in gaming is the better option.

There was a stretch of time where more was automatically seen as better — more map, more quests, more loot, more systems layered on systems. Games became bloated buffet tables, with 80+ hour commitments just to “finish the story.” But lately, there’s been a shift. A craving for something tighter, cleaner, more elegant. Games that respect your time and attention span. Balatro is a poster child for that shift.

It’s a game that trims the fat — and in doing so, becomes something much more interesting.

♠️ Poker but a Roguelike

At first glance, Balatro is a solo poker roguelike. You play hands using classic poker rules: High Card, Pair, Straight, all the way up to Royal Flush. If you don’t know poker, don’t worry — the game gradually teaches you, and before long you’ll instinctively understand which cards to chase and which to burn.

You get a set number of hands and discards to outscore progressively harder “Blinds.” Each round features a Small Blind, a Big Blind, and a Boss Blind, with point thresholds that must be surpassed to continue your run.

Your score is broken down into two elements:

• Chips – based on card face value (e.g. a 2 gives you 2 Chips, a Jack gives 10)
  
• Multi – a multiplier tied to the hand you play (e.g. a Pair might give a x2 Multi, a Full House might give x5 or more)

At first, you’re just scraping by with simple hands and small payouts. But Balatro isn’t interested in staying small.

🃏 The Shop: Where Chaos Begins

After each Blind, you earn money to spend in the shop. That’s where the game reveals its chaotic brilliance. There are four main types of cards:

• Jokers: Passive effects that stay with you — mostly. Some give you +50 Chips for every Club in your hand. Others boost your Multi if you played a Flush, or give a wild bonus if your hand contains all face cards. You can hold up to five, and stacking synergies is where things get wild.
  
• Tarot Cards: One-use buffs that tweak your deck mid-run. Maybe you +50 a card’s base Chips. Maybe you make one card worth double Multi but with a chance of breaking. There’s risk, reward, and plenty of experimentation.
  
• Spectrum Cards: Higher-stakes cards with more chaotic potential. One might destroy a card in your hand but replace it with three Jacks. Another might randomize a hand’s worth of cards into a random suit.
  
• Planet Cards: These upgrade your hand types. A Level 1 High Card might give you +5 Chips and +1 Multi. Get enough Mercury cards and suddenly a humble High Card is dishing out massive numbers. Yes — I once won with a Level 25 High Card build. It was exactly as absurd as it sounds.

You can also buy card packs in each category, drawing a few cards at once to pick from. That deck of 52 you started with? It’s not staying normal for long. Some cards delete, others duplicate, some mutate. Your deck is in constant flux, and managing that chaos becomes half the fun.

🧠 Decks, Difficulty, and Dopamine

As you complete runs, you unlock new decks that dramatically change your playstyle. Some give you extra hands or discards. Others completely reshape the game — one deck replaces your standard 52 cards with a weirdly split 26 Spades / 26 Hearts combo. Another deck averages your Chips and Multi instead of multiplying them.

Each deck can be used to ascend difficulty levels. Runs start on the base White Chip level. Beat a run, and you unlock the next color. Each level adds new constraints:

• -1 discard
  
• No money from Small Blinds
  
• Jokers that self-destruct after a few turns
  
• Boss Blinds that hit harder, faster

And yes — each new Chip level stacks all previous debuffs. By the time you’re trying to survive on the highest difficulty? It’s everything, all at once.

That might sound punishing. But here’s the thing: Balatro is still fun even when you lose. Some runs are straight trash — you draw bad, buy worse, and get annihilated. Others? You click into a synergy so satisfying it feels like you broke the game. There’s nothing quite like watching one hand score three million points, all because your jokers, planet cards, and hand type aligned just right.

✂️ Depth Without Bloat

Balatro succeeds where many larger games fail: it’s mechanically deep without being needlessly complicated.

It never throws a tutorial book at you. Instead, it builds naturally — adding one system at a time, then layering complexity through synergy. If you’ve played roguelikes like Slay the Spire or The Binding of Isaac, you’ll recognize the feeling. That little rush of “what if I combine this with that” — and then watching it work better than you expected.

And because runs are short — 20 to 40 minutes, usually — it’s easy to jump back in. It scratches the same itch as a good roguelike, but with a pacing that rewards experimentation over perfection.

🎖️ Final Thoughts: The Top Shelf Choice

Balatro is one of those games that doesn’t need to scream for your attention. It’s not a blockbuster. It doesn’t have hundreds of cutscenes or sprawling maps. But it nails the core loop — and then gives you just enough tools to break it wide open.

It’s poker at its heart, but it’s also a puzzle, a slot machine, and a roguelike love letter wrapped in one.

This is the kind of game I’ll be thinking about months from now. It’s the kind I want to show people, talk about strategies for, and come back to over and over again.

There was no question in my mind: Balatro is the first game to receive the Top Shelf Game award here on What’s On The Shelf. It deserves it — and then some.