Balatro, the indie game phenomenon blending poker rules with randomized runs and a splash of deck-building, has finally been released on phones. You can pick it up for $10 on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store, and it’s been added to Apple Arcade’s library as well.
In other words: you can’t escape Balatro. Prepare to kiss productivity goodbye.
Balatro launched back in February on consoles and PC to immediate acclaim, a game so successful that players half-jokingly complained about losing hours to its compelling loop. As an indie game without much graphical complexity, it’s perfectly suited for the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck — but releasing on phones makes it so much easier to play in a pinch, whether sitting in line or waiting for your laundry. Or while watching a show. Or walking a dog. Or anytime, ever, really.
The mobile version does sacrifice a bit of the flashier interface effects, but you’d have to put the games side-by-side to notice, and all of the original gameplay is preserved. Balatro is a simple-to-learn and increasingly tough-to-master game as you get to the higher difficulty levels, but the basics of the game are: use the cards in your hand to assemble poker hands and score enough points for each round.
As in normal poker, higher-value hands like straights and flushes score more points than pairs and three-of-a-kinds. You have a limited amount of hands to play and discards to perform while hunting for the right set of cards.
You’ll need to beat two rounds of small and big “blinds” with increasing scores before facing a “boss” blind that tacks on a special condition to the fight — perhaps cards from one suit (spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts) won’t score points or you’ll draw cards face-down after playing a hand.
Once you beat the boss, you’ll go up an “ante” or level of difficulty, and the scores you have to beat for blinds and bosses increases. After the eighth ante, you win the run, and can either keep playing endlessly or start over for a new challenge.
The trick to scoring higher with ever-increasing blinds? Cheat! Between rounds, you can buy a few things to even the odds in your favor. Most importantly, you can buy or acquire Jokers, which improve your hands or add bonuses for certain suites or ranks of cards played — this is where what you pick up along the way most changes which kinds of hands you’ll chase during your run. But you can also buy other extras, like planet cards that ratchet up the value of hand types (pairs, straights, flushes, etc) or tarot cards that augment the cards in your deck.
Sound complicated? You’ll pick it up as you go. Poker skills come in handy when gauging odds on whether you’ll draw the right hand or need to pivot to a new strategy. But the mix of Jokers, hand values, new cards to your deck and boss antes makes every run feel new. Even if — or rather, when — you crash and burn on a run, boy does it feel easy to restart and try your luck again.
Which is, in some ways, the problem. Now Balatro is everywhere. You don’t have an excuse not to play — you do have phones, right? Woe to the cubicle warriors and remote rangers who just want a game to play on their lunch hour, the retail or service worker stalwarts who want a distraction on their break. You’ll get it. And then you’ll finish a run in triumph or tragedy and check the clock to see an hour has gone by, if not more. You’ve been warned.