Welcome to the Underrated Gems, a brand-new review series for underrated games. Every other week, along with College Football, I will be reviewing a game I consider to be Underrated between all the games that are released. These games would be considered not that well known in the mainstream media, hidden gems, and most importantly: just Underrated. All these games will be reviewed on my Steam account unless otherwise stated. This week, we got ourselves a special Poker Game that involves a simple forgotten card.

In an average deck of playing cards, one may forget about a loner one: The Joker. The Joker card has almost no value in a deck of cards, or even in any type of card game. It may act as some sort of wild card in some cases, but most of the time, you wouldn’t expect to use a Joker card, especially in a game of high-stakes poker. But this year, a solo indie developer named LocalThunk has changed the meaning of the usage of the Joker. On February 20, 2024, LocalThunk released a seemingly poker-like game called Balatro. But what it would end up becoming was one of the top roguelike games for this year, all because of a simple, yet genius mechanic. One that required the only loner card in a deck of cards: The Joker

Gameplay

The premise of the game is simple enough. It plays like you’re playing single-player poker, and trying to obtain a specific score to advance. You are given a set of randomized eight cards to use, and the goal is to get the best possible hand with them to advance to the next stake. In the beginning, four hands to get to that score. You are also given three discards which allows you to discard up to five cards per hand. An X Chips times Y Multiplier determines the points, and the better the hand, the better the score. There are a total of 8 antes in a run, each with 3 blinds, with each level increasing the required score you must get. At the 3rd blind per ante, you will get a boss blind which gets an additional stipulation. Each “blind”(level) increases the score by either 1.5x from the last or 2x on the boss blind. But once you get to a score that your base cards by themselves can’t reach, you’d start to use the main gimmick that allows you to reach scores as high as 1.9 Quintillion Chips.

The Jokers

This is where the main gimmick of Balatro comes in: Usage of Joker. In this case, there are over 150 jokers in the game as of October 2024, each with its own unique abilities. For example, the base Joker Card will increase your multiplier by +4. Each joker provides different abilities to your playing deck, with some increasing the amount of chips and multi-gained gained, others solely based on luck.

Each Joker provides a special ability that when combined with others, gets insane amounts of chips earned. The main point is to stack your joker deck with as many jokers that can complement one another, and max out a score that surpasses the goal score. You have a start of five joker slots to be able to put in as many jokers as you can, including the chance to expand the size. But even with the number of jokers in the game, how would you be able to get Jokers to begin with?

The Shop, Of Course!

After each blind you complete, you will get some cash depending on if you completed the blind fast enough. Afterwards, you get to access a shop each time, without it ever going away. In each shop, there will be a random selection of jokers that you can purchase with money(Digital money of course). The cost of the joker would depend on the rarity as well as what the joker can do. Each time you enter a shop, all of its contents are rerolled, with wanting to reroll more costing $5, to begin with, to provide new things each time. They can be purchased separately or by a booster pack type and you choose the card you want. With the exception of Jokers, there are other things that can be bought within the shop that can also provide upgrades to your deck without ever needing to use Jokers. These upgrades include:

• • Buying Single Cards for your deck

• Buying Tarot Cards/Packs to upgrade your deck

• Buying Planet Cards/Packs to upgrade your played hand value

• Buying Spectral Packs for different abilities

• Buying Vouchers that cost high, but give you an amazing ability

Overall

Balatro can take what we know about Poker and completely turn it into a fun and replayable single-player game. The main gimmick being the one card that almost no one uses in a deck of cards, really adds to the experience and how Jokers aren’t as worthless as they seem. With more content being added and being multi-platform, the game of Balatro is sure to definitely decrease production rates across the board(which was their exact tagline when their mobile version came out in September). Just be sure to see the words “Nope!” every time you try to use the Wheel of Fortune Tarot Card though, it may say 25% chance, but in reality, it’s rarely going to hit.