Balatro Launches on Phones, Saves Travel and Wasted Workdays Everywhere

Balatro, an indie game adventure that combines the rules of poker with random runs and a splash of deck building, has finally been released on phones. You can get it for $10 at iOS App Store or Google Play Storeand added to the Apple Arcade library.

In other words: you can’t escape Balatro. Prepare to kiss the product well.

Balatro launched in February on consoles and PC to immediate acclaim, a game so successful that players jokingly complained about losing hours in its compelling loop. As an indie game with no graphical complexity, it’s perfectly suited for the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck — but porting it to phones makes it much easier to play in a pinch, whether you’re sitting in line or waiting for your laundry. Or while watching a show. Even if you walk the dog. Whenever, always, really.

The mobile version doesn’t sacrifice a bit of flashier interface effects, but you’ll have to put the games aside to notice, and all the original gameplay is preserved. Balatro is an easy game to learn and gets harder to master as you reach higher difficulty levels, but the basics of the game are this: use the cards in your hand to combine poker hands and get enough points in each round. .

As in regular poker, high-value hands such as straights and flushes score more points than pairs and threes of a kind. You have a limited number of hands to play and discard them while hunting for the right set of cards.

You will need to beat two rounds of small and big “blinds” with increasing points before facing a blind “boss” who faces a special fighting situation — maybe cards from one suit (spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts) will not score or you will draw cards face down after playing a hand.

Once you beat a boss, you will go up the “ante” or difficulty level, and the points you have to beat blinds and bosses increase. After the eighth ante, you win the runner, and you can continue playing indefinitely or start over for a new challenge.

The trick to getting high scores with the ever-growing curtains? Cheat! Between rounds, you can buy a few items even when the odds are in your favor. Most importantly, you can buy or find Jokers, which improve your hands or add bonuses to certain suits or levels of playing cards — the more you pick up the more it changes what types of hands you’ll be chasing during your run. . But you can also buy some extras, like planet cards that increase the number of hand types (pairs, straights, flushes, etc) or tarot cards that increase the cards in your deck.

Sound complicated? You will download it as you go. Poker skills come in handy when you’re weighing the odds of whether you’ll draw a right hand or need to switch to a new strategy. But the mix of Jokers, hand values, new cards in your deck and boss ants make every run feel fresh. Even if — or rather, if — you crash and burn on the run, boy does it feel easy to start over and try your luck again.

Which is, in a way, the problem. Now Balatro is everywhere. You have no excuse not to play — you have phones, right? Woe to the cubicle warriors and remote workers who just want a game to play on their lunch hour, salespeople or workers looking for a distraction during their break. You will find it. Then you will finish the run in victory or disaster and check the clock to see that an hour has passed, if not more. You have been warned.