superultra
ronyeh
Maybe it’s a comfort game for you. But it’s an addiction for me. I need to stop, so I can find something else to get addicted to.
sdwr
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Balatro is building on 50 years of addiction-seeking game design. Everything from the sound effects, to the random round rewards, to the pacing of unlocks is optimized to be as attention-grabbing and dopamine-releasing as possible.
It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi
cwizou
> It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
Exactly.
To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :
- You know from the start you may not win every round.
- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.
And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.
Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.
bbkane
I love Solitaire - it's such a nice way to kill a few minutes while waiting for something else.
Unfortunately, many solitaire phone apps are filled with ads, slow, or have clunky controls.
A few years ago, however, I found https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.tobiasbielefeld.solitaire... . Its free and open source, and quite fast with nice shortcuts to move the cards.
I love this app and have played multiple Klondike/Spider Solitaire games a day using it. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want a simple game of Solitaire in the same spirit as the post.
palsecam
Self-plug. Using a lightweight PWA (progressive web app) is also an option: https://FreeSolitaire.win
Works offline after the first visit. No ads until game over, and they aren’t obtrusive. Intelligent hints, detects dead-ends, doesn’t generate unwinnable games.
Often lauded here on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972075 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42031052.
sl3dge78
I highly recommend the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Greatly designed solitaire games. I play them every day on my commute to work.
motes
I was gonna recommend the same one. I wanna add that Hempuli (Baba is You, Noita) also made a solitaire collection inspired by Zachtronics. It's just 3 bucks on his itchio and it's something I play while I have my coffee.
https://hempuli.itch.io/a-solitaire-mystery
Funny enough it has a "Royal Flush Solitaire" where you make poker hands and your goal is to reach 240 points.
Binary Solitaire and Transformation are my favorites.
skeaker
Thirding this recommendation, Fortune's Favor solitaire and Shenzen solitaire from this collection are some of my favorite variants ever. Either of them would be worth the price of admission alone.
rezmason
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection inspired me to begin experimenting with Solitaire variants, and hopefully Balatro's well-deserved success will stoke people's curiosity in similar titles.
For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:
foobarian
This is why I play it with actual physical cards. I learned it as kid so partly it's a comfort ritual, and partly the tactile interaction is very soothing.
diggan
Was looking for this on iPhone as well some weeks ago, and came across a Solitaire that is included in Apple Arcade that works really well, doesn't have any ads or other distractions, just plain Solitaire.
And another bonus is that Balatro (which the submission author created) is included in Apple Arcade too, which was the original reason I got Arcade.
schnable
Apple Arcade is great for avoiding all the adware and in-app payment crap.
NoboruWataya
This is the one I use too. I like how many variants it has as well.
ziddoap
>It’s now been over a year since launch and I am still playing Balatro almost daily. I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I think this is really important, especially for games. Play the game you make!
There's a fair number of games that I've played where the developer clearly has not sat down and played through the game as a player would. No skips, no custom developer-only starts or features, no rushing through sections "because I know what happens", etc. To be fair, though, these are often below $5 games on Steam, so I'm sure a chunk of them are cash grabs rather than an honest attempt at making a successful game.
svelle
The story of the Hotline Miami 2 devs comes to mind where they mentioned that they play tested the game at half speed a lot of the times, which, including many other factors, contributes to the game being way harder than the first part.
ksynwa
Reminds me of Miyazaki from FromSoft who said he doesn't play his own games.
Trasmatta
No, he said he doesn't play them AFTER they release. But he plays them constantly when they're in development. One of the difficulty rules at FromSoft is that each boss and area has to be beatable by Miyazaki (which he said is a good baseline, because he likes challenge but doesn't consider himself good at games).
ksynwa
I checked and you are right. Thanks for the correction.
ekianjo
He would not be able to beat the first boss probably
modeless
Balatro is the only game where my score has maxed out the value of a double precision floating point number. And this isn't some crazy speedrunning strategy, it's very achievable for normal players. It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played.
jsheard
If you want the numbers to go even more up, the Talisman mod reworks everything to use BigInts for practically unlimited number go up potential. It's mainly intended to be paired with other mods like Cryptid which add obscenely overpowered cards, but Talisman can be used on its own if you just want to attempt the normally unwinnable ante 39 and beyond in vanilla.
xnx
> It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played.
More than Universal Paperclips?
Arainach
Unlike Universal Paperclips, I actually have a desire to play Balatro more than once.
It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available"
The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automation both the game and you are proceeding towards the heat death of the universe and all you can do is accelerate it.
It's also a time boxed game - if you ignore the Civilization "one more turn" effect, any given game will be over within 20 minutes.
jerf
The "time boxing" is coming to be one of my favorite aspects of the roguelite genre. It's a nice structure for a combination of a deep and compelling game, that opens up at a reasonable speed, but also doesn't call for 80 hours to "finish" it. I like JRPGs but even so they quite often overstay their welcome. Death may wipe nearly all your progress but you can easily try again in another timebox.
(I played some of the classic Roguelikes, and spent a lot of time with Angband, but that was one of their problems... winning still took many hours, could easily be dozens, and so death became very scary. They were on to something, but the modern rebalancing of "hand it all out more quickly, and resolve the game in an hour or two and let them come back" seems a much more practical approach in a lot of ways.)
exitb
It really does work that way. It’s a perfect game if you have ~25 minutes to kill. It’s fairly complex, but doesn’t really require player to keep much information between runs. I hate going back to a game after a few weeks only to discover that I no longer remember how to play it.
IsTom
> 25 minutes
Personally I've had ~1 hour runs often. Am I just a slow player or am I missing something? For context I've been playing for less than two weeks and haven't yet beat ante 11 (7M feels like a big step in difficulty).
jerf
As you go up the antes, the number of viable strategies decreases, until it narrows down to just one or two a number of antes quite a ways before the "end".
IIRC localthunk has said that he considers the normal "beat Ante 8" of Balatro to be the "real" Balatro and that the "beat all the higher antes" is mostly there to satisfy people who want it but it is not what he is optimizing for. In contrast to a lot of Roguelikes where "beating the game" is more "an offramp for those who want to call it a day but technically just the beginning of the 'real' experience". Both of which are fine goals, IMHO, but I think it helps to know that Balatro's additional antes are not designed to be in the latter category.
Trasmatta
Nah, it's pretty common for runs to take that long, especially if you're going into Endless. Some of the top Balatro streamers I watch will frequently have runs that take that long (or longer).
It does help to increase the game speed. I've got mine up to max speed (but I played it at normal speed for quite awhile, while I got used to the mechanics).
kenny11
I thought I was the only one with this problem.
I can still remember how to play the original Doom after all these years (and where all the secrets are!) but the modern editions have so many controls and weapon modes that if I don't play it for a month I don't remember how anything works.
evmar
Sorry in advance if it's too off-topic, but if you want to play the Windows 2000 Solitaire I have it kind of working in my web-based emulator here:
https://evmar.github.io/retrowin32/run.html?exe=sol.exe&dir=...
havblue
"To force players to get out of their comfort zone and explore the design of the game in a way they might not if this were a fully unguided gaming experience."
It's great how rogue like/lite games such as slay the spire and Hades have riffed on that concept. Guess what, you won't have the same power ups this time. You're going to have to learn to play the same game in a different way. So in Balatro you're playing draw poker in an attempt to build different hands based on your strategy.
AdmiralAsshat
I mean, that might be the intent on paper, but when I was going through a game like Dead Cells, I still had specific weapons or layouts that I was especially effective with--and in practice that just meant that if I didn't manage to get my favorite bat or nun-chuck weapons to drop, there was a good chance I wasn't going to be able to complete that run.
jerf
Non-twitch based roguelites make it somewhat easier to learn and deploy those alternate strategies in my experience because you can read a bit of a clue online, think about it, and then play through a round slowly and thoughtfully. In an action game, you know, you pick up the sickle weapon for the first time and you may have literally seconds of experience with it before you die.
I spent some substantial time in Enter the Gungeon but have to admit I kind of bounced off of it for this reason... I don't have the raw time to compensate for the fact that the guns require certain muscle memory for each of them, and the bosses need certain muscle memory for each of them, and the combinations require certain muscle memory... I enjoyed my time and you might say I got close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I just don't have the time to get there in a game where fractions of a second count.
momojo
> My fantasy was that I was playing this weird game many years later on a lazy Sunday afternoon; I play a couple of runs, enjoy my time for about an hour, then set it down and continue the rest of my day. I wanted it to feel evergreen, comforting, and enjoyable in a very low-stakes way.
I will pay money for more games like this. I want more games like this.
I could write an essay on this beautiful breath of fresh air. Balatro, like many beautiful pieces of software, is defined by what it is and isn't. No ads, no screwy Skinner box mechanics. Just wholesome gameplay.
flocciput
When I was a kid, if I couldn't be on the computer for whatever reason I'd occupy myself with a pack of cards. I'd play solitaire (Klondike) over and over. I would vary the draw count and see how that affected the game. I'd sort the cards beforehand and see if that made it any easier or harder to win. I'd try to find the optimal order the cards would have to be in before dealing for the game to be won in the least number of steps. Ultimately I figured Solitaire was just a roundabout way of sorting a deck of cards and started messing with other sorting methods. I still, every time I see a pack of cards, feel that urge to just sort and sort and sort. It wasn't even "fun", I was just so desperate for mental stimulation.
Anyways, love Balatro!
par
Reading this makes me sad actually, because I grew up on windows machines (starting with windows 3.1) and have so many memories of Solitaire that came shipped with windows. The deck variations, the little and big effects (like winning!) I played it so much as a grade schooler. Now that mac is so ubiquitous, most kids wont ever know the simple pleasure of playing solitaire.
npteljes
Forget Mac, people, kids play on their phones first. And yeah, it's far from the offline simple please that is solitaire. I wonder what they'll say when they reach this stage of life. Today's popular things seem soulless to me, but I'm sure they are connecting to it (and to things I don't know about) just the same as I did back then.
santoshalper
Don't worry, Windows is still far, far more ubiquitous. The bigger reason people don't play solitaire as much as they used to is that it is no longer the only game installed on their PC.
So many people in the 90s learned solitaire playing it on a work from a lack of other options on their work PC. Now with the so many games on the web and your smartphone, you might not even try it.
People give Microsoft a lot of shit, but including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
cwizou
> including bundled games on what was at the time primarily a business OS was bold, controversial, and brilliant.
Brillant, sure, but not completely sure it was controversial or bold, they have stated that it was primarily included in Windows 3.0 to help people get used to the new paradigms (for Windows) of the mouse and drag and drop, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire
> People give Microsoft a lot of shit
Well they didn't help themselves by shoving ads and subscriptions in all of those games : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Solitaire_Collection...
noirscape
Windows Solitaire mostly died because Microsoft strangled it with microtransactions and ads during the Windows 8 days.
What went from a simple minigame you could fire up at any time got transformed into this monstrosity that kept forcing ads on you, urging you to buy premium versions, adding "engagement" nonsense (daily missions) and selling you back the same features that came free in the Windows 7 version.
netcraft
ive always seen the reason MS included solitaire and minesweeper was to teach people how to use a mouse and a gui.
I can remember even in the early 2000s when we started installing PCs instead of green screen terminals at different locations having employees play solitaire as a way to get them used to their new computers and learning how to use a mouse.
dilDDoS
Great read, I always love reading about the thoughts and intentions behind game design.
> I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I do see the relaxing component of the game once you’ve got the hang of it and are playing on white stake. But I do feel like the game encourages you to take on more difficult/frustrating stakes and decks, so for someone working on gold stake for the black deck for example, it would absolutely not be something to play before bed (unless you’re in the mood to cry yourself to sleep)
throwaway019254
This game is freaking addicting. I had to uninstall it.
saulpw
It was for me too, but only for about a month or so. Once I got 19 of 20 achievements (and the last one is nigh-impossible), I lost interest, and haven't played it since. (Though this post is tempting me to try a game or two with a different non-addicted attitude!)
This is in stark contrast with Slay the Spire, which I've been playing compulsively since 2019.
I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time.
My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.