APP STORE AWARDS

Apple Arcade Game of the Year

Apple Arcade

Balatro+

When Poker Meets Solitaire

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With ever-shifting rules and audacious wild cards, this one-of-a-kind indie gem is perfectly engineered for fun.

– App Store Editors

The basics will likely be familiar: start by playing classic poker hands – such as pairs, straights, flushes and four-of-a-kinds. The better the hand, the more points you score.

But the real fun of Balatro+ is breaking those classic rules, by adding, subtracting and powering up cards to create score-boosting combinations.

Throwback, pixelated graphics and a synth-driven soundtrack round out the experience.

How about an extra ace to play an impossible five-of-a-kind? Or a superpowered jack that quadruples your score – or multiplies it by 20? Every run delivers random jokers that completely alter – and in many ways define – your strategy, which continually changes while you play.

Unlike most card games, where you figure out a strategy and stick with it, Balatro+ made us feel more like explorers, tinkering with newly unlocked jokers and other powerful cards to develop brilliant tactics on the fly. When everything came together – such as when the strategy we devised had us raking in millions of points – it felt like finding gold.

Even the greatest run eventually comes crashing down like a house of cards in Balatro+. But the pang of the loss is quickly replaced by a sense of hope, since the next game will be completely different. With ever-changing rules and seemingly limitless strategies to discover, Balatro+ deals a truly unbeatable hand.

Quick tip

Jokers trigger from left to right, so order them in a way that maximises your scoring. Put a joker that adds to your chips and multiplier to the left of one that multiplies them. It could mean the difference between a failed run and a massive, blind-beating score.

Fun fact

There are more than 150 special cards in the game, each illustrated to reflect its special powers. You can also alter the face cards’ art in the game’s settings. There you’ll find Cyberpunk 2077–themed spades, hearts decorated with an Among Us character and more.

Meet the creator

When creating the game, Canada-based solo developer LocalThunk took inspiration from the poker-adjacent Cantonese card game Big Two. But it didn’t stop there. LocalThunk perfected the gameplay loop over two and a half years of development.