Never underestimate a Joker.
Looks like we found out who the real Joker is!
Balatro is a poker-based roguelite Deckbuilding Game developed by LocalThunk and published by Playstack. It was released on all major platforms on February 20, 2024, with the Mac port being released on March 2 of the same year.
Balatro has no story to speak of, and focuses on playing hands of poker against a series of blinds, with the goal of scoring enough chips to beat the score threshold on each one before running out of chances. Blinds come in sets of three, with the last being a boss blind that imposes a negative effect during the round; beat the boss, and the ante rises with a new set of blinds. Between rounds, the player can use the money earned from clearing blinds to make purchases that will help them keep up with the blinds: jokers are stored in a separate hand and provide various benefits while held, vouchers act as permanent but expensive passive upgrades, and a variety of booster packs open up methods of upgrading the score given by each poker hand, enhancing individual cards so they grant extra chips, multipliers, or money, or simply adding more cards to the deck to increase the likelihood of creating powerful and/or illegal hands.
The game's content matches similar deck-building roguelites, with many different decks to choose from at the start of a run, difficulty-modifying "stakes" that can be stacked on top of each other, challenge runs that grant preset builds and conditions to work around, and a host of unlockable cards and vouchers to find in future runs.
Balatro provides examples of the following tropes:
- 100% Completion: In addition to all the cards and items to discover, decks and Jokers also track the highest stake they were cleared with. Someone looking to 100% the game will have to go on numerous runs to get there.
- Achievement Mockery: A couple jokers are locked behind discarding a hand that could otherwise easily win a round by itself, such as a royal flush or five Jacks.
- Affectionate Parody: While the main theme revolves around poker, Balatro serves as a cheeky tribute to cards in general, incorporated into poker through convoluted rules of its own making, which evolve from standard suit playing cards, to tarot cards, to sports trading cards, to gift cards, and even credit cards.
- Alliterative Name: The name on the postcard from Mail-In Rebate, the signature on the Baseball Card, and the owner name on the Credit Card all follow the same pattern of first name starting with a J and last name being Joker. Credit Card in particular has its owner given as "J. Joker Jr."
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The planet cards for "secret" hands (i.e. those you need a modified deck to play) will not appear in the shop or booster packs if they haven't been played at least once before in the current game, preventing them from clogging up options if their hands can't be made in the first place. Less obviously, this also applies to jokers that work based on certain conditions a deck may not be able to satisfy: for example, Stone Joker (provides a scaling multiplier based on the number of stone cards in the deck) only appears if the deck already has one or more stone cards in it.
- If eternal jokers are in play, the game will avoid applying it to any jokers that would be completely worthless if affected (mainly those that have an effect when sold), or any that have a decaying effect that could eventually make them worthless. Egg is one of the only exceptions, since there are a few cards that benefit from its increasing sell price even when it can't be sold.
- Bandit Mook:
- The Tooth boss blind will drain $1 from the player's wallet for every card they play. It doesn't impair their scoring potential (unless they have something that benefits from stored money), but it can leave them penniless afterwards if they need to play a lot of cards.
- The Ox drains all money if the most used hand is played against it. Builds that rely on playing one hand type with no variation will suffer greatly from seeing it. On the flip side, if the player is in debt (has less than $0), the Ox will eliminate that instead, setting the balance back to $0.
- Bilingual Bonus: "Balatro" is Latin for "court jester", another term for the Jokers you can collect in the game.
- The Blank: The Faceless Joker gives $5 if three or more face cards are discarded at the same time.
- Breakable Weapons:
- Glass cards give a 2x multiplier when scored, but have a chance of breaking and removing themselves from the deck every time they get used in a hand.
- Gros Michel gives +15 multiplier with no stipulations on top of being a common joker, but has a one-in-four chance of destroying itself after every round. Its destruction enables Cavendish to spawn later in the run, which offers a much stronger 3x multiplier plus a much lower (1-in-1000) chance for it to destroy itself.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": In keeping with the poker motif, levels are called blinds and each tier thereof is called an ante.
- Cap:
- By default, five jokers and two consumables can be held at any given time; the Black Deck can hold six jokers while the Painted Deck can only hold four.
- Any card or tag that grants money has a varying limit tied to it so that its effect doesn't scale too high.
- Interest tops out at $5 per round while holding $25 or more at the start of a run. With enough money and all related Cap Raisers, this can reach up to $40 per round.
- Cap Raiser:
- Various vouchers upgrade the player's maximum interest, consumable, and joker amounts.
- Negative jokers add +1 to the player's joker limit while held, and are the rarest and most expensive joker edition as a result. The legendary joker Perkeo applies negative to any consumables it duplicates, which can lead to absurdly large inventory stashes.
- Cast from Money: The Bull and Bootstraps scale their chip and mult bonuses, respectively, the more money you have. This is inverted with the Vagabond, which generates a tarot card after each played hand if you're low on money.
- Challenge Run: Challenge decks include significant modifiers to a run, like changing the cards in your starting deck, giving you certain eternal Jokers, or forbidding certain Jokers from appearing. For example, the Medusa deck replaces your face cards with Stone Cards, which have no rank or suit, and sticks you with an eternal Marble Joker, which adds another stone card to the deck every round.
- Changing Gameplay Priorities: At the start of a run, the game plays like a standard game of poker, with hands like straights or flushes usually being the best ones to play. However, depending on the Jokers you pick up and other cards you use, you might find yourself in a situation where the best hands might be one of the normally lesser-scoring ones.
- Color-Coded Item Tiers: Joker rarities are represented by color: blue for common, green for uncommon, red for rare, and purple for legendary.
- Color Motif: The final bosses each have a color prefix as part of their name.
- Credit Card Plot: The Credit Card costs $1 to purchase from the shop and allows the player to go up to $20 in debt. True to its namesake, it's useful for making necessary purchases when money is low, but often ends up being harmful in the long run because a player obviously isn't generating any interest while their money is negative, and selling it prevents the player from buying anything until they Work Off the Debt.
- Critical Status Buff:
- The Mystic Summit adds 15 Mult when you run out of discards.
- The Dusk and Acrobat Jokers have abilities that trigger when you're on your last hand: the former retriggers all the cards played in that hand while the latter triples the multiplier.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: One boss blind, The Wall, requires a score that's four times the amount of the base for that ante (twice as much as any other boss), but otherwise doesn't impair the player. One of the Final Boss choices, Violet Vessel, works the same but with a six times boost to value.
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- The DNA card is a rare Joker that permanently duplicates a High Card played on the first turn and adds it to your hand for the next one. While using it requires you to start with the lowest-scoring hand by default, cloning the right cards can potentially net you Flush Fives, enhancements included.
- Loyalty Card gives x4 Mult, among the strongest bonuses in the game, but only triggers on every sixth hand played, requiring you to carefully plan out and time its usage if you need it to beat a certain blind.
- The legendary Joker Canio gains x1 Mult whenever a face card is destroyed. Card destruction effects are rather uncommon, with many not giving you the option to directly choose a card, and opportunities to destroy face cards naturally diminish the more you destroy. Because of this, Canio is counter-intuitively most effective if you were using a strategy that relied on filling your deck with face cards. That said, if you can somehow keep destroying face cards and pivot to a different strategy, you can pretty much turn the game into a cakewalk.
- The Burglar gives you three hands in exchange for removing all your discards when you select a blind. While this means you're potentially forced into several bad hands, combining the Burglar with other Jokers that give chip or mult bonuses such as the Mystic Summitnote ensures that you can at least compensate for it.
- Madness gains x0.5 multiplier every round, quickly becoming one of the strongest score multipliers in the game... in exchange for destroying a random other joker every round. Since you can't win with only one joker, your only choices are to rely exclusively on eternal jokers (which are rarer/offer less selection, can never be swapped out, and don't appear on lower difficulties) or to constantly buy more cheap jokers and hope the important ones aren't destroyed.
- Five card poker hands in general. They have higher base payoff stats, scale faster with planet cards, and trigger the "when scored" effects of all five cards. The more demanding hands like Straight Flush or Flush Five scale even faster. But you have to draw them every round, which either involves devoting resources to make your deck more lopsided, spending all your discards just to play one hand, getting lucky, or all of the above. And you may have trouble playing it more than once per round, while the simpler hands could be played 3-4 times.
- Earn Your Fun: Like most roguelikes, you start with access to a limited number of items and new Jokers, Vouchers and Decks are earned via gameplay achievements. However, if you aren't interested in the unlocking process, profiles have an "Unlock All" button which will immediately make all unlockables open on that selected profile. Note that 100% Completion is tracked on profiles, and unlockables count for less than 25% of the completion percentage.
- Endless Game: Endless Mode can be entered upon completing any run, where play continues as normal except with each ante increasing the base blind value at an exponential rate. Most game-winning setups won't make it past ante 10, one unlock is gated behind reaching ante 12, and only the most broken combinations can hope to get any further than ante 16 (which is as far as the collection menu will display). And ultimately it's not truly endless, since an Overflow Error makes ante 39 unwinnable.
- Exact Words: Very important to keep in mind with certain effects. Many examples include:
- The Ox boss blind and the Wraith spectral card don't just deplete all your money, they set it to $0. Including if it's negative. Similarly, the Tooth continuously drains your money to the negatives because its description does not say that it stops at zero.
- The Hex and Ankh spectral cards will destroy all other jokers along with their beneficial effects. However, they still work as long as you have one valid joker they can affect, so if you sell all your other jokers first, only have one to begin with, or if all your jokers are eternal…
- Wild Cards work as any suit for both good and bad effects. They can activate any joker effect that works off a specific suit, and they count as any suit toward (Straight) Flushes. However, any boss blind that debuffs a given suit will also debuff all wild cards.
- The Pareidolia joker makes every card count as a face card, meaning every card can activate every face card based joker. However, this also means when dealing with boss blinds, The Plant will debuff every card, and The Mark will cause every card to be drawn face down.
- Some card effects refer to a card being "played" or "scored"; the former means that the card has been presented in a hand, the latter means that it was part of the scoring hand and thus contributed its chips/enhancement properties. This can be important for managing a few card effects; for example, Ride the Bus (adds +1 multiplier every hand but resets if any face cards are scored) won't reset if face cards are played but don't contribute to the scoring hand, unless you also have Splash (causes every played card to be scored).
- Abilities that cause a card to retrigger when played also indirectly causes other things that trigger off of that card being played to trigger again. For example, playing a hand of five face cards while you have Sock and Buskin and Smiley Face causes Smiley Face to trigger ten times and add a total of 40 Mult.
- The Oops! All 6s joker doubles all probabilities, which does indeed turn 1 in 2 chances into 2 in 2 chances, making them always trigger. However, because it doubles all probabilities, it also affects potentially negative ones. It causes glass cards to have a 2 in 4 chance of shattering, Gros Michel to have a 2 in 4 chance of destroying itself, and The Wheel blind to cause 2 in 7 cards to be drawn face down.
- Some Jokers award a bonus if your hand contains a particular type, including if it's part of another, higher-priority hand. For example, Jolly Joker awards +8 Mult not only on a Pair proper, but also Two Pair, Three- and Four-of-a-Kind, Full House, Five-of-a-Kind, Flush House and Flush Five, since those implicate a hand with at least two of the same rank.
- The Smeared Joker makes Hearts and Diamonds the same suit, same with Clubs and Spades, making it easier to get Flushes and apply suit bonuses from Jokers. However, if a Boss Blind debuffs one suit, it also debuffs its counterpart aka half your standard deck.
- Madness gains x0.5 Mult and destroys a random Joker when a blind is selected.note If you pay attention to the wording, you'll notice that the bonus is not dependent on destroying a Joker, which means its bonus still increases if you don't have any other Jokers — or better yet, if your other Jokers are Eternal, which can't be destroyed.
- Burglar states that it adds +3 to playable hands and removes all discards only when the blind is selected, instead of directly altering either stat. On one hand, this makes sure that it negates any card effects that grant bonus discards, since those all work on a full-time basis. On the other hand, it being a specific effect means that joker-copying cards can sync with it without issue, and it also completely counters The Needle, which enforces its "clear in one hand" condition by setting hands to 1 but can't do anything about hands added afterwards.
- Cards that gain chips or mult for certain actions only keep those gains even if sold or destroyed if they track how many times you performed those actions in the entire run. This means that the Runnernote resets its chip count if you sell it and find it again in the shop later on, while the Fortune Tellernote can show up in the shop already buffed.
- The Red Seal has the effect "Retrigger This Card 1 time". While this largely is used for scoring, it can also apply to any time the card is called by any effect, such as a Steel Card triggered on the hand being played, a gold card in hand after a blind is defeated, even more niche interactions such as Raised Fist reapplying the bonus if the Sealed card was the lowest.
- The Psychic forces you to play hands of five cards each. However, it doesn't state that you need to play a hand where all five cards score, so you can get away with playing something like a Two Pair (four cards), then just tack on an extra card (ideally either a card you want to get rid of, or a Stone Card for the 50 chips) to make it a five-card hand.
- Foreshadowing: During the demo, the ante counter had a ? next to it. When you beat the 5th boss blind, Verdant Leaf appears as your final challenge as the ante counter rolls over to 6/5.
- Four-Fingered Hands: The Four Fingers Joker, which reduces the number of cards needed to form a Straight or Flush to four, is a four-fingered hand, unlike the Grabber Voucher, which has five.
- Fun with Acronyms: The To Do List has the following tasks listed: Jog, Oil Change, Karate, Eat Candy, and Ruminate.
- Gathering Steam: Some Jokers have an effect that increases under certain conditions. For example, Spare Trousers gains +2 Mult every time a Two Pair is played, and the Fortune Teller gains +1 Mult for every Tarot card played.
- Glitch Entity: Misprint, a joker that resembles the standard-issue joker but with a misaligned, stretched picture. Its description is a constantly shifting and buggy set of values, which translates to giving a different multiplier for every hand played.
- Game-Over Man: Losing a run causes the standard joker card, named Jimbo the Joker in the tutorial, to appear to the left of the results screen and make a pun at the player's expense. Also inverted, as the joker gives a more complimentary pun after a successful run.
- Grows on Trees: The Money Tree, which is the upgrade of Seed Money, increases the interest cap to $20.
- Guide Dang It!: While some mechanics rely on the player paying attention to the Exact Words or abusing loopholes, others are never directly explained and can be quite easy to miss:
- The easiest to discover is that jokers which give bonuses directly (i.e. not triggered when a card is played/scored) always activate from left to right. Having +MULT on the left and ×MULT on the right makes a huge difference in score. More subtly, the larger order of operations is cards played/scored, then in-hand effects, then direct joker bonuses. This especially affects steel cards (×1.5 MULT when in hand) since they only apply their effect to the base multiplier and any effects triggered by the cards themselves. Depending on your jokers, this could make them incredibly powerful or practically worthless.
- Cavendish (×3 MULT, 1 in 1000 chance to destroy itself each round) is a particularly strong joker, especially for a common. However, it only spawns if you let Gros Michel (+15 MULT, 1 in 4 chance to destroy itself each round) consume itself.
- Historical In-Joke: The gimmicks behind the Gros Michel (+15 mult, 1-in-4 chance to destroy itself every round) and Cavendish (x3 mult, 1-in-1000 chance to destroy itself every round, only appears after Gros Michel destroys itself) jokers are a reference to real-world banana cultivar history, with Gros Michel bananas being nearly wiped out by fungi outbreaks and subsequently getting replaced by the hardier Cavendish as the dominant variety.
- Interface Screw: Some Boss Blinds and challenge decks draw your cards face down, hiding their suit and rank until they're played, which potentially messes up your Flush and Straight-focused strategies. Amber Acorn does this to your Jokers and also shuffles them around, messing up those which rely on their positions to maximize their bonuses. However, you can still rearrange face-down cards before playing them, saving you from Amber Acorn if you were able to memorize your Jokers and their positions before facing it since their animations when they give bonuses still play.
- Kill Screen: In endless mode, the highest possible Ante that can be reached is 39: at that point, every Blind will show the glitched target score of "naneinf" and even if the player can somehow match it, the game will always count the amount of chips gained as lower than the target, putting an end to the run.
- Joke Item: The Blank voucher "Does nothing?", and it, in fact, does… nothing. However, buying ten of them across several runs unlocks its upgrade, Antimatter, a very strong voucher that grants one extra joker slot when purchased.
- Last Chance Hit Point: Mr. Bones prevents you from losing a run once before self-destructing if your chips are 25% that of the required chips for the blind. However, you won't be able to earn any winnings from the blind.
- Letter Motif: The Boss Blinds encountered in any ante that isn't a multiple of eight are symbolized by letters of the Phoenician alphabet.
- Level Drain:
- Playing any hand against The Arm will decrease its level by one. Originally, this could leave a hand at a nigh-worthless level 0, but a post-launch patch reined in The Arm's effect so that it can no longer reduce hands below level 1.
- The Hieroglyph and Petroglyph vouchers reduce the ante by one level, essentially extending the run's length with all that entails for scaling purposes. However, they also come with permanent hand and discard decreases respectively.
- Literal Wild Card: Wild cards count as all suits and will trigger all jokers that boost cards of specific suits. On the flipside, they're also disabled by boss blinds that debuff cards of specific suits.
- Loophole Abuse:
- A few spectral cards will affect a random joker at the cost of destroying every other joker you have. This is an almost unreasonable amount of luck and risk to hit the card you want… but there's nothing (besides the presence of eternal jokers, assuming they aren't the intended target to begin with) saying you can't just sell every joker except the one you want affected before using it, since they'd all get destroyed anyway.
- Certain Boss Blinds will cause your cards to be drawn face down. However, face-down cards still get automatically sorted by rank/suit, so you can potentially deduce which cards they are by using the auto-sort function and comparing adjacent cards. Even better is that tarot cards that change cards in some way will play an animation that flips the cards over. Using one on any face-down cards will give you a couple of seconds to directly peek at them.
- Luck-Based Mission: It's a game where you play poker hands to score enough points to defeat blinds, and even with strategic deckbuilding, your run will go kaput if you're unlucky enough to be drawn several bad hands or encounter a particularly difficult Boss Blind.
- Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
- Discards can be used to dispose of up to 5 cards at once and draw that many cards to replace them, letting the player get to whatever they need for a good hand faster; they also don't add money at the end of the round under normal circumstances unlike remaining hands, making them more "free" to use. There is a boss blind that starts the round off with zero discards while another makes it so you only draw three cards after playing or discarding, however, plus some jokers than encourage playing without discarding.
- The shop offers a reroll of its single cards starting at $5, then increasing by $1 for each subsequent reroll, resetting after the next blind. Despite the name, it's functionally a restock, as it replaces all the cards with new ones even if one or more have been bought. One voucher, plus its unlockable upgrade, reduces the reroll cost by $2, while a skip tag starts rerolls at $0 and one Joker grants a single free reroll.
- One voucher enables rerolling the boss blind if it's unfavorable, but it only works once per ante and costs $10 to use. Its unlockable upgrade can be used infinitely, but the price remains.
- The Oops! All 6s! Joker doubles the odds of any probability-based event, both positive and negative. It also stacks with itself in the event you get multiples.
- The Telescope voucher makes the Planet card for your most played hand always appear in Celestial Packs.
- Magikarp Power:
- Any card with scaling effects can quickly become a key factor in a run if its scaling is fed. Cards like Spare Trousers and Square Joker start out with meaningless boosts, but when upgraded enough times they can provide a significant boost to multiplier and chips compared to jokers with better default boosts.
- Yorick, one of the legendary jokers, originally had no benefit until after a high number of discards have been used. After hitting that however many rounds later, it goes from useless to suddenly granting a 5x multiplier that can carry the player through the rest of a run. It was changed in v1.0.1 so that it gains x1 Mult for every 23 cards discarded, which has the same slow but powerful scaling effect as other scaling Jokers.
- Mechanically Unusual Class: All the decks have different starting or persistent benefits that require the game to be approached differently, but none are as different as the Plasma Deck, which features a "balance" gimmick: after a hand's chips and multiplier are calculated, the values for both are equalized to the midpoint between them before being scored. This creates a scoring shift where chips end up being more valuable early on and the late-game focuses on pushing multiplier as high as possible without letting it get dragged down too much by low chips. All blind values are also doubled for the Plasma Deck to accommodate for the higher scores it enables.
- Midas Touch: The Midas Mask turns every played face card into gold cards, which each give you $3 if they're kept at the end of the round.
- Money Multiplier: Some tags, Jokers, and tarot cards increase your payout, with a few such as the Hermit and the Economy Tag doubling your current amount.
- Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: A single playing card can have one enhancement, seal, and edition tied to it, but cannot have multiple of any one type.
- No Plot? No Problem!: Why are you playing poker against nondescript blinds? The game really doesn't say.
- No-Sell:
- Most blinds hinder the player by debuffing specific cards, which prevents them from applying chips to the score or activating any enhancement, seal, or joker effects. However, it does not prevent them from being used to form a valid hand.
- On the player's side, Luchador disables the boss blind of the current ante when sold. The legendary joker Chicot does it better, canceling all boss blinds effects while held.
- Overflow Error: Chip values are stored as a double-precision floating point number, and maxes out at 10308. Chip values higher than that are considered infinite, which leads to a Killscreen at ante 39. If you actually manage to score enough chips to hit this limit, the game won't consider it higher than the ante, even before the Killscreen, guaranteeing a loss. Why?
- Pinball Scoring: Scores can reach so high that the game can't properly display them and they must be expressed in scientific notation. As stated above, they can technically reach as high as 10308, but scores can still go higher than that and become a glitched infinite value that displays as "naneinf".
- Power at a Price:
- Some Jokers have a drawback to them. For example, the Vampire grants x0.2 Mult for each enhanced card played, but the enhancement is also removed.
- Spectral cards grant powerful benefits, but most of them also require a significant price to be paid. For example, the Ankh copies one of your Jokers at random, but destroys the rest.note
- Pun: Many Jokers have mechanics that revolve around clever references and wordplay. For instance:
- Pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving faces in random or accidental arrangements of shapes, causes all cards to be treated as face cards.
- Scholar cares about scoring Aces, which means it works best if you get straight A's.
- Ride The Bus lists the face cards that reset its bonus as bus stops — that is, the bus keeps on going until it reaches a stop.
- Walkie Talkie gives +10 Chips and +4 Mult whenever you score a 10 or 4.
- Hit The Road cares about discarding Jacks.
- Yorick's effects are associated with the number 23, which was how many years he had been dead for in Hamlet.
- Reward for Removal:
- The Erosion Joker adds 4 Mult for every permanently discarded card that makes the deck smaller than its initial card count.
- The Castle permanently gains 3 chips for every discarded suit, which changes each round.
- The Faceless Joker gives $5 if three or more face cards are discarded at the same time, while the Mail-In Rebate gives $3 per discarded rank, which changes each round.
- Required Party Member: The Cerulean Bell boss blind invokes this, forcing you to always have one randomly picked card to be played or discarded.
- Retraux: Balatro is designed to resemble a classic video poker game, complete with CRT filtering options.
- Rush Boss: One boss blind, The Needle, has the same score to beat as the small blind of the ante, but must be cleared in one hand.
- Score Multiplier: The game primarily revolves around this, referred to in-game as "Mult". All poker hands played have an inherent Mult tied to their difficulty. The Mult of a played hand can be increased by acquiring Jokers, which add to (or in some cases multiply) the active Mult during score calculation depending on the specific trigger conditions of the Joker, resulting in bigger scores. Poker hands can also be upgraded permanently via Planet cards, which level up your hands and increase both their base chip value and base Mult.
- Shop Fodder:
- The Egg joker has no inherent score benefits, but increases in sell price by $3 after every round, letting it be sold at a sizeable profit down the line or be used to help with cards which care about the sell value of Jokers. The drawback is that Egg will take up one of the player's five valuable joker slots (unless it happens to be a negative edition), potentially hampering the player's chances of lasting long enough in a run for The Egg to become adequately lucrative.
- Diet Cola is a joker that has no purpose but to immediately be sold and exchanged for a Double Tag, which duplicates the next tag the player collects.
- Skippable Boss: All Small and Big Blinds have tags attached to them, which provide one-time benefits and can be collected by opting to skip the associated blind and move onto the next. The downside is that skipping blinds bypasses the main way of generating money, the shop cannot be visited until after beating a blind, and playing hands is often necessary for scaling passive effects to defeat the unskippable boss blinds.
- Stuck Items: Higher stakes provide a chance of receiving "Eternal" jokers, which cannot be removed or destroyed once they're added to the joker lineup. They're also present in some challenges to preserve their gimmicks.
- Tarot Motifs: The cards of the major arcana can be bought in the store or used from booster packs for a wide variety of effects. Most of them modify the deck in some way, adding enhancements, changing suits, or outright replacing/deleting certain cards. A few of them instead generate money, jokers, or other consumable cards.
- Theme Naming: Many jokers with similar effects are grouped together with a theme:
- The jokers that provide +4 mult for playing a specific suit are Wrathful, Greedy, Gluttonous, and Lusty. They're collectively known as the Sinful Jokers in the v.1.0.1 update notes.
- Jokers that give chips for playing specific hands are all synonyms of "cunning", while ones that give mult for hands are synonyms of "insane".
- Jokers with powerful effects that diminish over time are food-themed.
- The end bosses are themed after suits from foreign playing card decks, with four of them (Amber Acorn, Verdant Leaf, Crimson Heart, Cerulean Bell) being suits from German playing cards. Violet Vessel is a Cup, from Latin decks (and most tarot decks).
- All the legendary jokers are named after famous real-world or fictional jesters.
- Uncommon Time: The main theme of Balatro is in 7/4 time signature.
- Unique Items: By default, you can only ever come across one copy of a joker at a time. The Showman joker overrides this while held (it also enables finding multiple of the same card in tarot, planet, and spectral packs), and a few rare effects allow a joker to be duplicated.
- Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Winning a run with a deck unlocks the next stake for that deck, which adds a modifier to make the game harder in some way, like increasing the required scores or reducing discards or hand size, along with applying the modifiers of the previous stakes.
- Variable Mix: The music changes depending on what kind of menu the player is in.
- Violation of Common Sense: A lot of unlocks are gated behind doing really dumb things, like discarding a Royal Flush, discarding five jacks at once, and so on.
- Visual Pun: The Seed Money Voucher is represented by a dandelion coin seedling.
