No game this year has captured the imagination of the Engadget crew Balatro did, and when it came time for each staff member to rank their favorite games of 2024, everyone – and I mean everyone – wanted to write about Balatro. In the end, instead of forcing everyone to fight for the chance to write about their love of the game, we decided instead to ask the team to write their own individual take on Balatro.

My Steam Deck is a Balatro machine and I love it

I is a Balatro machine at this point, and no, I’m not complaining about it. I have broken out my Steam Deck for many games in the past Balatro and I plan to play a lot more with it in the future, but for now and possibly until my last breath, its main function is the generation joker.

First of all, Balatro It just feels great on a handheld device. This is the kind of game you can play passively while watching TV or listening to a podcast, or with intense focus as you try to collect jokers, stakes, achievements and stickers on the way to Completionist++. Steam Deck is the ideal platform for this type of game, because, especially in combination with a comfortable PC setup, it allows players to flow between these two states without losing progress. The mobile version of Balatro is rad and the Switch version is peachy, but I started playing on PC and, over 500 hours later, I’m reluctant to start again on any other platform.

I really like curling up on the couch Balatroplaying it on my desk PC, using it as a distraction on long commutes, and getting a few hands on before bed. the Balatro Machine – uh, I mean, Steam Deck – enabled my obsession in a seamless way.

– Jessica Conditt, Senior Reporter

Balatro is a card game that you can feel

Balatro a game you usually play in your head. There’s a giant array of modifier cards, each with their own effects and consequences, and you work through their permutations like you’re tinkering with a chemistry kit. This is a game of decisions, everything depends on the decisions you have made before. Some work, most blow up in your face.

This is the maker Balatro work, but it’s not my favorite thing about it. What I like the most is how tactile it is. How does it make a digital playing card game have any felt effect. This is the little shake each card makes when scoring. The donk when a joker adds to your multiplier, the way the donks accelerate and increase in pitch as the buffs and retriggers stack up. The thrrrp of deck reshuffling. The slight delay in opening a booster pack to heighten the anticipation, how to break the pack to highlight the finality of your decision. The sound of coins colliding when you collect interest or buy something. The fire that burns and rises around your score when you pass the goal with one hand, a dopamine hit within a dopamine hit. The way to suck the air out of trancy music is when you inevitably fail.

You are not a character of Balatro. It’s just you, staring at the cards set against the rotating suits. Yet all these improvements go a long way to suck you into that vortex, locking you in it, somehow giving a game that most resembles video poker a sense of physical place. Balatro is, among many things, an A-1 example of economical sound design. The easiest way to digest it is to play it on mute.

– Jeff Dunn, Senior Editor

The real Balatro is the joker sticker we got on the road

I’m not an achievement hunter — I’m the kind of person who skips sidequests that aren’t interesting and rarely replays games after finishing them. The one “Platinumed” game in my PlayStation collection is the PS4 version of Resogunand I have 100-percent precisely zero Xbox games. Why, then, is 2024 the year I’m obsessed with reaching Completionist++ in Balatro?

I received the Completionist Steam achievement, which you get by uncovering every card in the game, after a month of playing the game. It took me another five months to get Completionist+, which is awarded to those who beat Ante 8 in every deck on gold difficulty. The one thing left for me is the hardest challenge in the game: Competitionist ++, which involves getting gold stickers for each joker by beating Ante 8 on gold difficulty with each of them active.

As of writing, Completionist++ is still a distant dream. It’s easy to feel like you’ve mastered the game after beating Completionist+; There are simple joker combinations that can get you past the Ante 8 in every deck. Completionist++ takes the safety nets away from you, forcing you to beat the game’s hardest levels without relying on surefire strategies. While I sometimes miss my high-score chase in the early days with Balatrothis challenge gave the game a new dynamic for me, as I learned how to make a victory from the jokers that I considered useless before.

If you’re done with all the stakes and wondering what to do next, Completionist++ is a challenge worth setting yourself. Just a word of warning: I’ve played for 460 hours on my PC and Steam Deck, and I’ve only unlocked 961 of the game’s 1,200 stickers.

– Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

Balatro is a deep, complex game for dirty casuals like me

Some of my friends and co-workers are taking Balatro to some wild extremes. Aaron told me he opened and finished about 95 percent of the game; Meanwhile I’m sitting at a measly 19 percent. Another friend often shares quick videos from his runs where he racks up hundreds of millions of points in one hand with Jokers that I can’t fathom, while my best one hand sits on a little over 3 million.

The good thing, though? It is not discouraging; this is a feature, not a bug. Balatro somehow managed to become a type of game that you can sink hundreds of hours in an all-out quest for completion and mastery. Or you can do what I did and take it out, play for 30 minutes or an hour a few times a week, and come back to it again with more to do when you get the itch.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to get to the point where I get a billion points in one hand, but my gaming time is limited and I mostly choose to spend it on the PS5. But one of the great joys of Balatro so you can go on a bender and play it for hours, and then not come back to it for days or weeks, and then just pick it up and keep improving. You will not lose any skills or lose sight of your goals. It’s a casual, pick-up-and-play game that also hides some incredible depth, and games like that don’t come around often.

– Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor

Balatro is an almost perfect mobile port

2024 will undoubtedly be the year of Balatro. It comes out of nowhere to fill our heads with dreams of flush fives and legendary Jimbos. But I think what put it over the top was when it launched on iOS and Android earlier this fall. Not only does the mobile version cost $5 less than the desktop Steam edition (or console ports), but there are no intrusive ads or additional purchases anywhere in the game. That includes all crossover cardbacks (like the ones with characters from , Cyberpunk 2077 etc.) and the large will be released early next year.

Beyond that, there is no difference in features between the mobile and desktop/console versions. Admittedly, that’s due in large part to the game being a relatively simple title (at least in terms of graphics). But even then, you’d be surprised how easy that mess is. The game boots almost instantly and even if you’re crushing the antes while pushing your score deep into scientific notation, the system doesn’t falter. Throw in a satisfying interface, support for cloud saves, multiple languages ​​and profiles and a high contrast option that’s great for accessibility, and you have an app that plays well on almost any device.

In fact, I would argue that foldables like the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold and Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 are the perfect joker-hunting devices. Their large screens feel like a perfect match for Balatro without feeling cramped, which sometimes happens in older gadgets with less wide displays. The text is generally easy to read (although sometimes not so much on smaller devices) and there is plenty of open space to push things around without getting in your own way. I have a few minor gripes that you can read about in my longer piece but overall I’m confident I’ll get more than my money’s worth for years to come.

— Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter