Balatro, the Time-Draining Poker-ish Game, Is Coming to Smartphones Soon

Indie deck-building game Balatro broke onto the PC and console gaming scene back in February with all the charm of a backroom poker dealer looking for players — just come in and play a few hands, it’ll be fun and relaxing. An hour later, you’ve cranked out the wildest deck strategy and, win or lose on your run, one thing is certain: You’ll probably talk yourself into another one. Goodbye, time. 

Though players could save themselves from chaining hours of play by, y’know, leaving their home, soon Balatro will be playable everywhere, when it comes to smartphones on Sept. 26, as the game’s account announced on X. You’ve been warned.

For those who’ve avoided the incredible addiction of Balatro, the game is a deck builder themed around poker. Players start with a standard deck of 52 Bicycle-style playing cards, and must draw and play a limited number of poker hands to defeat a score limit in each round. Scoring follows poker’s hierarchy, with the humble high card and pair at the lowest end and the royal flush at the top. 

Through the run, players can modify their deck, improve the scoring of certain hands and acquire joker cards that dramatically change how they play. This makes it a bit of a roguelike in that each run can be drastically different than the last, though there’s also an overlap of poker skill — like statistically expecting the best hands you can draw into with what’s left in the deck — to reward conventional card sharks.

Balatro isn’t a visually complex game, so there’s no real graphical obstacle standing in the way of it coming to smartphones, just the moral obstacle of considering the global hit to productivity expected once this game arrives on phones.

There’s no pricing info for Balatro’s mobile version — just word that it’s coming to iOS and Android, as well as the $5-per-month Apple Arcade service.

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