> Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it, but wasn’t blown away by it. I think you and I are probably similar in that. I'd say I really enjoyed about 20 hours of it, then played an additional 30 hours where I was hoping things would start getting fun again, but it never came. Ignoring the video Slots scoring, and poker themes. I would still say luck is so much stronger in balatro then on any roguelike I've played. To the extent that the best "strategy", is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don't show up before the ante outpaces you. In short, psudo-gambling mechanics are IMO largely what hooks people in the game, which I also have to say the PEGI group may actually be if anything slightly underestimating the risk. IE the game is 100% not gambling, but it draws on everything in the brain that gambling does. "Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further". I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there's a reason why there's such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics. Balatro IMO leans into all of the hook on gambling tropes, just avoiding the last step of exploiting it to get users to continue to pay them money. It's actually a pretty reasonable question to ask... does it put kids/teenagers into a mindset that will make them more vulnerable to a less ethical game developer that takes that last step.

> To the extent that the best “strategy”, is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don’t show up before the ante outpaces you. Yeah, I feel this. *Slay the Spire* ability to choose paths gives you some control over fixing some bad RNG, so *Balatro* _feels_ more luck-based. That said, it doesn't really _feel_ like a "gambling" game. Gambling games have essentially _no_ skill, whereas *Balatro* does have a lot of player choice, where the "best" choice isn't obvious (i.e. can't just follow a system). Gambling, however, usually has minimal player interaction, or there's optimal play that cuts the gap between the house and the player the most (but never more than 50%). It's basically like other deck building games, just with a poker theme and a bit more RNG.

Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, someone defended Balatro's RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that *only* 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty. I don't know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game. That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance... at absolute best you only have an 80% chance of winning on the hardest difficulty, and that in 20% of cases it gives you a completely unwinnable setup. I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd. The average player is not playong 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button... this is so beyond the realm of "just git gud scrub".

> “Maybe next game will give me cooler jokers that will get me further”. I mean yes all games have some extent of these, there’s a reason why there’s such a large overlap. As well as why basically all mobile app developers, and a good portion of big corporate monstrocities turned their games to build on gambling mechanics. The psychological term at the core of the mechanic is a variable reward schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcement_schedules >In behavioral psychology, reinforcement refers to consequences that increase the likelihood of an organism's future behavior, typically in the presence of a particular antecedent stimulus >Variable ratio schedule (VR) – reinforced on average every nth response, but not always on the nth response.[14]: 88  >Variable ratio: rapid, steady rate of responding; most resistant to extinction. >Applications > >Reinforcement and punishment are ubiquitous in human social interactions, and a great many applications of operant principles have been suggested and implemented. Following are a few examples. > >Addiction and dependence > >Positive and negative reinforcement play central roles in the development and maintenance of addiction and drug dependence. An addictive drug is intrinsically rewarding; that is, it functions as a primary positive reinforcer of drug use. The brain's reward system assigns it incentive salience (i.e., it is "wanted" or "desired"),[31][32][33] so as an addiction develops, deprivation of the drug leads to craving. In addition, stimuli associated with drug use – e.g., the sight of a syringe, and the location of use – become associated with the intense reinforcement induced by the drug.[31][32][33] These previously neutral stimuli acquire several properties: their appearance can induce craving, and they can become conditioned positive reinforcers of continued use. The thing is that *many* games use an aspect of random reward, which leverages the conditioning effect of a variable ratio schedule to get people to want to play. [*Rogue*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_%28video_game%29) had random drops in 1980, for something early that I can name off-the-cuff. Like, having random rewards are all over video games, were around long before F2P or pay-to-win lootboxes. Like, banning games for leveraging that mechanic would ban a huge range of video games, card games, board games, etc. I think that the reason that people worry about it with gambling is that a runaway impact on someone *directly* results in draining money from them, especially since someone can hope to "make money back". "This will help encourage someone to buy an expansion or sequel" is acceptable, but "money is spent on a per-roll basis in the hopes of getting money" is not. *Balatro* definitely makes use of random rewards...but many, many games do that. *Balatro* looks a little like a gambling game. You can go and play video poker with actual money, and the first round or so of *Balatro* is simply video poker, with virtual money, before *Balatro*'s mechanics enter. But...I'm not sure that that makes *Balatro* particularly problematic. Maybe, I guess, someone could play *Balatro*, then think that "video poker is cool" and then go play video poker for money. I guess maybe that's what the PEGI people were upset about. I don't know how much any special *Balatro* convertability into an actual gambling game is a factor. I mean, I am pretty confident that you could take virtually any video game and turn it into a gambling game. Hell, a number of free-to-play games spanning many genres *do* have some degree of winning at least in-game stuff when you insert money.

> And I don’t think you can solve “bluffing” either, because just knowing the theory behind bluffing changes how and when you bluff. *Any* theory, to have any impact, must change how you act. You can't get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker. The best you can do is exploit what I mentioned -- information leaks, or try to find someone who isn't playing an optimal strategy and exploit that. But if *poker player X* is playing according to what von Neumann would advise, they have a bluffing approach where, no matter the strategy you adopt, you will not tend to come out ahead in the long run. They can tell you that that's their strategy, say "I went and read up on game theory, and here's how I'm playing", and it still won't permit you to do so. Now, that's a conservative strategy. Minimax relies on the assumption that the other player will play optimally, given the information available to them. A "von Neumann" player won't necessarily exploit weaknesses that someone else has as strongly as some other strategy might. So, let's say that a player absolutely never folds, for example. It's possible to adopt some non-von-Neumann strategy that permits a player to "win more" against a player playing suboptimally. It just means that no other player in poker can get an advantage, over the long run, over someone playing what von Neumann would recommend. >None of that relates to Balatro at all. I agree --- bluffing is outside its scope. *Balatro* is similar to video poker, not traditional, multiplayer poker.

> You can’t get an edge over someone playing game-theoretic optimal bluffing strategy in poker. These types of "solved games" make some pretty hefty assumptions, such as limiting possible actions. But that can only really happen with online poker, when you do it live, you introduce a ton of variance that a good player can exploit. Algorithms may have "solved" a game, but that doesn't mean a human has. It's the same idea with a game like chess, where we've developed essentially "perfect" computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move, which will give you the best possible outcome. Does that make chess uninteresting? No. At the highest levels, it's less a strategy or tactical game and more psychological. The idea is to surprise your opponent and play something they aren't prepared for which gets them into time trouble figuring out your plans, and the clock becomes a piece you can use against them. So the prep for a game is studying their past games and guessing what they might be preparing against you, and preparing something they won't expect to use against them. When dealing with humans, there will *always* be weaknesses to exploit, and that's interesting. So the game of live poker remains interesting.

> It’s the same idea with a game like chess, where we’ve developed essentially “perfect” computers that can compute every possible board state from a given point onward and give you an optimal move Chess isn't solved: chess computers have outplayed the best current human players, but they can't always provide an optimal move, can't look down branches far enough. Although they do use Minimax! But it is similar to the extent that you can get not-perfectly-optimal play that will probably do better than a human. > When dealing with humans, there will always be weaknesses to exploit That's probably true.

> they can’t always provide an optimal move After the first 10 moves or so, they can. There's something like 9 billion possible chess positions after that point, and opening theory is well established, so it's largely solved. Computers can calculate something like 100 moves deep (and nearly all branches), though they do use heuristic to eliminate unlikely branches. There are some interesting games between top bots because of that heuristic, but any of the top bots will consistently beat a human because they can compute orders of magnitude more possible game states. So it's essentially solved, meaning that, in practice, a top AI will pretty much always beat or draw a top player. The difference in rating between a top bot and the top human player is something like the difference between a GM and someone aiming for IM, and we expect a similar performance difference.

> The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button… this is so beyond the realm of “just git gud scrub”. Yeah, I would say "playing 100% optimally is at least fair to look at, but if by known RNG, you can know things like say what joker will be negative if you take the skip blind, or what what will show up if you reroll the shop or open a pack, then that's such a huge advantage it doesn't even deserve to be part of the comparison. IE making zero mistakes would be a fair comparison... IE if you always take the move that has the highest odds of success with the information a player has, but counting decisions based on avoiding something with a 99% chance of success because the player knows it will be in the 1% is crazy bad way to grade something.

Eh, I really don't agree that thinking about future rounds is even remotely like gambling. It's not the random chance that makes it gambling, it's the wagering and possibility of a payoff. No one would mistake vanilla solitaire for gambling even though it's based on random factors and minimal strategy. I think what you're referring to as gambling tropes are more *engagement* tactics, which are often used by gambling apps but are fundamentally distinct.