In Elden Ring I hoarded every damage buff to the end of the game and used none of them. The logic: pop one on a boss attempt, almost certainly lose that attempt, and now I've wasted a thing I worked to collect for nothing. So I'd save it for "an attempt that really matters," except I could never tell which one that was, and by the time my attempts got good I'd beat the boss without it — which retroactively proved I never needed it. WHO is this item for? When is it even meant to be used? Same dance in Witcher 3 with blade oils, in Prey with the recycler charge. The item was never the problem. I was optimizing the fun out of my own game.
That phrase isn't mine — it's Soren Johnson's, and it's become a law of the field: given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game. I take it further than most designers do. Any time the best strategy isn't the most fun strategy, I think that's a failure of the game's design, not a failure of the player. Which is a demanding law to hold a game to. Most games break it somewhere.
I've spent a genuinely stupid number of hours inside Balatro looking for the place it breaks — the seam where playing well and having fun quietly come apart — and I can't find it. That's the whole reason I keep pushing it on everyone. "Perfect" isn't a crown I'm qualified to hand out; I'm a player teaching himself design by taking games apart, not a designer. All I mean is: I went in certain the flaw was there, and I came out unable to point at it.
If you haven't played it: it's a roguelike about poker hands. You play hands to clear a score, and between rounds you buy Jokers, little modifiers that bend the rules. That's the whole box. And that tiny box holds more good design than games three hundred times its size. Here's my honest read of why.
You can see the entire machine running
Before any of the clever stuff, Balatro makes sure you can watch the math happen. Play a hand and the score assembles in front of you — chips, then a multiplier — and every Joker that fires lights up and shouts its number, left to right. Nothing is buried in a tooltip you have to go dig up. You can always answer "why did that score 800?", and it's precisely because you can answer it that you start trying to make it score 1,600.
That sounds like a small nicety. It's the entire foundation. Remember the Elden Ring problem — I couldn't tell what a buff was worth, so I never spent it. Balatro has no hidden values to hoard against. When you can see the whole engine, the smart play and the satisfying play stop being two different things, and there's no boring-but-correct move lurking in a menu, because there are no hidden menus.
"Any time the best strategy is not the most fun strategy, I believe, is a failure of the game's design."— me, the lens I bring to every game I take apart
The Jokers are a combinatorial playground
Here's where the real thing lives. On their own the Jokers are almost boring: this one adds multiplier when you play a pair, that one gives chips per face card, another doubles a number if some condition holds. Legible. Unremarkable. The magic is that they multiply against each other, and the whole design is tuned so combinations detonate.
You never find one overpowered card. You find two cheap, forgettable Jokers that happen to feed each other, and the instant they click your score doesn't climb — it goes vertical. One sets a condition, a second cashes it, a third multiplies the result, and a hand that scored 40 a few rounds ago scores 40,000. And the thrill isn't the big number. It's the half-second before it, when you realize the cards are about to start talking to each other and you, specifically, are the one who caught it.
- Each Joker is legible on its own, so you always understand the pieces.
- The value lives in the interactions — a space far larger than the short list of cards lets on.
- You're never handed the combo. You find it. The depth is something you build, not something the game spends on you.
That's the difference between content and a system. The list of cards ran out of surprises for me ages ago. The relationships between them, which I can recombine forever, still haven't.
The "one more run" loop is honest about being a loop
Roguelikes live and die on the run — start from nothing, build something improbable, usually lose, keep only what you learned. Balatro's is the tightest I've felt: short enough that "one more" is always plausible, long enough that a good one feels earned. And when you lose it's almost never the game's fault. You can replay the exact moment you got greedy, or got scared, or fumbled the combo in your shop. The blame lands squarely on you — which is the kindest thing a game can do, because it means you are the thing that can improve, and you can feel yourself doing it.
Now the honest part, because the law cuts both ways and I'd rather say it than have you notice it. A loop this clean is very hard to put down, and "I can't stop" is not the same compliment as "this is good for me." I haven't really mastered Balatro so much as lost the ability to walk away from it. The same frictionlessness that closes the seam closes around your evening. A perfect object can be a perfect trap — the bars on the cage are gorgeous, and it's a cage all the same. That's not a trophy. I'm just telling you where the good thing turns on you.
The itch it left, and the thing I'm actually building
I don't take a game apart to rank it. I take it apart and it leaves an itch, and the itch turns into something I try to make — usually badly at first, the way you do when a feeling gets under your skin. Balatro left the worst itch in years, and it was specific: cards are quiet and orderly, but dice are loud. They happen to you, live, with the whole table watching. Does the number-assembling magic survive being moved onto something that chaotic?
That's not a vague hunch anymore. It's "Balatro, but with dice," and I've done the homework. A couple of Farkle roguelites already exist on Steam — Dice with Death, Dicealot — and they're just not good, which reads as an open lane, not a closed one. The scoring skeleton is Farkle; the modifier layer borrows Balatro's Jokers; and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 already ships a menagerie of loaded dice I can lift the math from wholesale — one that rolls a 6 a third of the time, another that's 66% twos. I even have the framing gag: the filthiest version of Henry is the final boss, and all he does is play dice.
I don't know yet if the magic transfers. I might be chasing a feeling that only works when the input sits still and waits for you. But that's what a good teacher does — you leave wanting to sit the exam yourself, not memorize the answer key. The highest compliment I can pay Balatro isn't that it's perfect. It's that it made me want to find out, with my own clumsy hands, how a thing that good is even built.
Keep going A dice roguelike, because Balatro · The games I love, and why