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Balatro’s creator has barely played other deckbuilders, and thinks that’s partly why it succeededSpared genericism
Spared genericism
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack
LocalThunk explained that the game which game Balatro started out based on the Cantonese card gameBig Two. Then they encountered videos of Luck Be A Landlord and became, in GamesRadar+’s words, obsessed with it—but without playing it. Like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord is a ‘make numbers do big’ game, only you’re building a wildly complex slot machine crammed full of synergies then hitting a button and watching random chance play out. Landlord is the game Balatro has most reminded me of, so I’m not too surprised to hear that LocalThunk says they have little experience with the genre it perhaps ostensibly resembles: roguelikelike deckbuilders. They say they’ve only played genre champion Slay The Spire to check out a technical solution.
“That’s part of the reason why [Balatro] has succeeded,” LocalThunk told GamesRadar+. “I don’t know the tropes. I only played Slay The Spire last May because I wanted to understand what they did with [gamepad] controls. If I’d played that game before designing this one, it would have infiltrated the design quite a bit. I didn’t want to subconsciously take design elements from those games – and then suddenly mine is less original. Sometimes it’s good to do those things; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But for me, I was making this for myself for fun. I thought it’d be more fun to try myself, not as a retail thing, not ‘this is the correct thing for the game to sell the best.’ Figuring out design issues is fun for me.”
It’s a curious line of conversation because I can’t think of what Balatro would borrow from Slay The Spire. It’s distinct enough, honed in a different enough direction, that it’s hard to imagine swapping out or adding parts. Which I suppose is proof that the process worked here. But what I really like is how Balatro builds on the idea of Luck Be A Landlord and combines it with a card game.
Luck Be A Landlord is a game where you build your own slot machine, filling it with a pool of symbols that will randomly appear on the reels when rolled. Symbols have synergies with other symbols, like babies eating candy and rain watering flowers, creating cascades of combos which grow more complex and thematically weirder as you build this number-producing machine. But Luck Be A Landlord just has you hit a button to roll the reels and watch it go. As I enjoyed my time with it, doing big numbers is only fun for so long. Picking my cards, arranging my jokers, selecting upgrades, and playing my hands gives the luck machine an important and satisfying element of skill. I made that happen. I made those numbers go ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. I made those score flames rise.
