I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time.
My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.
> It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
Exactly.
To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :
- You know from the start you may not win every round.
- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.
And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.
Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.
I think Balatro is way too hard to be a good stress reliever. Unlike solitaire, I can barely win a run in Balatro and there's no indication as to what I could do better. I actually find it stressful more than stress relieving, if anything.
For me it was Battleship Solitaire (https://lukerissacher.com/battleships), which I found via hackernews. For the first few weeks I played it every day at every opportunity, and since then I fire it up at least every couple days and burn through it. Its a less involved Sudoku logic puzzle that is mind-bogglingly satisfying to complete.
I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Balatro is building on 50 years of addiction-seeking game design. Everything from the sound effects, to the random round rewards, to the pacing of unlocks is optimized to be as attention-grabbing and dopamine-releasing as possible.
It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi
It's a roguelike deckbuilder. The randomness is necessary to the genre.
I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized. The only way the developer makes more money is through players telling other players how fun the game is, which convinces them to buy it.
What's interesting to me is that despite all that (the escalating lights and noise as your score ticks up, and the hypnotic effect of the sound slowing down and speeding up when you fail/restart the run, are two big examples), I seem to be the only person who hit a wall with Balatro. I enjoyed it for a few days, saw what grinding out all of the jokers/stickers would be like, and put it down. Not in an insulted way, but in a "I've had a good meal, I'm full, and I'm happy to leave the rest of my plate" way. I find this particularly interesting because other games do have an ability to grab me by the throat.
I think both of these are true. Balatro is a like a finely honed blade of dopamine harvesting -- it truly does build on the most addictive facets of gaming we have discovered thus far. It is also laudable in the ethos of its designer, expressed through the game. As others have said, there is not and will never be monetization, per LocalThunk's distaste for gambling(we can be pedantic and argue that at the core of each roguelike is a gambling aspect but).
I think there is a fine line here between the cynicist 'never indulge' and the consoomer/accelerationist 'do as you will'
I love this app and have played multiple Klondike/Spider Solitaire games a day using it. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want a simple game of Solitaire in the same spirit as the post.
First time I've played any game through the end just because I wanted to see an ad! It's really well made, gotta confess I went the CLI route because I don't know how to design GUIs with moving parts. Also, I wanted to play my game with controls tailored for the keyboard layout (ASDFGHJ keys control the columns if using QWERTY).
Very nice but I keep losing my progress on a game with swipe gestures on android accidentally triggering back functionality when I pull a card from right to left, even with installed PWA version
I was gonna recommend the same one. I wanna add that Hempuli (Baba is You, Noita) also made a solitaire collection inspired by Zachtronics. It's just 3 bucks on his itchio and it's something I play while I have my coffee.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection inspired me to begin experimenting with Solitaire variants, and hopefully Balatro's well-deserved success will stoke people's curiosity in similar titles.
For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:
Thirding this recommendation, Fortune's Favor solitaire and Shenzen solitaire from this collection are some of my favorite variants ever. Either of them would be worth the price of admission alone.
I absolutely love the Zachtronics solitaires. I play at least one a day on my phone. That said, I wish they were slightly better designed for phones, since the text/images and touch targets can be a little small. It's too bad Zachtronics is no more -- it'd be nice if they were able to do some UI updates.
This is why I play it with actual physical cards. I learned it as kid so partly it's a comfort ritual, and partly the tactile interaction is very soothing.
It also "forces" you to keep playing when it gets tough, as a complete shuffle plus new setup isn't just a simple click away. It's also nice to get off the screen for a while.
I recently bought a smaller deck of cards, like half or three quarters of the size of a normal deck or so. Makes it easier to play without needing a huge table.
That's long been my favorite Android version of klondike too.
But my favorite favorite remains the old Windows 95 Solitaire. I keep a copy around even on Linux through wine to play sometimes on PC. The main reason? I still love the ending animation of all the cards springing down without clearing the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uev21NTzom8 I don't understand why no other version seems to want to implement this ending animation, it's the best one of all time.
I was horrified to find Microsoft removed a simple Solitaire with a junk app full of ads (I hadn't looked at Solitaire in years). Perfect example of enshitification.
It did have the benefit of me deciding I'll never purchase another Windows computer ever again and my family just doing physical card games.
One nice side benefit of DNS-level adblocking (pi-hole, etc) is that a lot of mobile games never end up showing ads. It doesn't always work perfectly, but in particular I play a euchre game on my phone that frequently asks me to "pay X to play with no ads" and every time I think "What ads?"
That said, sometimes I pay to support the developer if I like the game. Sucks when a game I like doesn't offer the "remove ads" option.
Was looking for this on iPhone as well some weeks ago, and came across a Solitaire that is included in Apple Arcade that works really well, doesn't have any ads or other distractions, just plain Solitaire.
And another bonus is that Balatro (which the submission author created) is included in Apple Arcade too, which was the original reason I got Arcade.
>It’s now been over a year since launch and I am still playing Balatro almost daily. I play a couple runs before I go to bed
I think this is really important, especially for games. Play the game you make!
There's a fair number of games that I've played where the developer clearly has not sat down and played through the game as a player would. No skips, no custom developer-only starts or features, no rushing through sections "because I know what happens", etc. To be fair, though, these are often below $5 games on Steam, so I'm sure a chunk of them are cash grabs rather than an honest attempt at making a successful game.
The story of the Hotline Miami 2 devs comes to mind where they mentioned that they play tested the game at half speed a lot of the times, which, including many other factors, contributes to the game being way harder than the first part.
No, he said he doesn't play them AFTER they release. But he plays them constantly when they're in development. One of the difficulty rules at FromSoft is that each boss and area has to be beatable by Miyazaki (which he said is a good baseline, because he likes challenge but doesn't consider himself good at games).
Balatro is the only game where my score has maxed out the value of a double precision floating point number. And this isn't some crazy speedrunning strategy, it's very achievable for normal players. It's strangely compelling to make numbers go up and Balatro harnesses that better than any game I've played.
If you want the numbers to go even more up, the Talisman mod reworks everything to use BigInts for practically unlimited number go up potential. It's mainly intended to be paired with other mods like Cryptid which add obscenely overpowered cards, but Talisman can be used on its own if you just want to attempt the normally unwinnable ante 39 and beyond in vanilla.
Wow you can do that in a mod? Crazy. I wondered if localthunk would do this or if it was actually kind of nice for the game to have a "kill screen" ending like the old arcade games.
Unlike Universal Paperclips, I actually have a desire to play Balatro more than once.
It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available"
The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automation both the game and you are proceeding towards the heat death of the universe and all you can do is accelerate it.
It's also a time boxed game - if you ignore the Civilization "one more turn" effect, any given game will be over within 20 minutes.
"To force players to get out of their comfort zone and explore the design of the game in a way they might not if this were a fully unguided gaming experience."
It's great how rogue like/lite games such as slay the spire and Hades have riffed on that concept. Guess what, you won't have the same power ups this time. You're going to have to learn to play the same game in a different way. So in Balatro you're playing draw poker in an attempt to build different hands based on your strategy.
While true, it still feels like there's only a handful (ha!) of viable strategies, and / or a few "must-haves".
I'm playing on mobile so no Steam mods, but I do hope the developer will add additional game modes, cards, modifiers, etc to change things up a bit. Or I should just get out of my comfort zone and take a chance lol.
I mean, that might be the intent on paper, but when I was going through a game like Dead Cells, I still had specific weapons or layouts that I was especially effective with--and in practice that just meant that if I didn't manage to get my favorite bat or nun-chuck weapons to drop, there was a good chance I wasn't going to be able to complete that run.
Dead Cells's "Custom Mode" lets you eliminate loads of objects from the set offered, making it much more likely for you to get weapons you want.
It's somewhat unique among the roguelites I've seen in not only offering this but also treating it as valid play: any wins/achievements in this mode (e.g. more BC) will unlock properly.
So, no need to put up with Spartan Sandals ever again!
Non-twitch based roguelites make it somewhat easier to learn and deploy those alternate strategies in my experience because you can read a bit of a clue online, think about it, and then play through a round slowly and thoughtfully. In an action game, you know, you pick up the sickle weapon for the first time and you may have literally seconds of experience with it before you die.
I spent some substantial time in Enter the Gungeon but have to admit I kind of bounced off of it for this reason... I don't have the raw time to compensate for the fact that the guns require certain muscle memory for each of them, and the bosses need certain muscle memory for each of them, and the combinations require certain muscle memory... I enjoyed my time and you might say I got close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I just don't have the time to get there in a game where fractions of a second count.
It really does work that way. It’s a perfect game if you have ~25 minutes to kill. It’s fairly complex, but doesn’t really require player to keep much information between runs. I hate going back to a game after a few weeks only to discover that I no longer remember how to play it.
Personally I've had ~1 hour runs often. Am I just a slow player or am I missing something? For context I've been playing for less than two weeks and haven't yet beat ante 11 (7M feels like a big step in difficulty).
As you go up the antes, the number of viable strategies decreases, until it narrows down to just one or two a number of antes quite a ways before the "end".
IIRC localthunk has said that he considers the normal "beat Ante 8" of Balatro to be the "real" Balatro and that the "beat all the higher antes" is mostly there to satisfy people who want it but it is not what he is optimizing for. In contrast to a lot of Roguelikes where "beating the game" is more "an offramp for those who want to call it a day but technically just the beginning of the 'real' experience". Both of which are fine goals, IMHO, but I think it helps to know that Balatro's additional antes are not designed to be in the latter category.
Different people play at different speeds. And some builds require more thought than others. I find that it takes about half an hour on average for me to win a run (reach ante 9).
Nah, it's pretty common for runs to take that long, especially if you're going into Endless. Some of the top Balatro streamers I watch will frequently have runs that take that long (or longer).
It does help to increase the game speed. I've got mine up to max speed (but I played it at normal speed for quite awhile, while I got used to the mechanics).
I can still remember how to play the original Doom after all these years (and where all the secrets are!) but the modern editions have so many controls and weapon modes that if I don't play it for a month I don't remember how anything works.
What a thoughtful post. I think there is a narrative that localthunk is a "shitty programmer" (which he might very well be), but that by extension, it also means that he just got lucky and bumblefucked his way into massive success - almost as though he didn't know any better.
A post like this dispels that narrative - he clearly put a ton of thought into the design of that game and was incredibly intentional about where he wanted it to go.
In what quarters is that narrative? Surely one only has to play Balatro for an hour or two to understand the incredible game design effort that underpins it all, which is brought so vibrantly to life by the music, art, animations, and all the rest of it.
I can't imagine someone appreciating all this and still managing to poo poo it over a few bugs or maybe some quibbles about it having been built in Lua.
My assumption is that a lot of the people that look at small chunks of code and judge someone’s programming ability are people who have only worked in corporate environments and have never had to build a large project on their own, and don’t have any understanding of the effort it takes to make a game like Balatro by yourself. Maybe that’s an unfair judgment. But so is calling LocalThunk a “shitty programmer” over some questionable if-else logic.
He clearly comes across as a conscious game designer as well. And programming doesn't need to be good on today's machines. Many of the indie successes are shit software, like Minecraft, Valheim, Cities Skylines, Project Zomboid, and I'm sure there's many others. Great product design and PR are infinitely more important than software quality.
I have never heard that assertion, I don’t know how anyone can play Balatro and not feel that it is a deeply intentional creation. I think localthunk would be the first to tell you they got lucky with how it found an audience outside of themselves, but everything in the game oozes polish and intention.
Even if the underlying code is "bad", who cares? There are far more important skills in indie game development then programming ability. I'd much rather play an interesting, well-designed game with a few bugs and messy code over a well-programmed but boring game.
> My fantasy was that I was playing this weird game many years later on a lazy Sunday afternoon; I play a couple of runs, enjoy my time for about an hour, then set it down and continue the rest of my day. I wanted it to feel evergreen, comforting, and enjoyable in a very low-stakes way.
I will pay money for more games like this. I want more games like this.
I could write an essay on this beautiful breath of fresh air. Balatro, like many beautiful pieces of software, is defined by what it is and isn't. No ads, no screwy Skinner box mechanics. Just wholesome gameplay.
Readit News
My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.
I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.
Exactly.
To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :
- You know from the start you may not win every round.
- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.
I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.
And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.
Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.
Nailed it. A good rogue-like deck-builder should always have these qualities. My favorite for a few years now - Slay the Spire - lives by this.
It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi
I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized. The only way the developer makes more money is through players telling other players how fun the game is, which convinces them to buy it.
Perhaps it was too overt?
I think there is a fine line here between the cynicist 'never indulge' and the consoomer/accelerationist 'do as you will'
Deleted Comment
Unfortunately, many solitaire phone apps are filled with ads, slow, or have clunky controls.
A few years ago, however, I found https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.tobiasbielefeld.solitaire... . Its free and open source, and quite fast with nice shortcuts to move the cards.
I love this app and have played multiple Klondike/Spider Solitaire games a day using it. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you want a simple game of Solitaire in the same spirit as the post.
Doesn’t generate unwinnable games[1] & detects dead-ends. Works offline after the first visit. No ads until game over, and they aren’t obtrusive.
Often lauded on HN, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41972075 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42031052.
1: The probability that a random deal is unwinnable is ~20%. Wikipedia has a section on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_(solitaire)#Probabili...
Well, it was designed for the terminal, try the webconsole version here: https://rpigab.gitlab.io/solitaire-cli/
Source: https://gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli
Edit: screenshot: https://ibb.co/4RkTFzZ4
The X to close the ad didn’t work.
https://hempuli.itch.io/a-solitaire-mystery
Funny enough it has a "Royal Flush Solitaire" where you make poker hands and your goal is to reach 240 points.
Binary Solitaire and Transformation are my favorites.
For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:
https://rezmason.github.io/patience
I recently bought a smaller deck of cards, like half or three quarters of the size of a normal deck or so. Makes it easier to play without needing a huge table.
But my favorite favorite remains the old Windows 95 Solitaire. I keep a copy around even on Linux through wine to play sometimes on PC. The main reason? I still love the ending animation of all the cards springing down without clearing the background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uev21NTzom8 I don't understand why no other version seems to want to implement this ending animation, it's the best one of all time.
It did have the benefit of me deciding I'll never purchase another Windows computer ever again and my family just doing physical card games.
Other features include history of all your plays, statistics, and ability to play older hands again.
Another detail that might be relevant to HN audience is that it is built using 100% SwiftUI.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-solitaire-app/id1613070030...
That said, sometimes I pay to support the developer if I like the game. Sucks when a game I like doesn't offer the "remove ads" option.
And another bonus is that Balatro (which the submission author created) is included in Apple Arcade too, which was the original reason I got Arcade.
Here's one written in C# and compiled to WebAssembly:
https://solitaire.xaml.live/
Source code:
https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Solitaire
It's not overly configurable, but there are zero ads, trackers etc. and it's very lightweight with hopefully no (significant) bugs.
https://www.solitairecat.com/
Dead Comment
I think this is really important, especially for games. Play the game you make!
There's a fair number of games that I've played where the developer clearly has not sat down and played through the game as a player would. No skips, no custom developer-only starts or features, no rushing through sections "because I know what happens", etc. To be fair, though, these are often below $5 games on Steam, so I'm sure a chunk of them are cash grabs rather than an honest attempt at making a successful game.
See: https://youtu.be/IcgmmBEEHsk?t=1427
More than Universal Paperclips?
It also requires more thought and strategy at every point rather than "wait for line to go up and click buy on anything available"
The biggest difference is that you can lose Balatro, and you can lose it very quickly either due to bad luck or bad strategy. In Universal Paperclips nothing matters, once you get the most basic automation both the game and you are proceeding towards the heat death of the universe and all you can do is accelerate it.
It's also a time boxed game - if you ignore the Civilization "one more turn" effect, any given game will be over within 20 minutes.
It's great how rogue like/lite games such as slay the spire and Hades have riffed on that concept. Guess what, you won't have the same power ups this time. You're going to have to learn to play the same game in a different way. So in Balatro you're playing draw poker in an attempt to build different hands based on your strategy.
I'm playing on mobile so no Steam mods, but I do hope the developer will add additional game modes, cards, modifiers, etc to change things up a bit. Or I should just get out of my comfort zone and take a chance lol.
It's somewhat unique among the roguelites I've seen in not only offering this but also treating it as valid play: any wins/achievements in this mode (e.g. more BC) will unlock properly.
So, no need to put up with Spartan Sandals ever again!
I spent some substantial time in Enter the Gungeon but have to admit I kind of bounced off of it for this reason... I don't have the raw time to compensate for the fact that the guns require certain muscle memory for each of them, and the bosses need certain muscle memory for each of them, and the combinations require certain muscle memory... I enjoyed my time and you might say I got close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I just don't have the time to get there in a game where fractions of a second count.
Personally I've had ~1 hour runs often. Am I just a slow player or am I missing something? For context I've been playing for less than two weeks and haven't yet beat ante 11 (7M feels like a big step in difficulty).
IIRC localthunk has said that he considers the normal "beat Ante 8" of Balatro to be the "real" Balatro and that the "beat all the higher antes" is mostly there to satisfy people who want it but it is not what he is optimizing for. In contrast to a lot of Roguelikes where "beating the game" is more "an offramp for those who want to call it a day but technically just the beginning of the 'real' experience". Both of which are fine goals, IMHO, but I think it helps to know that Balatro's additional antes are not designed to be in the latter category.
It does help to increase the game speed. I've got mine up to max speed (but I played it at normal speed for quite awhile, while I got used to the mechanics).
I can still remember how to play the original Doom after all these years (and where all the secrets are!) but the modern editions have so many controls and weapon modes that if I don't play it for a month I don't remember how anything works.
A post like this dispels that narrative - he clearly put a ton of thought into the design of that game and was incredibly intentional about where he wanted it to go.
I can't imagine someone appreciating all this and still managing to poo poo it over a few bugs or maybe some quibbles about it having been built in Lua.
My assumption is that a lot of the people that look at small chunks of code and judge someone’s programming ability are people who have only worked in corporate environments and have never had to build a large project on their own, and don’t have any understanding of the effort it takes to make a game like Balatro by yourself. Maybe that’s an unfair judgment. But so is calling LocalThunk a “shitty programmer” over some questionable if-else logic.
Apparently there are places where the code is like a thousand lines of if card_name then effect.
I will pay money for more games like this. I want more games like this.
I could write an essay on this beautiful breath of fresh air. Balatro, like many beautiful pieces of software, is defined by what it is and isn't. No ads, no screwy Skinner box mechanics. Just wholesome gameplay.