Game of the Year 2024: Balatro [PCGamer]

What part has you stumped?

Value of the hand is ranked like poker. Each hand is worth a number of chips and a multiplier. The face value of cards scored add to the number of chips. You have a set number of times you can discard per round and you use those to throw away cards and redraw trying to get a good hand. You have so many hands per round to try to reach the goal score. Everything else tweaks those variables to get higher scores per hand, which is necessary because the round goal quickly becomes impossible with the base deck and scores.

After 30 minutes I suppose you know all that...

After my first 30 minutes I was hooked and barely able to play anything else for the next month.

Took me like 60 seconds to get it. I play poker and rogue likes already though

I bounced off of it my first couple rounds too, but then I figured it out enough to start trying builds, and it got a lot more fun

I had some prior knowledge before playing by watching someone online play the demo quite a bit, so it didn't take me long to figure out. The major problem I have is that I don't remember which hands are better between straight and flush and around there, but that's easily mitigated by the run button thing on the side.