Apple Arcade's Best Game of 2024: Balatro+
This one-of-a-kind indie gem from the Apple Arcade catalog is perfectly engineered for mobile gaming fun, with ever-shifting rules and audacious wild cards.
The basics of Balatro+ will likely be familiar to card game enthusiasts: Start by playing classic poker hands—like pairs, straights, flushes, and four-of-a-kinds. The better the hand, the more points you score.
But the real excitement of Balatro+ comes from breaking those classic rules, by adding, subtracting, and powering up cards to create score-boosting combinations.
How about an extra ace to play an impossible five-of-a-kind? Or a superpowered jack that quadruples your score—or multiplies it by 20? Every round of Balatro+ delivers random jokers that completely alter—and in many ways define—your strategy, which continually changes while you play.
Unlike most card games, where you figure out a strategy and stick with it, Balatro+ made us feel more like explorers, tinkering with newly unlocked jokers and other powerful cards to develop brilliant tactics on the fly. When everything came together—like when the strategy we devised had us raking in millions of points—it felt like finding gold.
Even the greatest run eventually comes crashing down like a house of cards in Balatro+. But the pang of the loss is quickly replaced by a sense of hope, since the next game will be completely different. With ever-changing rules and seemingly limitless strategies to discover, Balatro+ deals a truly unbeatable hand for Apple Arcade gamers.
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Balatro+ Card Trick: Maximize Your Scoring
Jokers trigger from left to right, so order them in a way that maximizes your scoring. Put a joker that adds to your chips and multiplier to the left of one that multiplies them. It could mean the difference between a failed run and a massive, blind-beating score.
Endless Customization in Balatro+
There are over 150 special cards in the game, each illustrated to reflect its special powers. You can also alter the face cards' art in the game's settings. There you'll find Cyberpunk 2077–themed spades, hearts decorated with an Among Us! character, and more.
Meet the Solo Developer Behind Balatro+
When creating the game, Canada-based solo developer LocalThunk took inspiration from the poker-adjacent Cantonese card game Big Two. But it didn't stop there. LocalThunk perfected the gameplay loop over two and a half years of development.