I have cited a few games as inspiration for Balatro in the past, but I wanted to talk about one in particular that hasn’t been mentioned much that arguably is the most important.
I think if I had some kind of Balatro vision board, solitaire (Klondike) would be right in the middle of it with a big red circle around it. You can probably see some of the similarities between my game and the classic solo card game. I wanted my game to have the same vibe.
If you’re somehow unfamiliar, solitaire is a group of card games characterized by solo play. Klondike is usually the variant that most people in the west associate with solitaire, but one could argue even Balatro is technically a solitaire game. Traditional solitaire games exist at the peak of game culture for me. These games are so ubiquitous and accepted by society that almost everyone has some memory of playing them. They have transcended gaming culture more than even the biggest IPs (like Tetris or Mario), and they occupy this very interesting wholesome niche. Solitaire is almost viewed as a positive pastime more than a game. That feeling interests me greatly as a game designer.
As Balatro 1.0 development drew nearer to a close in early 2024, I found myself picturing the type of person that might play my game and what a typical play session might look like for them. 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 think that’s one of the reasons why there isn’t a player character, health, or classic ‘enemies’ in the game as well. I wanted this game to be as low stakes as a crossword or a sudoku puzzle while still exercising the problem solving part of the brain.
Essentially I wanted to play Balatro like people play solitaire.
One of the main ways that the vibe of solitaire and my own game differ is in the meta-game Balatro has that solitaire does not. Things like achievements, stake levels, unlocks, and challenges certainly can be looked at as a way to artificially inflate playtime, but those things were added for 2 other reasons I was more concerned about:
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. In solitaire this probably isn’t super useful because the game has far fewer moving parts, so the player can figure everything out by themselves, but I don’t think that’s the case with a game like Balatro. I feel like even I learned a lot from these guiding goals that I wasn’t anticipating many months after the game launched.
To give the players that already enjoy the game loop a sort of checklist to work through if they so choose. They can come up with a list of goals on their own (as I see many from the community have) but I do really appreciate when I play other games and they give me tasks to accomplish and shape my long-form play around while I enjoy the shorter play sessions individually.
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, and I feel like I just might have accomplished the task of recreating the feeling of playing solitaire for myself. Seeing the discourse around my game has me fairly convinced that this is decidedly not how the average player has been interacting with my game, but I’m still thrilled that people are having a great time with it and I’m even more happy that I feel like this game turned out how I wanted as a player myself.
This is why you might have seen me refer to this game as ‘jazz solitaire’ in the past. I wanted to bring the old feeling of solitaire into a game with modern design bells and whistles, creating something new and yet familiar. Only time will tell if I actually accomplished that.