My favorite game of 2024 will be the first physical edition I’ve bought in years — because the freebie is AMAZING

What you need to know

• Balatro is a deck-building game that took Steam and Xbox by storm earlier this year.
• The Xbox physical Special Edition has just gone live for pre-order at Best Buy for $29.99.
• Balatro Special Edition comes with 10 real Balatro playing cards (5 Jokers and 5 Aces) and will launch officially on 17 September 2024.

It’s been a while since I last discussed Balatro, but this game consumed my thoughts for nearly two months. I initially played it on the Steam Deck and enjoyed it so much that I double-dipped onto Xbox. I lived and breathed Balatro, evangelizing to all would listen as if my life depended on it. Though I’m currently taking a break to avoid hearing the music in my sleep, I still firmly believe it’s my game of the year thus far. Recently, news of a physical edition has whipped me back into my deck-building frenzy. But why? Well, I haven’t been interested in physical games for years, but the Balatro Special Edition includes actual Balatro playing cards—10 in total, featuring 5 aces and 5 jokers.

The game will launch on disc on September 17, 2024. While the announcement was made weeks ago and only the Nintendo Switch version was available for pre-order initially, now Best Buy is also accepting pre-orders for the Xbox edition for $29.99 and I am about to TRIPLE dip to get these cards.

What is Balatro?

Balatro is love, Balatro is life. But no seriously, Balatro is the kind of game you download not knowing much about and end up hopelessly addicted to because of it’s genius gameplay loop. On first appearances, it looks like a poker game where you must play the best hands possible to an achieve a high score, and the score required to get past each level grows every higher. As the scores get increasingly difficult to achieve, you start to wonder how on earth anyone ever finishes a round. The key is the other tools the game gives you, such as Jokers and Tarot cards available to choose in between each round. These cards allow you to ‘cheat’, want a pair to score higher than a royal flush? You can build your deck to do this. You don’t actually need to know anything about poker at all, the game teaches you by playing. 

All of this set to a psychedelic soundtrack, and the ability to unlock better cards to make your next ‘run’ go even better, make for some highly addictive gameplay, and it’s no wonder the game has a cult following of players not only sharing their love for the game but attempting to make their own physical cards.

While many talented artists have tried their hand at bringing Balatro cards to life, it stands to reason that the game’s publishers would want to make some official versions, and we are hungry for them. I’ve pre-ordered my copy of Balatro not to use the disc but to frame the cards and throw some more pennies behind this incredible game that I cannot believe was made by just one person, the mysterious LocalThunk.

Unfortunately, there are no pictures online yet of what the cards will look like, and I’ve tried to create my own ‘IRL Balatro’ many times with a combination of playing cards and my Diablo tarot cards. 

The banana and egg are added without explanation because if you know, you know.

Balatro has already sold over 1 million copies at its last count in April, but it’s also the 4th-highest game on Metacritic so far this year with a score of 90. So, if you don’t believe me, believe the other overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews. You can already get the game as low as $8.69 if you purchase through CD Keys but I still think the $29.99 is more than worth it for the amount of hours of gameplay available and the joy of receiving the physical cards, and with that I’m letting Balatro fever take a hold of me once more.