Balatro is a roguelike deck-building poker game developed by LocalThunk, initially released on PC and consoles in February 2024. It was later ported to iOS and Android in september, allowing me to play it for this critical play. It’s marketed as a strategic card game, but under Balatro’s vibrant pixel aesthetic and beautiful animations lie a manipulative system of randomness and escalating difficulty. These patterns take behaviors from live-service and/or gambling games, borrowing their most addictive structural elements. However, since these patterns aren’t used for micro transactional behavior, is using chance in games for the sole purpose of engagement ethically acceptable?
One key aspect of Balatro’s appeal is how it mirrors the appeal and stakes of poker. Each hand is a gamble, and the game rewards players who chase high-risk, high-reward plays. Balatro actually takes this one step further by introducing exponential growth instead of linear growth through multipliers and an escalating ante system. With each round, the score threshold increases at a faster rate, growing exponentially. I went from needing to score above 100, to needing to score over 300,000. From a developer’s perspective, this creates a rising tension curve that keeps the player engaged, taking Poker’s engagement trick of increasing the ante(stake) and making it more dramatic. During my run with the Red Deck, I created a synergy around a Flush made entirely of Aces, powered up through a Polychrome Glass Joker and a Red Seal. The hand repeatedly triggered 1.5x multipliers, allowing me to clear a threshold through exponential growth. The ante system made that moment feel earned and urgent. Because success depends on keeping up with a rapidly scaling challenge, every decision matters more. The majority of round came down to a single high-scoring hand, which makes the stakes feel constantly real. The exponential difficulty doesn’t just make the game harder. It makes it seemingly matter more, and make the player feel even more invested.
But that sense of urgency also comes with a cost. Balatro leans hard into a manipulative system of randomness that, at first, feels deeply unfair. Shops rotate unpredictably, Jokers appear without warning, and synergy cards that would define your strategy might never show up. Many promising runs collapse through no fault of the player. This system mirrors pay-to-win mechanics in Clash Royale, where randomized chests control both card availability and upgrade speed. A stronger player with a weaker chest pool can still lose, not because they misplayed, but because they lack the upgraded cards needed to compete. In both games, early success depends as much on what you’re given as what you do with it. Your progress in the games are covered by an opaque layer of luck, and Clash Royale lets you bypass that wall with money. But, Balatro gives you the tools to push back.
Balatro may borrows the same psychological tactics, using scarcity, uncertainty, and deferred gratification to keep you chasing better outcomes. However, in balatro, you can end up controlling that randomness. As I kept playing, I stopped gambling on lucky draws and started building consistency. I removed junk cards, duplicated Aces of Hearts, and tailored my deck into a tight machine that almost always delivered the hand I needed. The game never removes randomness, but it allows you to shape it—to stabilize the chaos. That shift is what separates Balatro from the monetized manipulation of Clash Royale. You cannot pay to win here. You have to learn how to use the chaos, manipulate it, and eventually master it. The randomness becomes part of the strategy instead of a barrier to it. And the randomization that feels bad in Clash Royale, it feels fresh in Balatro. It keeps the player from learning and overusing just one strategy, and lets them experience different playthroughs.
There are many other common dark patterns used in Balatro.
The shops rotate inventory randomly, meaning the player is never quite sure if they’ll see their favorite combo again.This mirrorsFOMO-based monetization systems in games like Fortnite. But with Balatro, you can change what shows up in the shop, augmenting it to show more options, or more of certain types of cards. The tension remains, but the player has agency to respond rather than be exploited.
Big plays are enhanced and amplified with bursts of color, sound, and motion. These effects heighten emotional peaks and mirror the sensory overload patterns used in slot machines or Tetris Effect, conditioning players to continue chasing chance-driven highs.
Balatro does mirror the patterns of casinos and games with harmful random behavior. In gambling, this kind of dark and deceptive patterns can be financially devastating. In Balatro, it mostly steals your time, but it’s harmful effects are still worth questioning. Is psychological manipulation only unethical when money is involved? Or does compulsive time-wasting also unethical?
I argue that Balatro remains ethically permissible for three main reasons. First, it involves no financial coercion. Unlike loot boxes or gacha systems, Balatro never asks the player to spend money to continue or optimize their run. The compulsion is emotional, not economic. Second, player autonomy is intact. The game doesn’t impose timers, stamina systems, or session caps. Its progression systems are expansive, but never rushes the user to make a decision. Third, the randomness is contained within a closed, knowable system. While specific odds are hidden, there’s no rigging of probabilities and no manipulation for monetization. The player is able to manipulate the systems of the game, making nearly all the odds of the game loosely within the players control. These reasons make Balatro’s dark patterns only engaging, rather than engaging and harmful.
That said, Balatro could improve ethically by introducing more transparency. Listing odds for Joker appearances or synergy triggers would allow players to plan more strategically without compromising the game’s core loop. A cooldown prompt after extended play sessions could promote responsible behavior and gambling practices, even if no money is at stake.
Balatro is a game that maximizes game engagement really well, without charging money and forcing the user to make a choice they don’t want to. It borrows the psychological machinery of slot machines and live-service games but reconfigures them into a tightly designed, single-player experience with no monetization hooks. It proves that randomness can drive deep engagement without exploitation. Balatro didn’t ask me for money (after buying it). But it did get me to play for three hours, so still be careful!
