I spent 2025 digging through all the word game roguelikes flooding Steam to see if any could capture Balatro’s magic—here are the highly scientific results

Balatro was PC Gamer’s 2024 game of the year. But that was in a more innocent age before we had to endure wave after wave of imitators. Seemingly every casino classic has been plundered at this point, with Balatro-fied spins on blackjack, roulette, and even those coin-pusher machines that haunt crap arcades (to be fair, that one shares a publisher with Balatro and is kinda excellent).

Outside of the casino, it’s word game developers who are the most frequent vultures hungrily circling poor little Balatro.