Press B 197: Why are you not playing Balatro?

Could somebody give me a hand? I flushed so many hours straight down the toilet playing this game this week. Today on hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Pressbit. A cancel. Tonight we're gonna be talking about a little indie game that came out just recently. But first, let's. Let's welcome everybody in. How are you guys doing? Sinistar?

I'm swell. It's Friday and the swelling will stop eventually.

Jake, I'm doing fantastic and sinister. There's a cream for that now.

And, GP, I can hear your background over everything happening.

Why, thank you. And the swelling has not gone down in over 4 hours. I should be concerned.

All right, so tonight we are talking about a little indie game called Belatro. I think that's how you pronounce it. Not entirely sure. I don't know where they got this name from. I guess I should have dug into that a little bit.

Bellatro Lestrange.

Yeah, sure. So this is a game that, the best way I can think to describe it is you remember your parents or grandparents having one of those little video poker handhelds that they'd just sit and play and beep, beep, beep. And if you ever messed with it, you'd usually lose. And then you'd have to refresh it, get all your tokens back and play again. Right?

Check your privilege. We did not have that at the orphanage. Thank you for bringing up so many things from my child. Wow.

You've already told us how many times your father beat you. We already know.

Well, I stayed at the orphanage on the weekends. Anyway, let's move on.

Beat you at poker, right? We're sorry. YouTube and twitch.

It'd been more than 7 seconds. You can talk about child abuse after 7 seconds, right?

Ballatro ultimately feels like a game that's like it gives you one of those little video poker handhelds, and it's like, all right, here's all the tools to cheat. Figure it out.

Yeah.

So you're just constantly cheating at video poker. Essentially.

I'm going to call out. I have a similar take. To me, it's kind of like you're playing poker with, like, a seven year old who's like, twos, four, sixes, jacks, queens, and aces are wild, and every other five is wild as well. And you're like, okay.

And all of your children, five, face down. You have to make your deck face down.

Here's a nine, seven, five, and three. That's a straight.

I feel attacked because that's exactly how I played it as a young teenager.

Until security checked me out. That is how.

I'm sorry, did I say a six year old? I made a 16 year old. I'm sorry.

Sure.

It's okay.

So, yeah, a rogue like card game, like poker game. Right? That's kind of what this is built at.

Yeah. Well, okay. It's worth mentioning. I read an article. It's worth mentioning that the team that worked on this didn't play any other rogue like card games prior to this. That's why it feels so fresh. The only time they played one was they went and checked out slay the spire after the game was pretty much done, just to figure out how they handled the controller.

That actually makes sense.

Yeah. So this is why it feels so different from other deck building rogue lights.

Which is also why you hit x to play your hand and y to do your discards. Because very much slay the spire also uses kind of all of the buttons to do different events in the game.

It's kind of funny because I feel like the controller in this is actually better functioning than in Slay the spire.

It could be. I need to go back and play slay the spire with the controller.

Again, not the only one who played this game with a touch screen, because that's the only way I've been playing that.

I have done that too.

Motherfucker.

I will say, having played Slay the spire on my switch, my steam deck, my pc, and my phone, having played slay the spire on all four of those platforms, I can say that the touch screen in Balatro is actually a lot more user friendly than slay the spire mouse. Totally functional on both. Controller. Totally functional on both. Touchscreen sucks on slay the spire.

Yeah, I was just going to say I love touchscreen on this game. It works pretty good. The only issue I have, and it's a small one, is when you have consumable cards in the top right corner if you want to sell them or use them. The button is a tad too small on the steam deck, and I worry that my finger might push the wrong thing. I haven't yet.

I can understand that.

Weird. But it's one of those things where if this game was on a phone, I think it would work great. They just need to refine that one small part where the buttons are a little too small. But otherwise, this game, to me, is the ultimate touch screen game.

Yeah. And honestly, I have not misclicked anything on the touch screen.

On. Yeah, okay. That's true. I haven't misclicked on the touch screen. I'll get to just a second. I have done touch screen on my laptop, which has a touch screen, Jake, just fyi, I have done that and it controls very well. The one thing I have found with the controller is sometimes I misclick Y for x and then I'm sad because I'll have a great, say, full house and I'll decide to discard it.

I've done that one or two times.

I did that once or twice. Yeah, I was like, oh, no, I didn't mean to do that. That was a good hand, I wanted that. Or I'm trying to get rid of a discard, accidentally play it. I'm like, oh, man, there went that turn worth of points.

But you know, if you do that, that actually unlocks a joker, though, or unlocks something in the game. When you discard a poker hand the first time you get something out of the game from it.

There's also, I think I saw one we'll get to like on the main screen occasionally. It gives you hints how to unlock jokers. And I swear that there's one that's like discard 20,000 cards or something ridiculous.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I love the combo. But we should probably explain to anybody who hasn't played it. Yes, you've got your 52 card deck and then you are essentially in any round. There's three battles where you have to amass x number of points to move on to the next. And then there's like a boss battle with some handicaps. All the while you have the option of purchasing other cards that may or may not have status effects whilst collecting a myriad of jokers that can do any number of things that you can think of. Or there's booster packs, there's celestial cards, there's tarot cards. I don't even understand most of the stuff. I get the bare bones.

There are tags. I didn't understand tags for the longest time. Yeah.

I think tags took me about a run and a half to really figure out.

And by the way, first I'm even hearing that for those watching the stream and seeing the video, werewolf did play this with high contrast mode, so you may see different colors for your cards.

Oh, yeah, I did turn on high contrast so that I could easily tell things apart because I accidentally clicked the same two different suits a couple of times and there's actually a joker that makes it to where hearts and diamonds or black suits and red suits are the same suit. So since I had played a bunch with that, I was like, after another run, I kept making the mistake and I was like, I really need to make these more obvious.

Yeah, I play with the high contrast mode as well. Back when I used to play online poker, I did the same thing. I like having the four colors instead of the two black and the red.

I also turned off the CRT effect because that hurts my eyes.

Yeah, and the shakiness. I immediately turned that off. I did not care for that.

Okay, so we were describing this game, which is you have your poker hands, but that doesn't actually mean that you're playing poker. And we'll talk about, actually, the whole gambling thing here in a little bit. But you have your standard high card, two of a kind, three of a kind, two pair, straight flush, et cetera, et cetera. But the goal is not to like, you may have a more likely win without having a straight flush because of the way that the game is built. The game, just like every other roguelike, is about the modifiers. And that's where we were talking about tarot cards and planet cards and spectral cards and joker cards.

When you're amassing the points, there's two parts of the points. There's the point value of the hand you're playing. Then there's also a multiplier and the multiplier and the amount of points you get per hand is based on which type of hand you're playing, much like in poker, but with the modifiers, you can quickly, like Sinister said, make Paris, for example, be a lot higher of a point value in a multiplier than even three of a kind or a full house, even. That's how I play. So you really have to kind of pay attention to what you're modifying in your run, because you can get some crazy combos with what would normally be a really lousy poker hand. So poker theme, but not really poker. And that's the fun part of this, I think.

Yeah, it's a rogue like that uses poker rules. Not poker like gameplay, but poker rules.

Right, because at the bottom, you see that it says ante, but ante refers to what world of your gameplay you're on. So it's essentially like there's eight worlds. Each one has three levels. You have to beat the boss level. The other two can be skipped for other bonuses instead of playing through and trying to earn your rewards that way. But it's not like you got to play a dollar every time you play the first level, and then you go to world two, and it's $2. No, it's not that. It's literally just this is the world.

You'Re on, and instead, the money you would earn is what you use to spend in the in game store to get more cards, different cards, modifiers to your runs. Like all those different things are in the in game shop.

Yeah. This is a game that's literally all about stacking the deck in your favor.

Somehow I lose all the time.

Just to give you an idea, today I was playing where I had a joker that said you get a plus four multiplier for every club you play. And so I would actually take the Arcana cards that would convert one card into another, and I basically built a deck out of clubs.

Yeah, I guess to finish his point, there's jokers that do things like when you score with a card that has a spade, it's a different, higher multiplier. There's ways you can modify your cards, like even trash cards, like a two seven. In poker, everybody knows two seven is one of the worst poker hands in this game. You can modify your two and seven so that there are different effects on them, make them wild and make them give you money. One is called steel. Makes the card worth 1.5 multiplier if you don't play it, if you just keep in your hand. So there's hundreds of multipliers or modifiers to this game. And the jokers themselves, there's 150 of them that you kind of unlock as you lose your many runs. And even when you win, you also unlock jokers. And that's kind of the progression, I guess, right?

Yes. And the times 1.5 thing, I think we need to clarify just a little bit. So whatever hand you play innately has an amount of chips it's worth and a multiplier tied to it. So it'll be chips times multiplier. And some of the jokers can up that multiplier by plus this much, plus that much and so forth. And some of the cards might just have plus four multiplier on them or whatever as you upgrade them and start cheating your deck a little bit. But then the steel card, like you said, times 1.5. So after it runs through your hand and applies any multipliers you have there, then it goes down to your reserve cards, I guess we'll call them, and it factors in those steel cards times 1.5. So then if you had 40, it'll become 60, and then it'll start running through your jokers from left to right. So, terrible example, because I'm not mirrored here, but it'll be plus this, plus this, times this, plus this, times this. Depending on how you have it organized. And it'll also add chips to it for some of those cards. And you end up pumping out ridiculous numbers after a while. In your first game, if you pump out a decent flush or straight, you'll eke in around 300 points, give or take, right by the end of the game. My biggest hand, and I've not come close to this since, that was a ridiculous run, but my biggest hand was one hand, 11 million plus points, which.

I don't even know how you get that.

I must be doing something wrong. Wow.

My highest is like 64,000.

Even so, I'm at like 11,000 for mine. Single.

Once you get 15k, you get an achievement for a 15k hand.

I think there was an achievement for.

A bigger hand than that, probably, but I remember the 15k hand. Yeah.

What was the blind like? What was the goal?

I think it was 300 million.

Yeah. I think you were chasing the wall. I think you were fighting the wall.

Yeah. But it was also anti twelve, so it was pretty far.

And by the way, anti twelve is actually when you switch to endless mode. So you win when you beat the boss at anti eight, but then it allows you to continue on, and that's endless mode.

But I found when you do endless, I never get very far. I get maybe an extra, maybe another ante or another two stages in maybe, but I find then the blinds get to, like, 2 million, 3 million, just ridiculous amounts, and I don't cut it. My deck would be overpowered for the regular run, but as soon as you win and you go endless, it just becomes infinitely more difficult. I feel like you have to really have a broken deck to get far and endless.

So there's also multicolored decks, like blue, red, yellow, green, all these things. What do those mean? Like, I haven't gotten that far yet. I've unlocked a number of decks, but I haven't explored it.

Yeah. So the backside of the deck will have a color. And I think you start with. I don't remember.

Start with red.

I think it's red.

Yeah. Each one has a different effect. So blue, if I remember right, gives you an additional hand. So each round, you'll be able to play one more hand. I'm currently working on yellow, which basically starts you with $10. Okay. And I have unlocked the celestial whatever, the starry one. And that one's kind of interesting. I don't remember what the modifier is, but each one of those decks has an effect of its own. So, I mean, this game is infinitely replayable yeah.

The celestial deck gives you a telescope card to start off with, and that one makes it so the modifiers to the power of your individual hands, pairs, two pairs, full house, whatever, are from the planet. Cards, celestial cards. The telescope makes it so that every pack of celestial cards you open is guaranteed to have your best type of hand in.

Yeah, your most played hand.

Right. Your most played hand in there, which makes it very broken. If you're trying to chase pairs as your best hand and you want to pump the value of pairs, that telescope makes it really fun to do.

That's actually how I won the first time was.

I've done a few.

I had a telescope. I got a telescope from a voucher, which is an entirely different thing. But I got a telescope from a voucher and then I kept pumping pairs and I won the game with a pair and a stone card, if I remember right. And stone cards are awesome too.

We keep tossing words like sorry, like tag voucher, booster packs and stuff. And when we say all that things, I want to make sure we're very clear. This is like a single game. There is no microtransactions, no in game purchases. It's the theme of gambling and poker, but there's nothing like that of any kind of game. The creator of this game is anti gambling. In fact, as we found out today, it's just using the terminology of other card games as an influence to make this one complete package. There's nothing else added to it.

We should probably segue really quickly to the response that I guess was posted today by the team that made this. For those that are interested in buying it that may not have it, or you may have noticed, it's been delisted from some of the stores. Apparently some body of decision said that this is a gambling game, even though they specifically call out that the creator is like an anti gambling person.

What happened is it was rated three and up before release, and the publisher of the company discussed it with the ratings board in the EU before releasing, and they got that go ahead. And then after it released, I guess there was some kind of complaints because of the gambling type imagery in the game. So it got slapped with an 18 plus rating all of a sudden. And because the game itself doesn't mention 18 plus rating anywhere in the materials on the eShop for Nintendo in Europe and in some parts of Asia, where they're much more strict on gambling content, they've taken it down temporarily until they can sort this out. So in North America, it's fine. Steam is fine from what I read in the articles, it's mostly Nintendo eshop in the EU area. In some parts of this, this came up before. There's a few other games in the past, like they had loot boxes and other kinds of things. Randomized incentives for buying items that got banned. The Netherlands, for example, I think is why you can't buy. I think it's overwatch for gambling content. But this game, again, there's no real booster packs to buy. It's just in game gimmick, right?

It's funny. It's probably because they heard like, oh, there's booster packs in it and unlockables and all this. And they were like, oh, well, booster packs, magic. The gathering does that. And you're paying real money for something and you might not get anything good out of it, stuff like that. So no, it is not that. It kind of sucks for the devs that this happened just because it's dressed in a poker theme. Somebody was like, gambling? No, pump the brakes a little bit.

A little bit of a background from a sinister's life. My cousins. And if they ever listen to the podcast, I'm outing you a little bit. Sorry, cousins, they're of a religion that's a little bit teetotalr, a little bit anti gambling, a little bit, et cetera, et cetera. And when I was younger, we decided we were going to play. I don't even remember, I think it was hearts or something, not poker. And their parents were like, we can't have face cards because those are gambling related. And I'm like, great, I like to.

Play while drinking a warm drink.

Perfection. Perfection. Now what's funny is I told my cousins about this game on Wednesday because I play games with them on Wednesday nights and they've now wish listed it. So that's a fun little anecdote.

How funny.

Which is it now in the east stop. It's like what, $14 or something?

14, I think something like that, which I didn't realize it was available on the switch. And I made the mistake after you all said that of texting my wife and saying, hey, it's also on the switch. I have a feeling I just lost $15.

I have a feeling you just lost your chances at the steam deck.

Yeah, there you go.

That's still happening. That's still happening.

Yeah.

I have to be able to play portal on the run.

1499 us not on sale. So that's its base price.

Yeah. This game started with me playing it because these guys were like, hey, we're going to talk about this next week on the podcast, I was like, all right. And Jake sent me a copy. Thank you, sir. And so I started playing it just like, all right, let's check this game out for next week. And I got addicted.

Sinceris, and I have bought it for multiple people at this point.

I'm one of those. It was a gift to me from the family sen. And all week, I keep stupid hours, but all week, I'm like, okay, I've got to open this, because I think they'll be able to see how many hours I've played it because we're all friends on Steam, and I have to be able to hold up my part of the conversation today. So last night at, like, 10:00, I download it, tell my wife about it. She's watching me play it. And in the past 20 hours, we've logged 5.2 hours. And I don't know if everybody's noticed I'm yawning a lot. That is because I started playing this game, and this is one of the first times that this has ever happened for me where I love you guys, but I'm a little upset that I'm here recording this with you, because I want to be playing. Kidding. I'm kidding. I want to be here with you guys.

Wait, are you guys aren't playing Bellatro? I am right now on my steam deck while we're going.

Okay, yeah, rub that in.

Chard's watching us right now in chat. It's his week off from the podcast, and he says he's not even in the episode, and he's still playing Bellatro. That's how infectious this game is. This is up there with vampire survivors as a game that just everybody's talking.

About and playing quintessential one more round game. Just one more.

And I want to call out something that I ran headlong into multiple times. I play poker with friends. There's a Nevada city somewhere near me that I used to go every weekend, and I'd play in tournaments, and I did pretty, like, when I play poker with my friends, I come home with money every single time. I'm good at poker. And I beat my head against this game. I absolutely smashed my head against this game until I realized it's not poker.

Right. Sometimes you'll be playing pairs and pairs and pairs, and your pairs are all leveled up, and they've got a huge multiplier. And then you see a full house, and you're like, oh, play the full house. And it's not even worth a quarter of what playing a pair would be. You have to train your brain to be like, okay, just because it's a full house doesn't mean it's better. It just means it's better. At the beginning of the game, my.

Like, 60,000 something point hand was a pear.

Sure.

To that point, right before I logged in to do this with you guys, like I said, my wife was playing it, and she was just putting up some numbers. She's made it further than any of us in the household so far. And she was showing me her setup with all these jokers, but it was to build up these pairs, and her multipliers were stupid. And then she got to, I think, anti seven or whatever it was. It was like, well, 40,000, I think, was what she had to beat. And the rule was no repeat hands.

Oh, yeah.

So that's what got her. And that really kind of shows to go yet. You got to balance things out as you're moving along.

Yeah.

The one that kills me every single time. So if I get this boss blind, I always want it in either the first round of addies or the second round of addies, and that's the needle. If you get the needle, late game, you are screwed. The needle. What's the needle is one hand.

Yes, I've done that one.

One hand.

Yeah.

But by late game, hopefully, you have a broken deck that you can usually do it.

I don't think I've ever gotten, like, anti seven or anti eight in a single hand. I don't think I have.

The ones I don't like are. If I have a deck that is good, but it's not broken. Right, because you want broken. But if I have a deck that's good and I could almost do it, I can almost squeak by. But the boss blind of anti eight, the last round is the wall, which inflates the point count to obscene amounts. And that's all it does. A huge point count, and that's broken me more than a few times. But what's neat about this game, though, is, you know, the boss blinds are coming. You can see them ahead of time, and you can fairly early on or easily come across. It's all random, but you can come across tags or vouchers that let you reroll the boss blind, and that will save your butt. And today I just got one. I just finished the run with the black deck today, and I did it because the joker I got removes the boss blind's ability.

Yeah, that's the one.

Wow, that's so broken. Yeah. So every boss blind was just nothing. It didn't do anything. It was just an entire amount of points to beat, and it was great.

Yeah. This game, I guess. I guess this actually is part of the value is this game is chasing Rng well. And I had one joker. It's a knife, and I can't remember what the actual name of it is, but it consumes the joker to the right of it and adds two times the cell value to its multiplier. And so I just used that to just chew through Joker after crap, joker after crap Joker. And eventually I had it all the way on the right. So it wasn't eating anything, but I had fed this thing, like, I don't know, five jokers or something by this point. Yeah.

I think people not watching are just hearing us talk about different types of cards, and people even watching might be looking at this and be like, what the hell am I looking at on the screen? There are so many types of cards. We should go over it. So there's the cards that you play, right? The suits, the numbers, all that. Classic 50. Yeah. You have your basic 52 card deck that you start with, and you can mess with that as you go through. You can add more cards to it. It can become a much bigger deck or a much smaller deck, depending on what you choose to do. You can alter what suits you have. My plays, I either tend to lean into straights or flushes, so I try to stack my deck to where I lean into one or two suits throughout the gameplay. So that way it is a lot easier to get a flush. Right?

Yeah.

And then there are cards that let you do that. So you have those standard 52. They can be upgraded. They can have seals or materials that they're a type of. So they can be gold, steel, glass, whatever. And those all have different effects and in some cases, a negative effect that they might apply as well. Like a glass card has a chance to break. But there's also the seals, which sometimes they do something special if you discard it. Sometimes they do something special if it scores when it's played in scores, sometimes they do something special if it's just in general, like it might play it a second time or whatever. So the seals and materials can both be stacked, but you can't have, like, a glass deal card that doesn't work. It has to be a glass card with a seal. So there's those. Then you've got the jokers. The jokers are really the meat of the game. And those are what let you really set yourself up to cheat. In essence, those are what apply the big multipliers additions as well as multiplication. So instead of adding a plus ten multiplier, sometimes it'll just multiply everything you've got by 1.5. Or I think my biggest I've done was times 4.5. And then I was able to do that twice because I had the one that was like, whatever the card to the right of it does, this one does, too. So it was like it would run through all these big ass numbers and then be like, times 4.5, times 4.5. That's how I got my big ass score.

Well, here I am trying to level up my trousers.

Or there's the joker that says, on the last round, redo everything.

Run it a second time.

Yeah. And then I also want to point out, while we're talking jokers, some jokers are additive, so it's a plus or a minus. But more often than plus, some of them are multiply. So times x, your jokers run from left to right.

It's not like real math where you do multiplication, division, and then add and subtract. No, it's left to right, the way people tend to think of it when they first learning these things. And then their teacher is like, no, you don't do that. No, this does that. So it'll be like, plus times, plus times if you have it in that order. But you can rearrange the order of these. Same with whatever hand you play.

I haven't even messed with that yet.

And if you throw your times to the right of your pluses, any plus to a multiplier then gets multiplied at the end. Right?

Take some notes.

It's logarithmic or exponential or whatever, right? Yeah, take notes.

Yeah. We've also mentioned other cards. There's the tarot cards, which. This sounds ridiculous now. Like we're talking about the classic 52 and jokers. Okay, that makes sense. Now, we've got tarot cards in this poker game, right?

Sinstros. The first time we watched middle aged stream play this, and the first time she's watching this, she's like, it has tarot cards in it, right?

And so those tarot cards can do any number of things. Like, some of them will literally just double the amount of money in your hand, up to $20. Like, however much you got up to $20, it'll double. So some of them give you money. Some of them can apply status effects to the classic 52. Some of them can apply status effects to the jokers.

Some of them can give you jokers. Some of them will generate your cards.

Yeah, you can destroy cards. You can just create, like, there's number of effects. One of them is like, destroy one random card, and then all the rest become the same rank, which is like, they might all be sixes or kings or whatever, and it's random. Or one of them is like, destroy a card, and then all the rest become the same suit. And so there's a lot of ways to mess with your classic 52 deck. So you've got the tarot cards. Sometimes they'll just make consumable cards, which a tarot card is. Another type of consumable card is the celestial cards. The celestial cards level up your played hands. So if you want to make pear worth more points, you would choose the pear celestial card. Or if you want flush, which I know offhand is Jupiter, because I've done it so damn much. You choose the Jupiter card, and it adds plus two to the multiplier and plus 15 to the amount of chips it's worth. So it exponentially goes up with each of these types of hands. So you want those to be a thing. And then there's the vouchers, which we've mentioned. Vouchers are kind of a hidden card. You don't really see them. You can go find them if you look at your stats for the run. But vouchers can do any number of things. Like, it'll give you one more hand to play during a match. It'll give you another discard to play during a match. You can add telescope. Right? There's the one that'll make it to where every single celestial booster pack you open will have your most played hand there. So you can guaranteedly upgrade that. So vouchers do things like that. One of them. And I'll spoil this for you guys, because I had to look it up. I was wondering what the hell it was. It seemed useless. There's a blank voucher?

Yes.

If you buy that ten times, it unlocks a new type of voucher. So, literally, the blank voucher does nothing except count up x out of ten. Once you've done that ten times across different runs, it opens up a new type of voucher. That voucher gives you an extra joker slot for that run.

Oh, my God.

Now, these vouchers say permanently does x. They don't permanently do x outside of the current run you're on. So it's permanent in that run, not permanent in all runs.

Now, I also didn't understand negative jokers.

Which also do the same thing called.

Negative, which basically does not count against your joker quantity. So you can have, like, five regular jokers and then additional negative jokers that don't count toward your count.

Nine.

So far as my highest.

Oh, man. My highest has been six. That's wild.

I haven't even heard of these.

But, yeah, the negative jokers are fun because if you've got five jokers, normally you can't add an extra joker. You're at five out of five. But if you come across a negative joker, you can buy that and it'll just be like, all right, let me just slide up in there. And now I'm your 6th joker because I made room for a 6th joker. You don't have to have room for it before you get it. It makes its own room when you buy it, so it's great. I love that.

Something else that was a little confusing to me. There's a voucher, or there's a card that says minus one ante, minus one hand. And I'm like, why would I want to have progressed less antes? No, it actually means negative one from the required antes to win the game. So you can win the game at seven antes instead of eight.

I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah.

It still subtracts one hand for your ability to play. Why would I want to go backwards on my antes?

So it's not subtracting from the numerator, it's subtracting from the denominator.

Right.

Good to know. Sorry. My kids in fourth grade, 7th, it might be a parent now.

Sinstrous enlightened me to that one because I was avoiding them. Like, what?

I bought it one game because I thought it was minus one entry, plus one head. And I was like, all right, let's do it. Boom. And I think it gave me something for buying it. I don't remember, but I bought it. I bought it at least once.

Have you guys played enough to have a favorite joker? Like, what's your favorite one?

My favorite joker is. Okay, the misprint is pretty fun.

I like the misprint, but unreliable.

I like the one that gets a point every time you play a hand and subtracts a point from every time you discard. Because then I don't do discards anymore. And it just keeps adding multiplier points on top.

Okay.

If I had to pick one favorite joker, it would be. I don't remember what it's called, but it's the one that lets you play broken straights. So it lets you have a single card gap in a straight. So you can have a straight. That's a two, four, 6810, because it allows four card straightens.

Okay.

No two, four, 6810 queen, I guess.

Yeah, got.

Sure, you can have a gap, but you have five of them, but you can have a single card gap between every single card.

Understood? Okay.

Yeah. Now, when we're talking synergies, I like that with the four card straight.

Oh, yeah.

Because there's one that's like, you could play a straight or a flush with just four cards, and then when you have a broken straight, that's four cards. Oh, shit. All hell is about to break loose for your score.

I also like the one that gives you. I think it's a plus 20 multiplier for playing a hand of three or less.

That one's a lot of fun.

Yeah, that one looks like it's ripped in half. It's a ripped in half joker.

The one I like is the one that gains multiplier a times multiplier for every tarot card that you've played that run. There's also one for planet cards, and I chew through tarot cards. And if you get a card that a joker that generates tarot for you, combined with that, I pumped it up way high. Even though it's like, it goes up by 0.1 multiplier. You get that so fast. By the time you've done a run.

It'S not 0.1, it's 0.1. Yeah, I've actually had that tarot one and that planet one in the same run. So they were just feeding each other. Every time I got a tarot that was like, make two cards, I was like, yes, please.

The hiker is fantastic.

What's that do?

So the hiker, every time a card is played, it gets a plus four multiplier on that card. So by the time you are in, like, say, anti six, you're dropping kings that are like getting 28 points.

I'm a big fan of the ones where you can. I mentioned it earlier, if you discard one card, you get a duplicate of that card. It has to be on the first. You know, there's so many ways that you can just start getting royal flushes because you're just multiplying these every single time. But I think probably my favorite joker that I've come across so far. When we first started, I thought you got extra money for not using all of your discards. But then I came across this joker that said, if you go down, it's a 15 time multiplier on zero discards. Left, so you can get to wherever you want. But if you feel confident, even if it's a Hail Mary at the end, I love that guaranteed 15 time multiplier. It's really good.

There's also one called delayed gratification that gives you, I think, $3 for every discard not used at the end of each round. And so you get your little qualifier at the end that's like, here's your dollars for winning. Here's this. And then it's like delayed gratification when you don't discard.

Yeah, that's a good feeling.

Start to go on fire and stuff.

Oh, yeah.

The synergies in this tantric are really fun. There's another one that I really like where you stack a few of them. There's, like, one where every face card played gives a multiplier of plus four, and then you have one that's like every face card played plays again. And then every card is a face card.

The face card, yes.

So it's just like.

And then there's the one where it's like, your even numbers have a multiplier, and then there's a Fibonacci. Have you guys gotten.

The fibonacci is great. I think I had that in the run we were watching today in the stream. Yeah.

Then it's just all my best ones are just the low numbers.

Great.

Let's load it up.

Yeah.

Energy of this is really what makes it very interesting.

I love when you have so many that are working together. The game actually starts to speed up the number of qualifiers that it does, and eventually, it's just like.

In the video I recorded for today's episode, I have the game speed at, like, times 2.5 or times whatever the fastest it could, because I got tired of waiting the 25, 30 seconds for it to factor everything out. I was like, I can't anymore. This is a good chunk of my 30 hours. It's just sitting there watching numbers do their thing, and I'm like, I know the numbers are doing their thing. Do it faster.

No, enjoy it. I did it first. And then you go make some coffee, and you come back, we see where we're at.

But now that I'm doing, like, big, long things and none of them are hitting 11 million, I'm not getting the same hit.

Sure. That dopamine was left with your 11 million point hand.

Yeah. Now I'm chasing that.

The poorest millionaire in the room, everybody.

I just want to say, can we say how good this artwork is on the jokers? Especially. I love how they're so thematic. There's one joker that lets you go negative 20, you can go into debt. And the graphic on the card is a credit card. Yeah, it's pretty good.

The way they came up with the different variations for even just the low cards, they look like they're on papyrus. Or we talked about the glass or the gold or the steel and the rock. It's all brilliant. Or the wilds, the way they come up with different designs. Yes, I agree. The artwork is adorable.

And then there's actually one other card type we didn't talk about when I was running through the card types. There's the astral cards.

Yes.

So the astral cards are kind of like tarot cards, but in effect scarier.

Yes.

They're like tarot card times ten. Right. So they do something really scary. One of them is we'll clone a joker you have at random and destroy all the others. And I actually had it at one point where I was like, I want to do that, but I'm going to sell all the ones I don't want and just have it clone the one I like. Or it'll be like, we'll give a guaranteed really badass multiplier and destroy all the rest of the jokers. Or it does things kind of on the level of tarot, but bigger scale. It's kind of like a good analogy might be like Iron man versus Superman. They're both very capable, but one is a lot scarier than the.

Yeah, yeah, those are spectral cards. That's what. They're spectral cards.

Spectral, not astral.

Yeah, sorry.

They come in packs.

Astral packs, but they're very rare. But there is a voucher you can unlock or use that. Then has the cards start popping up in the regular rotation of cards.

Yeah. They can just show up in your tarot decks instead of the astral boosters.

Yeah, I love that.

And so the boosters, actually, that's something worth mentioning, too. You can get boosters for jokers, for playing cards, for tarots, for planet cards, and for spectral cards, like, all of them.

Yeah. I don't know how much thought went into this game, like how long the prep work was for it, but it's so brilliant and odly intricate. Like, you have to wonder they mean to do that. Or is it something that just kind of coalesced into, oh, we could do this and this and this. After the fact, after they programmed it, they realized the synergistics of it.

I actually had one game that I was playing this week where I wasn't sure what was going to get me the best score for that hand. And it was my last hand, and I was like, I need to make this count. I actually did some napkin math to figure out which one was going to be the better play. I've only done that one time, but that was just because I was like, I put a lot of time into this run. I want it to go. But for most of them, it's just been seat of my pants, let shit happen.

Yeah. To answer your question, or to at least maybe speculate on your question, GP, I have a feeling that at least some portion of this team that built this is either a magic, the gathering, or Pokemon or some sort of card game, dragon balls or whatever, some sort of card game player that has probably run into this world of, say, infinite combos or something like that, which happens in every single one of those types of games. I really feel like they probably did build to feed off of some of the others.

It would be an insult to say that it was a happy accident, of course. Yeah. I think the idea, I mean, the seed probably started one way, but germinated into these other things that when you zoom out, they're like, oh, my God, look what we did. But, yeah, obviously these are some very talented people who have played quite a bit of roguelikes and other deck builders and things like that that really have a good mind for this sort of thing.

Well, and I'm sure on top of that, magic will release a new edition or a new set or whatever, and they'll have to go start banning cards because they didn't realize what they were doing with some of these. Right. I'm sure that there was some of that where these people probably invented a card, and then somebody was like, hey, look at these two together.

They're like, wait, and that happened for what game?

Well, magic bans cards all the time.

Yeah.

So does Pokemon magic. I haven't heard of that. Is that gathering? That's a game? That's cool.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

It's not going to take off.

No, it's just a small company. Wizards of the coast in Hasbro. It's a small company.

It's not as good as Gwent or Marvel Snap. But maybe someday, right?

Or the game or what do we call it in horizon? Forbidden west? Forbidden Gwent. They have their game.

There's a card game in Forbidden west?

No, it's an asinine version of, oh, it's bad.

Okay.

So I think they honestly looked at Gwent and they're like, yeah, it's called Stryker. They probably looked at how successful Gwent was and they're like, let's do that.

Don't disparage Gwent. There's a huge fan community via Gwent, and we all love Gwent. It's good.

Cool. It's from Witcher three.

Witcher three guys.

My nerd credit is all used.

You get a steam deck, you can play all these games GP, right?

True.

Trying. I am trying. 300.

You came in at the right time because you missed gen one and you're now into Oled gen. That's right.

Or if they still have some of the gen one versions, they're cheaper, right?

Or like some refurbs. But yeah, I mean, whatever. If you're going to do it, do it. So I'll probably end up getting the nice new ones.

Yeah. So you shared another video with me, werewolf, and we probably should talk about.

Yes. So this was actually one of the games that helped inspire Bellatro, this game. It's a very similar vibe. And I actually got that vibe very early just from learning about what Bellatro was. I was like, man, this sounds a lot like luck be a landlord, which is effectively a very similar mechanically. But instead of poker hands, it's a slot machine that you're filling and stacking with what you want to be able to get your bonuses in the slot machine. And so I'll go into a little bit of detail on luck be a landlord. Not a lot, because this is not a luck be a landlord episode, but essentially, after every single round that you. Every single spin, that's the wrong video. After every single spin.

You get to be a landlord.

Yeah. Now you are.

Okay.

After every single spin, you get to choose another symbol to stick in your slot machine. And so it'll just put those symbols wherever it feels like at random. And so you start getting synergies in this game where symbols next to each other, certain symbols next to each other, will do certain things. Like a dog next to any human will give the dog a bonus for each human it's next to. Or bees and flowers have bonuses together, things like that. Water and seeds will grow different types of plants and those will create bonuses. And it's just a constant stream of how much can I stack this slot machine in my favor to get bigger and bigger and bigger numbers? And you even get little, like essentially what the jokers would do where it affects more of the slot machine than just what's right next to each square. And that'll create bigger numbers as well. So it's the same kind of thing. Cheat the slot machine in your favor, make numbers bigger, and find synergies to make those numbers bigger. This is very much an inspiration for Bellatro. I saw in an interview about it. But when you guys were telling me about Bellatro, I was like, this sounds like luck be a landlord. And then a few days later, I got pushed that article. I was like, I thought so.

Adequately diagnosed. Well done.

Yeah. Also, how creepy is it that your phone listened to you say, this is like luck be a landlord, and then it pushed it to you?

Right. I don't understand because I wasn't searching for anything Belatero on my phone or anything, and I got pushed this article. But I do read a lot know articles about new indie games, and so Google's like, here, you'll like this, you'll like this, you'll like this. I usually do open those. I'm an indie game listens.

I'm sure it listens as.

Yeah, I'm sure there's certain conversations the wife and I have had that have resulted in articles and information pushed to me by my phone that I'm like, okay, I have never searched for that on my phone.

You didn't have to. That's the brilliant part.

It's thinking, it's listening.

This game is great. I love this game. I've said a few times so far this year, and like, end of last year, my prediction for 2024 was that we had so many great games in 2023 as studios rushed to get them out, games that were locked up in development over the pandemic that 2024, at least the beginning might feel a little bit thin. Man, was I ever wrong, because we've gotten so many great games. Like, we got infinite wealth, we've got hell divers two. We've got Final Fantasy, rebirth, which a lot of people are loving that too, now. And we have Velatro. There's at least half a dozen, and not just good, but like 90 plus ranking great, amazing games. And just turned March today. How awesome is that for this year in gaming? This is a game of the year contender, and it's March.

And our first quad a title.

Yes.

Everybody's still playing skull and bones, right?

Yeah.

Right? Did amazingly, I'm sure.

Sure are.

Yeah. Dozens of copies.

How many of the games are, like, quadruple a or aa? Like $70 titles like Suicide Squad and Skull and bones, and they're doing absolutely shitty right now. But the two best or three best selling games so far this year, Palworld, hell divers and Belatro all sold 250,000 plus copies, sometimes significantly more. And all are, like, under $40. That's mind blowing for this year. So it doesn't need to be an expensive game to be a good game.

You know those wooden paddles that have elastic bands and a little ball stick and ball? Still buy those and they're still fun. Not everybody needs a PlayStation five. Sometimes I'm just happy to sit in a car and do that for a couple of hours. And I mean, for a reason.

When I was a kid, my parents said we had a PlayStation at home, and that was what they meant. I'm like, I want a PlayStation. They're like, we've got a PlayStation at home. I'm like, you mean the corner.

But says HD.

Like the darkness of a closet.

Yeah. This has been a great game. It took what luck be a landlord was and made it to where making those numbers bigger and bigger is a little bit more in the player's control.

Right.

It's less about the luck and more about the strategy. Right. The strategy isn't just picking what's there, it's making sure everything's organized in the right order and messing with your hand and choosing what to do. Exactly. Right now. And it's very intricate and there's a lot there. And I ended up looking through the achievement list globally, and it turns out the big score achievement that I got was score a million points in one hand.

Wow.

Okay.

And that's not even the biggest one of those achievements in the game. There is a score 100 million points in one hand achievement.

Oh, dear.

Okay.

Part of that, though, is because we haven't locked all the jokers and we haven't unlocked all the cards yet. And as you unlock that stuff, as you play, like, my first win in a run, I was like, what, 1215 runs in lost before I won one. That's because I was unlocking stuff as it kind of progressed through the game. And I'm sure a week from now we'll have progressed for enough and we'll get unlocked some really great cards and vouchers and tags and that will make that possible.

Yeah.

For the journey.

Here's what I've noticed, though, in the short five and a half hours that I've played this game, my shortest rounds or runs come immediately after my longest ones. And here's why I think that is. I think it's because I get so used to the joker setup that I have that after I lose and start a new run, I'm like, well, what happened oh, shit. That was with the previous run or even three hands ago. Three runs ago. I don't have that anymore.

I've not done that with the Joker specifically, but I've done that with my playing cards.

Sure.

Where I'm like, I've got these, right? And I keep looking. I'm like, where did those go? And I hit right trigger. And I look and I'm like, shit, that was last play, right?

Where are my twelve aces?

Right?

Yeah. I start a run. Every time I start a run, I'm like, 160 points.

Yeah.

And you'll play like two pair and think, oh, this will get me through the first stage, no problem. But no, when you first start around a fresh round, you really need to play a flush or a full house, and you have to work for it. And you get so spoiled once you get a few planet cards and a joker going that you forget that easily.

Yeah.

What it is, is like, let's say you just ran your first marathon and you actually did much better than you thought you would. And so you're on the high from that. And then somebody comes up and says, hey, would you go upstairs real quick? You realize I've done something great, but now I can't do anything basic. And that took me 5 hours to come up with the analogy alone.

Guys, it's the day after your first workout. Like, when you've spent a year not working out and you go work out of the gym, you're like, yeah. And then you wake up the next morning and you're like, no, someone has.

To wipe my ass for me. My hands won't work.

Yeah. How many times have you been in the shower trying to shampoo your hair? And you're like, I can't touch. My arms don't bend anymore.

More than most people on this day, I'll tell you that.

Yeah, probably.

Okay, I just solved a mystery.

Yeah.

Balatro is the latin word for a professional jester or buffoon.

That's a great name.

I was just calling out. We've talked about it, but it plays absolutely spectacular how beautiful that is on the deck.

Can we get a sponsorship?

I know I'm the only one who.

Doesn'T know what we're doing. Okay, all right, jake, we're all going to show it off.

You don't have the screen on. You're not showing the game.

I was going to wait until the end of the episode to pull this out and show you guys, but Oreo cookie?

No. Most of the time I've played this has been on my steam. Deck. I've played a little bit at the computer, but at the computer it's mouse and keyboard, right? Mouse, the steam deck. It actually seems like it plays better with a controller than a mouse. I've played so much on the steam deck that it's so easy to just do what I need to do. Whereas the mouse is like, all right, I got to mouse over everything, do all this. It's kind of like on the steam deck. I've gotten used to it the way I used to do t nine on my phone where you almost don't have to be looking. And then you go to playing with a mouse and it's like switching over to an Android phone where the keyboard is on the screen. I don't know where the fuck these buttons are. I misclick all the time.

The power steering in the car has gone out.

Yes, but I want to go back to how many times have I had my perfect hand lined up and I've hit y instead of x?

Yeah, I've not done that a lot. I've done it like two or three times. And that's it.

Yeah, I've done it a couple of times, but the only time that mattered was when my wife was watching because I don't think I'm going to hear the end of that for a minute. And she's right because I had a really good run at it and that's what ruined the run. I don't know.

Why would you do that?

I'm like, I don't know.

There's something else we didn't even touch on, on this. There's not just the different types of decks you can play with. Blue, yellow, green, black, red, all these celestial like, you get a whole bunch of different types of decks you could play with, but you also have different stakes you can go for. So it's like a difficulty tier for that. And there's like ten difficulty tiers. I've only seen three of them because I've only been able to beat the second one once. All those little rectangles next to the deck that you pick are a different.

Stake you can choose and they change things. It's not just making the blinds harder, there's something else to it.

Right, right. So I think the red stake makes it to where you don't get. And I see Citistar just jumped into the game just like I did to see what the hell these do.

Welcome to the play along portion of the podcast.

Okay, white steak is base difficulty. Let's see, I need to select, so.

Red steak is the second rectangle. I'll show you guys right here. There's that little red rectangle right there. That's the stake. And all these rectangles, there are different things. So you can see there's, like, eight of them or something. So the red steak is small blind, gives no reward money. So that first stage gives no reward money for the actual completion of the stage, but you would still get the other reward, monetary rewards you might get for that.

And I want to point out below the stakes, it says applies all previous stakes as well. So you're stacking.

I did not realize that. Okay, the next one after red is green. Required score scales faster for each ante.

And then applies all the previous stakes. Right?

Yeah. So I was initially going to try and go through all the red deck, all the stakes on the red deck, and once I got to green, I was like, that's not happening. I need to work through all the other decks first and then run through the second tier of all of them and then the third tier for all of them.

Oh, yeah. This is like, new game plus. New game plus, plus. New game plus, plus.

Yeah, this is like, there's all the.

Stakes, but then there's also the challenges as well. There's a special. Yeah, there's challenge challenge mode, which I don't even know what those are because I haven't got.

I do.

I have five of them, a lot of replay. Oh, do you have one of them? Okay.

I unlocked the challenges. You get five when you first unlock it. There's 20 total. So there's the omelet. And they give you a whole list of what this hand does. Oh, yeah, and all that. So it gives you a little explanation of it and all that. This is what you start with. This is the amount of money you get per rent, all this kind of stuff. And each one is different. So there's the omelet. There's 15 minutes city, 15 minutes city. Omelet basically is like, you don't get money from anything unless it explicitly states you get money. So you don't get money for completing rounds, not for discards left, not for hands left, not for completing a blind. Instead, you start with five of those stupid eggs that go up at $3, sell value for every round you beat.

And you sell them, and you can buy cards, packs with that.

Those are your five jokers that they start you with. And as you progress, it's like, okay, do I want to sell one now and get a joker to replace it? It's frustrating. There's 15 minutes.

Awesome.

That's a lot of gameplay variety for this game. That's insane.

Here's one that's called 15 minutes city. And it gives you two jokers to start with shortcut, which is allows straights to be made with gaps of one, which is my favorite card, and then ride the bus. Plus one multiplier for consecutive hands played without a scoring face card.

Now, the thing that was actually pretty good.

It is. Except in this deck, the lowest card is a four, and over half the deck is face cards. And these have a little modifier on them called eternal. Eternal can't be sold or destroyed, stuck with them. So you've got two jokers that are eternal, and they're great. If you could modify your playing cards to fit those jokers, but getting far enough to modify those and stay playing is. Yeah.

So, Jake, to your point, this replayability, I want to point out, I kind of view the world in what I call movie theater money. Right. An average movie is two ish hours, right. And you're doing well if a ticket is $10 us. And then you go and you get your popcorn and you get your drink and you get your candy and you get your whatever. And honestly, each person is going to spend $25 to $30 per movie. Right. For 2 hours. So anytime I see a game that is like $15, and in a week of playing it, I'm at 11 hours.

Yeah.

Justifiable. Absolutely.

There's also the fact that we mentioned a quadruple a title. Okay. They spent how many hundreds of millions of dollars on this game for it to suck years? Because they were like, oh, yeah, this will be a safe bet. But they didn't really think about it enough.

Right.

The midnight suns, you say that's a winner.

There's also something to be a game that's affordable. Right?

Right.

Yeah.

There's a reason people shop at Dollar Tree. It's not necessarily the better deal, but people go there because that's what they can afford. And for some reason, there's this mentality of, oh, yeah, we need to make the games more expensive because for every unit sold, we'll make x amount. Okay, true. But for every unit sold, you'll sell way more units if you bring the price down instead of going way up. So a ten or 15 $30 game, all these that are indie games that are selling like hotcakes. Part of it has to do with the fact that the game is not a stupid price. Right. There used to be a stigma against indie games because they're like, oh, what $10 game is going to be worth it? Spending $10 on a game? I'm not going to have fun with that. It's not going to be a good game. I think that's kind of out the window in the last few years finally, for sure, which is nice.

Good point.

Honestly, I think kind of the big one that brought this around was how many hundreds of millions of dollars did Minecraft make off of $15 beta. Right. And then the company sold for what, a billion and change?

2 billion.

Yeah. And still is one of the most played games ever.

Right. Plays it almost daily.

Yeah. Started at what, ten or $15 beta and made hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah.

Velatro in its first couple of days, the creator was tweeting out that he'd sold 250,000 copies after like a few days. I don't even know what it is now, but it's probably higher. But this is a game that has exploded. And I know people keep saying, oh, it's just another meme game like pow world and hell divers and Belatro now. But this is a game that I think is more like vampire survivors, which again, another dirt cheap. And I mean dirt cheap. That was what, $2 on Steam?

$5.

Okay, $5. And we've all, I think most of us put 100 hours into that game over the last year it's been out. And I always look forward to what updates they do, but every time they do an update, it's like half time, it's free or paid or even if it's paid for another $2. I'm always interested in seeing what they do because it's so much fun and so much value out of that one small little title. And this is a game I joked about, I think, in the episode description, this game is like 60 megs or something ridiculous. Small.

Yeah, it's ridiculously tiny. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's like 62 megabytes or something.

It's so 62.75, which is insane when.

You look at how like 100 gigs, that is Call of Duty or ballers gate three. And then you have a game that comes around saying, oh yeah, we're 60 meg.

Okay, Final Fantasy seven rebirth, right? Came out yesterday. My friend and I put off our game session last night because Final Fantasy seven rebirth came out. He's like, oh, I'm going to be playing that. I know I'm a nerd, whatever. And I'm like, yeah, it's fine. I know you love Final Fantasy seven. Five and a half hours of installation time we could have played.

I want to point out five and.

A half hours to install something. What the fuck, square?

I was busting Jake's balls earlier today, saying that Mortal Kombat one was Street Fighter six, and I installed it. Luckily I have gigabit Internet because that's 123 gigs of game, right? And it still took me like 25 minutes to download and install it.

He installed it from the disk. Why does it take five and a half hours to install from a disk?

We all know that answer. We all know that answer. Because the disk contained an incomplete game.

Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. Lottro is a definition of value for your dollar. I can't think of another game that is this cheap, this tiny, this seemingly simple at first glance, but it's so wild. And I've tried to explain to folks like friends outside of the podcast and work and stuff, it's like it's poker and it's a rogue like, but it's not poker, but it's poker adjacent. There's only one other game that I've played that has poker elements in a rogue like, and that was sword and poker, which was a mobile game years ago on iOS or like on iPhones, and you can't even play it anymore because it's removed from the App Store. But that was a poker like roguelike game where you had the hands were important, but it was a different style of roguelike, but it was more of a dungeon crawling roguelike. It felt more like a roguelike than maybe this does. This feels more closer to poker, but other than that, it's just like the genre that shouldn't exist. It's such a bizarre combo, but does.

In a glorious way.

I guarantee you I'm going to get more hours out of this $15 game that Jake probably spent like 19 Canadian on. For me, thank you. Than my friend who spent 75 on Final Fantasy seven. Rebirth is going to get out of that.

Okay, hold on, though. Before you make that claim, can we please acknowledge that with Belatro you have in a five and a half hour head start?

Well, no, I just mean overall. Overall, I am probably going to hit hundreds of hours in this game over the years. He might hit 150. He might. If he plays through and tries to get every achievement in the game, which.

He does try to do, according to how long to beat this or whatever the website is. According to that, initial reports for the new final fantasy is about 77 hours for completionist.

So if he plays through twice. Oh, for completionist. So to get all the achievements and everything probably.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, the extra.

I'm already halfway there on Palm.

Yeah, I looked. $5 game vampire survivors. I have 69 hours. Nice.

You can't play that game anymore, man.

I can't.

I'll buy you a new copy.

All right, hold on. Just because I got curious. How long to beat Ballatro completionist is 83 hours. So I got 50 hours to go. I love how main story is five and a half hours. So that leads me to believe the average is probably like the first time people beat a deck is five and a half hours deep on average, which.

Is.

A little bit I think I won on.

Took me. It probably was about my five hour mark before I beat the game. Sorry, jeep.

Well, yeah, to be fair, I am kind of a nerd for gaming this system. When it comes to games like this, I like to try and figure out how you can screw the game over a little bit. I did it in the messenger, too. It's just how I play games now. I'm like, how can I break it? How can I subvert what they wanted me to do, to do this? Know? I love doing that. And also my parents taught me to play blackjack and poker when I was a little. I remember I grew up in Vegas. It was going to happen.

Right.

Importantly, though, this is not a gambling.

No, but I understand the basics of poker in the terms of looking at what the cards are and analyzing those real quick. Right. And also this is a game that kind of encourages card counting. You can mouse over your deck and be like, all right, what I got left? How many of this suit do I have left? How many of this rank of card do I have left? And it's like, yeah, do it. Look at what you got.

Yeah.

I want to say that, yes, there's rng to this game, but it gives you a lot of information. And it's more like, yes, there's rng. But that's because it doesn't want you to use the same combo every run. You have to look at what jokers it gives you and think of ways to use that to break the run. That's the concept of the game. There's rng, but there's almost always, I feel away out of any situation. Like there really is. As long as you played it covered your ass.

All right, well, I think that's a lot for somebody to absorb that hasn't played this.

Yeah, I honestly didn't go this long on this episode.

Yeah.

Than I realized.

And you will go.

Going to. Yes.

Especially once you get that Diac life.

Or if you play on the switch like this is a game that's perfect for in bed. You'll never sleep again. But it's great in bed. I play a run every night. Oh, my God.

Somebody clip that, please. I need that.

Your sex life will go away, but you'll have Blotro and you won't care. So it's fine.

Wow.

See, it's great because I'm recording this. So we'll just go ahead and TikTok that one up.

Why not enjoy eleven and a half.

Hours of one of those two things this week?

Look, it's two minutes of one thing or 11 hours of another thing.

Okay, I'm going to describe one of those two things and you tell me which one it is. My wife says, do what you must, just don't wake me up.

That's two minutes.

Sex jokes, guys. This is great and sinister. Start again. Thank you very much for. Thank you and your wife for the copy of it. This is truly great. And here's the thing. I want to show some love to you guys because this isn't even the first game you've bought me this year. So thank you, daddy, I appreciate you. And one of these days I'll get to mega man eleven. But with Bellatro now, it's not looking like it's going to be soon.

Christmas gift.

That was a Christmas gift?

Yeah.

Well, anyway, I think we've said all we need to say about the game for this episode. Not all we can, but all we.

Need to revisit it later on during the game.

If you have any interest in rogue lights or meta games or anything like that, look into Ballatro, watch a game or two, see if it's up your alley. If it is, get it. It is absolutely worth the 15 $20 you're going to spend on it and you're just going to lose a lot of time to it. So that's something to weigh too. Like, do you have the time to waste playing it? If you do look into it.

Do you dislike sleep? Then buy this game?

Yeah. Do you oftentimes say how bloodshot on my thing to do and way too much time to blow? This is for you.

But I mean, it helps that it's on everything. It's on PS four, Ps five, Xbox. Oh, is it this and that? It's on the switch. It's on the pc.

You can almost as many places as you can find our podcast. Press B to cancel on all major carriers. Check out our discord and our website, pressbeatocancel.com. Heatness.com oh wait, no.

If you do grab it, leave a review and tell them that press B to cancel sent you.

Boom.

I'll take it.

Talk about synergy gorilla marketing for press.

B, please tell your friends and family.

And like and subscribe and tell us in the comments what your highest score is. Or come tell us on discord.

Should also say that since our hosted this week, the technical side, which has been great so you can watch us on YouTube and Twitch. I recently got an upgrade to my computer, so when I do that I'll be doing twitch and YouTube as well. So if you'd like to watch in one place or the other, you'll now find us more reliably on both, which I think some people will be happy to hear.

Yes, go tell your friends about us on Twitch because we'd love to get affiliate at least.

Yeah.

All right. Awesome. I think that's all we need to say. Well, thank you guys for watching and hanging out or listening. However you consume our podcast, we appreciate you. Thank you. Have another wonderful week, folks. Take care. Maya clown do I amuse.