Balatro, the time-consuming poker game, is coming to smartphones soon

Indie deck-building game Balatro burst onto the PC and console gaming scene in February with all the charm of a poker dealer looking for players — just come in and play a few rounds, it’ll be fun and relaxing. An hour later, you’ll have come up with the wildest deck strategy and, win or lose, one thing’s for sure: you’ll probably talk yourself into doing it again. Bye, bye.

While players can save themselves from hours of gaming by, you know, leaving their homes, Balatro will soon be playable everywhere, when it comes to smartphones starting September 26, as the game’s account announced on X. You have been warned.

For those who have avoided Balatro’s incredible addiction, the game is a deck builder with a poker theme. Players start with a standard deck of 52 Bicycle-style playing cards and must draw and play a limited number of poker hands to beat a scoring limit in each round. Scoring follows the poker hierarchy, with the humble high card and pair at the bottom and the royal flush at the top.

During the run, players can customize their deck, improving the score of certain hands and gaining wild cards that drastically alter their play. This makes it a bit of a roguelike, as each run can be drastically different from the last, though there is also some overlap of poker skill — such as statistically expecting the best hands you can draw with what’s left in the deck — to reward conventional card sharks.

Balatro is not a complex game visually, so there is no graphical obstacle that would prevent its release on smartphones. The only moral obstacle is the global productivity drop that is expected if this game is released on phones.

There is no pricing information available for the mobile version of Balatro. All that is known is that the version is coming to iOS and Android, and that a $5 per month Apple Arcade service will also be available.

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