Few tools for killing time are as elegant or versatile as a deck of 52 playing cards, which for hundreds of years have provided a welcome excuse to gamble, puzzle, laugh or infuriate in idle moments. With the help of technology, video games are now finding delightful new ways to turn diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades into something stranger and even more charming.
Balatro, one of the year’s biggest hits, supercharges traditional poker hands with powerful joker cards that are unlocked at random. One makes diamond-suited cards worth four times as many chips; another awards more chips when your hand includes face cards. A “hanging chad” joker makes the first card you play count twice, in a winking nod to the 2000 presidential election.
Pile-Up Poker challenges players, in a burst of poker-meets-sudoku genius, to lay out as many hands as possible on a four-by-four grid. Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers features increasingly absurd games of blackjack as players slowly fill their deck with a whimsical collection of other types of cards. (The Social Security card adds every card that your opponent discarded to your deck.)
Frank Lantz, a game designer and the chair emeritus of the N.Y.U. Game Center, said the shared cultural language of playing cards allowed players and designers to travel further together. Some may find it more appealing than an elaborate fantasy realm.
“Games aren’t just little simulated worlds that we drop into,” Lantz said. “They are systems that we design and interact with in order to explore them in a particular way. So that familiarity is necessary and powerful.”
After a few irresistible rounds, Balatro stops being a game about poker hands and becomes more about collecting a set of jokers that bends the rules in your favor. It is a perfect pairing: all the wonderful probabilities that have kept people playing cards for centuries, plus the randomness of algorithms. And, of course, none of the tedium of shuffling.
The pseudonymous creator of Balatro, known as LocalThunk, is not shy about the debt that his game — which has sold more than two million copies — owes to the enduring magic of the 52-card deck. “It’s this shared cultural game design tool that has evolved over hundreds of years,” he said in a video call.
LocalThunk is a Canadian game developer who previously worked in the tech industry and prefers to keep his real name separate from his game design work, although he is happy to virtually engage with players and journalists about the inspirations and design of Balatro.
One of those muses isn’t poker at all, but the Cantonese card game colloquially known as big two, in which players try to get rid of all their cards by creating corporate hands.
When he was an avid player with his former co-workers, LocalThunk began working on what would become Balatro by trying to develop a virtual version of big two. The poker aspects would come later, providing a more familiar context for a Western audience.
The reason his game, and others like it, succeeded, he said, “is because you’re borrowing from this really tried-and-true tool.”
Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers is filled with an array of colorful characters and uses blackjack instead of poker as its thematic spine. Its creator, Michael Davis, who publishes games solo under the name Purple Moss Collectors, was fascinated with the idea of stretching the definition of a playing card.
Being able to add a birthday card or SD card to your deck is both a clever joke and an opportunity for twists in gameplay. Players are eventually able to manipulate the cards on the table — swiping some from opponents, forcing them to play others, or even hiding a few up a sleeve.
Davis’s inspiration was an episode of the British comedy game show “Taskmaster” in which contestants were challenged to memorize the order of a deck of playing cards with gag cards mixed in.
He said blackjack’s extremely simple rules — the player must simply decide whether to ask for another card or “stand” in the hopes that their cards add up to no more than 21 — gave him room to experiment with comedy and complexity in his invented cards.
“The intention is that hopefully that base of blackjack teaches you the rest of the game,” Davis said, “slowly pushing out on the boundaries of your understanding of the game as you encounter new cards or new strategies.”
That familiarity can take a player to some wonderful places, like the oeuvre of Grey Alien Games, the husband-and-wife team of Jake Birkett and Helen Carmichael, who design solitaire games paired with thematic narratives, like the fanciful romance of this year’s Regency Solitaire II.
Zach Gage, who has a long history of making games for newcomers like Pile-Up Poker, finds that the appeal of card games shares a lot in common with the current popularity of word games.
“If you have a word that has to have an A here, that really shuts down big areas and opens up other big areas,” he said. “And that’s the thing that’s really great about a game design tool that people are familiar with.”
Gage said that there were a lot of interesting interactions within the structure of playing cards and that they “have been designed to be successful through the natural evolution of these games and tools.”
Playing cards have been part of the video game landscape for decades — the solitaire variant FreeCell was packaged with desktop computers of the 1990s and 2000s — and there is plenty of design space to mine in the future.
“Eighty years ago, in the ’40s and ’50s, bridge was more popular than Taylor Swift is now,” said Lantz, the game designer.
“Everybody played bridge, this game that is so complicated, has so much complex strategic decision-making, it’s hard to even know how to navigate a single turn,” he said. “Bridge is a masterpiece waiting to be rediscovered.”
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