Balatro broke my whole week

I sat down for one quick run. Three hours later the sun was up and I was explaining jokers to my cat.

Balatro is a poker roguelike, which sounds like a pitch nobody asked for, and then you play it and you get it instantly. You build a deck of jokers that bend the rules, you chase score multipliers that climb to genuinely silly numbers, and every run is a fresh little puzzle: how do I break this?

What gets me is the pacing. It respects your time, and then it absolutely does not. Each round is a couple of minutes, so "one more" is always true, and "one more" is the trap.

A couple of honest gripes:

• The late game can tip into solved territory once you know the strong jokers.
• A rough early shop can end a run before it really starts.

Neither one stopped me from booting it up the next night (and the night after that).

If you like numbers going up and decisions that actually matter, this is an easy yes. Bring snacks. You will lose track of time.