Playing Cards

Playstack and I recently partnered with Fangamer to create an official Balatro themed playing card deck. I want to talk a little bit about playing cards to explain why we decided to do this instead of a more ‘collectible’ merch idea.

Playing cards have always been a part of my life. I don’t think that’s a particularly unique experience, playing cards just happen to be a really ubiquitous cultural object, at least here in North America. However, for me as a game developer, I believe I have played playing card games for far more hours than I have played video games. Playing card games hold a special place in my heart.

Some of my earliest memories in life are playing Go Fish with my parents when I was very very young. Most of what I remember is being around them and feeling happy. I also remember playing War with my brother around this age too.

When I was a bit older, I learned how to play Kings Corner with my great grandmother. My brother and I would be given no quarter, and even if it ended up getting a bit intense, it was a way for family members 3 generations apart to share quality time on common ground.

When we would gather with our cousins, we would play Spoons. That’s probably the first time I saw how competitive my loved ones could really be. Spoons flying everywhere, blood drawn, egos bruised. Of course this always ended up with everyone crying from laughter.

With my friends, we would play Cheat, Slapjack, and President/Janitor/Asshole. These games were sort of the go-to games whenever a group of us would gather. More of an excuse to sit together and chat than anything.

Later on, when I started going to parties, we added Sociables and Ride the Bus to the repertoire. These games were touted as excuses to drink but the way there are constructed ended up making them incredible icebreakers. Almost every party I went to in my late teens and early twenties had some kind of card based drinking game.

In my later twenties, now that I haven’t been able to see my now physically distant friends quite as often, we travel to each other for a visit and often play the card game Golf.

Since my partner and I have moved away from Saskatchewan, she learned Cribbage and played it with her father from afar to help keep in touch. She taught me how to play too, and my guess is that this will be the next card game I end up spending a ton of time with.

She also taught me how to play a special solitaire variant years earlier at her family cabin. I find the game fascinating and ultimately decide to restart my dormant video game dev hobby to recreate the game on my computer. To this point it had been a couple years since I touched any video game related code, but this burst of inspiration propels me into making more projects and loving the hobby again. This was about 8 months before I started Balatro.

But the most important game of them all has to be Big 2, or the variant my friends and I made up called Big Cheat. The latter game had some pretty wacky rules and a lot of bluffing, and I played it absolutely all the time with them. I would get dropped off at school about an hour early every morning and my friends and I would play Big 2 to pass the time before the bell rang for our first class. Throughout high school and into University, me and my two closest friends would head to our local Tim Hortons multiple nights a week to get a coffee, shoot the shit, and play Big Cheat. We must have played thousands of games together. This game is what I was trying to recreate when I first started working on Balatro in the midst of the pandemic.

The common theme here is that playing cards were a tool used to spend time with the people that I love most in the world. It’s an excuse to be near each other, to break the ice, to spend some time talking without pressure. Frankly I think playing cards are magic for this, and I think that might be a reason why they have survived in our culture for so long.

I can understand that some Balatro fans are bummed that our foray into cards isn’t more collectible. I just wanted to lend my voice in this lifelong conversation with playing cards. I wanted to give people an excuse to spend some time with loved ones, to make new friends, and to catch up with old ones. I didn’t want these playing cards to gather dust on a shelf or in a box, I wanted them to be used until they are tattered like I had done with so many of my favourite decks in the past.

Even if you don’t get these playing cards, I would love to hear your stories about playing cards and what they mean to you or how they remind you of quality time spent with your loved ones.