Indie Gambling Game Phenomenon Balatro Sweeps The Game Awards 2024

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Published: 14 December 2024

3 min

In an awards ceremony featuring a performance by Snoop Dogg, LocalThunk’s indie gambling title Balatro took several awards home. These included Best Independent Game and Best Mobile Game. Balatro also finished runner-up in the main Game of the Year 2024 category.

Key Takeaways

Balatro Cleans Up: Indie gambling game Balatro won Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game, and Best Mobile Game at The Game Awards 2024.
Game of the Year Runner-Up: Despite stiff competition from titles like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Balatro finished as a runner-up in the Game of the Year category behind AstroBot.
Innovative Gameplay: Balatro combines poker mechanics with roguelike deck-building, offering wild twists like exotic cards and breaking traditional rules.
Broad Availability: The game is accessible on multiple platforms via Steam, including PC, consoles, and mobile devices.
Cultural Impact: Balatro showcased the power of indie games by competing alongside major AAA titles, a testament to its innovation and popularity.

The Game of the Year Category

It was close in the Game Awards’ Game of the Year 2024 category. LocalThunk’s Balatro finished as a runner-up. Team Asobi’s adorable space adventure AstroBot took the top spot.

However, Balatro was in with a crack at the crown alongside some massive AAA titles from big-dog developers. These included Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Quite the achievement for a small developer like LocalThunk!

Game of the Year Winners List

Balatro is in illustrious company, with industry heavy hitters like EA Sports FC 2025, Helldivers 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tekken 8 and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth in the mix for various categories.

Here’s the complete list of Game of the Year 2024 winners and runners-up:

AstroBot (Team Asobi/SIE)
Balatro (LocalThunk/Playstack)
Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science)
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree (FromSoftware/Bandai Namco)
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Square Enix)
Metaphor: Refantazio (Studio Zero/Atlus/Sega)

What Did Balatro Win?

While finishing in the runners-up spots for Game of the Year, Balatro won several other categories outright. Here’s the full list of categories that LocalThunk’s Balatro either won or finished close to winning:

What is Balatro?

Balatro is a gambling game roughly based on poker. Although, there’s a huge twist (no pun intended). LocalThunk, the company behind Balatro, describes the game as a “roguelike deck builder” at heart, and that’s not far from the truth.

Plenty of opportunities exist to play illegal poker hands to gain an advantage and create wild combinations using various menacing Joker cards. It’s great fun, and trying to beat your previous best score is the aim of the game.

How To Play Balatro

When you first load Balatro, you’ll be dealt a hand on nine regular playing cards.

You then choose the best four or five-card poker hand from those nine cards. All the standard hands are there, including Flush, Straight, Three-of-a-Kind, etc. You aim to create as big a score as possible, scoring hundreds of points before moving on to the next round. So far, so good.

This is where things take a turn into weird territory. In between rounds, you can add a variety of wild and exotic cards to your deck. These include holographic, steel and gold versions of cards that will get you multipliers and extra in-game chips.

There are also tarot cards to transform your chances of scoring big, planet cards to increase your points even further, and then a bunch of Jokers that will have a bearing on your strategy. We don’t want to spoil too much here. Instead, we recommend giving it a shot. Just remember this – you’re meant to break the rules!