ALT text: Playing cards beside fantasy reels.
Image Source: Editorial illustration by author
Balatro lets you improve the hands you play; Slots & Daggers lets you change the symbols feeding its battles. Both borrow familiar cards or reels, yet much of their decision-making happens beyond choosing a hand or starting a spin. You assemble abilities that change what those objects do. That combination is often called a build. Across a run, meaning one attempt through a sequence of challenges, your build develops alongside the encounters you face.
In his March 2025 retrospective, LocalThunk talked about how Balatro started as an online version of a card game invented with friends, but soon changed direction. By the end of December 2021, the prototype already calculated scores by increasing chips using a multiplier. Jokers and boss blinds followed in February 2022. The playing cards became a way to produce scores against challenges, with extra abilities layered around the hand.
The rules behind the symbols
A card’s value depends on the game using it. Blackjack counts face cards as 10 and lets aces count as 1 or 11. The aim is to beat the dealer without exceeding 21. A slot game instead uses its own symbol combinations and payout rules. Its paytable explains how the symbols relate to a payout, while additional rules describe any special features. Recognizing a reel or a playing card does not explain all those details. Even familiar-looking games need to be understood through their own objectives and available actions.
A blackjack decision at Lucky Rebel concerns the hand being played: hitting adds a card, while standing ends the player’s draw. Taking another card changes the total; it does not upgrade the value assigned to a king or queen. A slot’s features work within a different set of rules, including which symbols count and how special symbols behave. The casino label therefore covers activities with different choices; it does not make cards and reels interchangeable. Roguelikes can borrow either format, then add another kind of decision: changing the components used in later rounds. Any such ability belongs to that particular game’s design.
Balatro changes the scoring
Balatro’s hands feed a score rather than compete against another player’s hand. Its challenges, called blinds, set the chip total you need to reach. The combination you play contributes to that total, but the surrounding abilities can alter how much it produces.
Jokers supply effects that work alongside your playing cards. Planet cards let you level up hand types, and playing-card enhancements give individual cards additional properties. These changes operate at different levels: the combination being scored, the cards making it, and the abilities supporting them. A hand’s familiar poker ranking therefore does not fully describe its scoring potential.
Leveling a hand changes how it scores without changing which cards form it. A pair remains a pair, but its scoring potential can grow as the run develops. Enhancing a playing card changes an individual component instead. Together, those systems let players develop both a preferred hand type and the cards used to make it.
Slots & Daggers turns reels into equipment
Slots & Daggers uses its symbols for battles against monsters. Players begin by choosing symbols such as weapons or shields, then make changes between fights. Shield symbols block incoming damage, while weapon symbols attack the monsters. A symbol represents something the character can use, giving the reel a role closer to equipment selection than a conventional slot paytable.
Some weapons also require timed inputs when they appear, including stopping a filling gauge at the right moment. Choosing equipment and using it are separate decisions: one determines the available tools, while the other adds an action during the fight. The slot format remains recognizable, but the player is dealing with attacks, protection, and survival through successive encounters.
Writing in November 2025, Polygon’s Deven McClure described how the upgrade shop and permanent modifiers extend those choices. The shop allows changes to the symbol lineup and improvements to existing items. Permanent modifiers include greater damage resistance and additional symbol slots. Those upgrades change the character’s capabilities or the machine itself, so progression reaches beyond replacing one weapon with another.
Coins and chips also have separate jobs
ALT text: Equipment changes and permanent upgrades.
Image Source: Infographic by author
Coins fund purchases in the shop; chips buy permanent modifiers. Purchases can develop the equipment used during the current attempt or change the capabilities available beyond it. The duration of an upgrade belongs in the decision alongside its immediate effect. A stronger attack and an extra symbol slot change different parts of the combat system.
What carries into another attempt?
Balatro’s vouchers grant benefits for the current run. Their effects persist through encounters within that attempt, without becoming bonuses inherited by every later run. Discovering cards for the collection is a separate form of progress; it does not preserve the active effects assembled during play.
Slots & Daggers separates purchases for the current attempt from permanent modifiers. An extra symbol slot can affect the setup of later runs, while changing a symbol lineup answers the immediate combat problem. The two games use progression at different scales, even though both let players alter familiar game pieces.
A familiar symbol can be a fixed card value, a scoring component you improve, or equipment you replace. What defines the game is the control its rules give you over that symbol, and how long your changes last.