The rating board looked at the picture, not the system

Balatro was made by one person under the name LocalThunk and published by Playstack, releasing on 20 February 2024 across PC, consoles and Switch. The European board PEGI first rated it 3. It was then reclassified to 18 for prominent gambling imagery, after which the game was temporarily pulled from sale in a number of storefronts. In February 2025 the appeal succeeded and the rating became 12, the board accepting that the fantasy context distinguished it from actual gambling.

It is worth stating what is inside. You have a fifty-two card deck, you assemble poker hands, and each hand is multiplied by whichever jokers you have collected during the run. There is no wager. There is no money. There is no random reward in exchange for payment. It is a deck-builder that borrowed poker's table of hands, roughly the way a chess problem borrows the pieces.

The board saw the back of a playing card and stopped there. It never reached the question of whether a stake exists — and that question is precisely what separates gambling from everything else.

Meanwhile there are games in which you pay real money for a random assortment of items, complete with a spinning reel, a winning sound and a rarity glow. Formally, that is a wager. Such games generally carry a 7 or a 12, because a separate little icon was invented for purchases with randomised contents.

The lesson here is not about PEGI and not about Balatro. It is that judging by the picture is easier than judging by the mechanism, and so systems of judgement almost always slide towards the picture. Reviews have the same defect: describing how a game looks is easier than taking apart how it works — and the result reads with equal confidence either way.