I Spent 2025 Digging Through All The Word Game Roguelikes Flooding...

Balatro was PC Gamer’s 2024 game of the year. But that was in a more innocent age before we had to endure wave after wave of imitators. Seemingly every casino classic has been plundered at this point, with Balatro-fied spins on blackjack, roulette, and even those coin-pusher machines that haunt crap arcades (to be fair, that one shares a publisher with Balatro and is kinda excellent).

Outside of the casino, it’s word game developers who are the most frequent vultures hungrily circling poor little Balatro. Er, poor little obscenely-rich-and-successful Balatro. I can see the temptation as these games prove over and over that it doesn’t take much to turn Scrabble into a roguelike deckbuilder. Give the player a ‘deck’ of letter tiles, reward them for spelling prowess, then let them manipulate their deck by buffing or removing tiles and voila! You’re now one of the 5,789,247 Balatro-y word games on Steam.

Balatro of course didn’t invent this genre, but its influence is pretty obvious on a lot of these titles. Case in point…

Well, top marks for shamelessness with the name. What, was ‘Spellatro’ taken? Oh, it was. Anyway, in Wordatro you have ten tiles to make words from. If your word is at least five, seven, or nine letters long, you’ll get permanently buffed tiles added to your deck, a clever way of rewarding good wordplay.

Between rounds you also get a choice of three permanent bonuses, like point boosts or extra multipliers for certain letters. Solid stuff, albeit increasingly reliant on decent bonuses showing up. Later difficulties are so demanding—seriously, only two attempts to get the score?—that if a great bonus isn’t offered early on then you might as well quit and start over. Boo!

You can only play five letter words in this one, with success rewarded with money (nice) and ink (what?). Money can be spent on buying items that increase multipliers, reward certain letters being used, etc. Whereas ink can be used to increase the scores of your letters.

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There’s also an interesting idea wherein you can occasionally gain permanent buffs at the cost of removing letters from your deck, though you should maybe hang onto at least a couple of vowels.

Not bad, but the always-five-letter restriction does stop you enjoying the giddy highs of making a massive word that’s often the highlight of these games.

Help adorable birds migrate through the power of good sp

Source: PC Gamer