The 10 best Balatro-like games featured in October’s Steam Next Fest
The good news? Balatro-like fans are eating good this fall. The bad news? Our free time is about to take a big hit.
This was the biggest Steam Next Fest yet for Balatro-like games! For my third installment in this series, there were actually so many demos in this micro genre, that I narrowed down my final list to just the best ten out of all the games I tried. I continue to be so impressed by indie devs’ creativity, cleverness, and commitment to the number-go-BIG lifestyle. I hope Balatro fans will find a new most anticipated game from among these titles.
As always, I had to be discerning as I browsed the roguelike deckbuilder subgenre in Next Fest. One of my primary goals is to filter out games that fall more under the umbrella of Slay the Spire-likes than Balatro-likes. If you’d like to see the criteria I used to choose or eliminate certain games, you can refer to the breakdown at the end of my article from this past February’s Steam Next Fest.
One last note before we get into the good stuff: I also disqualified a few games on my initial list for their use of Generative AI in pre- or post-production. This Steam Next Fest featured more games than ever that incorporated GenAI into the development or marketing processes, and we at No Small Games remain committed to highlighting games developed without this technology, as much as possible.
1. Dice of Kalma
Developed by: Pepperbox Studios
Published by: Pepperbox Studios
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3885520/Dice_of_Kalma/
Ok, yes there have been a lot of dice-based takes on the Balatro-like genre coming out in recent months. To be honest, Dice of Kalma isn’t doing anything that radically different in its mechanics. But what it might lack in originality of gameplay, it absolutely makes up for with an incredible vibe and visual aesthetic. In this game, you play for your freedom against Kalma, the overseer of the Underworld. Whether your score can match an ever-increasing set of goals will determine your fate.
I found the UI to be exceptionally clean and clear in Dice of Kalma. In particular, the score total is easy to parse. Many Balatro-likes feature a ton of bells and whistles, but these game devs seem to appreciate that simplicity can also create a fun and addictive game loop. The joker analogue in this game are skulls with magical properties that you choose from after each round. Unlike jokers in Balatro, there is no cap to the number of skulls you possess at a time, which was a twist I enjoyed. I found it took some of the pressure off of choosing between them, and increased the simplicity of the game by not requiring that players manage a currency to buy these bonuses. I’m curious to see if more features or modes get added to Dice of Kalma before its full release.
Release Date: TBA
2. Breakout Season
Developed by: Kakaos Collective
Published by: Kakaos Collective
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3682370/Breakout_Season/
Breakout Season is one of those Next Fest demos that might be easily overlooked due to its fairly basic-looking graphics and UI, but the bones are good. I had so much fun playing the demo and can’t wait to see how the game evolves from here. The core gameplay is based on classic Breakout, of course with the Balatro-style twist of trying to score enough points each round to meet the target.
Breakout Season features more than one twist, though, as the “Season” in the title refers to a farming sim-style mechanic. Players maximize their score through the planting of vegetable blocks throughout the brick pattern. Each of your little vegetable guys comes with its own propagation pattern. Breaking the vegetable blocks causes them to multiply and spread, building out your own little block farm. In between rounds, the shop stocks garden-themed items to buff and multiply your score and fertilize your veggie team. The bonuses are clever, although the variety feels a little limited at this stage.
This demo may not have the most awe-inspiring graphics, but it hooked me long enough to play through several runs, which puts it in a spot as one of the most addictive games on this list. I’ll be keeping my eye on Breakout Season as it progresses towards release.
Release Date: Nov 10, 2025
3. Sink and Score
Developed by: Fart Games
Published by: Fart Games
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3823830/Sink_And_Score/
There’s something extra special to me about Balatro-likes that take beloved childhood games and give them a twist. Sink and Score plays heavily into the nostalgia factor with its roguelike take on Battleship. Each round, the game presents you with oceanic grids of increasing sizes. You have a limited number of turns to shoot missiles at spots in the grid, trying to locate and take down enemy crafts. The number of ships you sink translates into points, which add together towards your threshold score in order to progress.
I found the score calculation to be a little bit opaque and difficult to anticipate, making it hard to know whether or not I would be able to proceed onto the next round. I’m sure with more time in the game I would have developed a clearer understanding, though. I do think the game designers did a good job of creating fun and thematic special effects to select in between rounds (this game’s equivalent to jokers), including homing missiles that guarantee a hit on an enemy craft or extra powerful shots that take down a whole ship on impact. These special effects come with a bit of a twist, in that they only last for one round. Once they expire, the game presents you with new options to choose from before the next round begins. Overall I thought this was a fun take on a classic boardgame.
Release Date: TBA
4. Tabulo
Developed by: Noah Games
Published by: Noah Games
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3538860/Tabulo/
It was only a matter of time before someone Balatro-ified chess, and here it is. Tabulo is an interesting take on a chess-based Balatro to me, because it deemphasized the two-player nature of the game. In Tabulo, as in every Balatro-like, you want to score enough points to reach the threshold to win the round and move forward to the next. To do so, you place your chess piece to form patterns on the board. Each piece interacts with and scores points on other adjacent or nearby tiles (pawns target adjacent tiles, rooks target rows and columns, bishops target on a diagonal, you can probably sort out the rest).
You get several attempts to score enough points to move forward, but in between each scoring phase, you encounter the shop where you can buy more pieces and also special tiles that add new effects and buffs to your pieces and board. The twist here is that your pieces and these joker-style trinkets all have to fit somewhere on your chess board in order to take effect. The fact that you get to go through the shop so often meant that I was frequently changing up where I placed my pieces and what passive boosts I was using in my strategy.
I went from feeling curious but unimpressed to feeling very locked in within just a couple of rounds. The legally distinct (barely?) Balatro-style music certainly helped. But for real, if I were the devs I would look at swapping out for a more unique soundtrack. All in all, I was surprised at how quickly Tabulo hooked me.
Release Date: TBA
5. Blunderworld
Developed by: Hidden Roll
Published by: Hidden Roll
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3944070/Blunderworld/
Something I was hoping to see from more of the Balatro-likes on this list, and that I think is an essential factor to achieve the kind of viral success that Balatro and successors like CloverPit found, is personality. Where some of these games may lack their own identity or quirks, Blunderworld shows up with personality in spades. Blunderworld sends you on a quest through hell and back to become the new lord of the Underworld. The game pits you against all the heavy hitters, the devils and demons who rule over all the deadly sins, in a game that felt a bit like the strange love child of shuffleboard and Beyblades (although I think it’s technically closest to Crokinole).
The core gameplay is all very kinetic and physics based, as you take your puck (called an Opus) and send it flying across the circular play area, in an attempt to knock as many little orbs out of the right. These orbs grant you souls, which make up your base score. Scattered around the little arena, your opponents will place various obstacles and debuff zones to hinder your scoring potential. Unlike in most Balatro-style games, Blunderworld applies not just one, but two different multipliers to your score, creating the opportunity for some truly astronomical score totals.
The fact that gameplay is mainly physics-based adds a certain level of unpredictability, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially for those who enjoy calculating the specific probabilities of different outcomes in Balatro. But I found Blunderworld to offer a great mix of really satisfying kinetic scoring and mathy strategy. Plus, I can’t wrap up without mentioning the dialogue and lore were genuinely very funny, and added to the charm of the game. I’m looking forward to picking up the full game, which is available now!
Release Date: Oct 23, 2025
6. Plinbo
Developed by: Raphus & Co.
Published by: Raphus & Co.
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3948580/Plinbo/
Ok, yes, we’ve seen several takes on a Balatro-ified Pachinko game. Most notably, Ballionaire offered up an endlessly customizable, synergizable fever dream of an experience that turns the pegboard into your deck. While I loved Ballionaire, I did find it overwhelming at times. Plinbo scales way back on the various mechanics and customizations, delivering a much simpler variation on this concept.
In Plinbo, your pegboard largely stays the same from round to round. Each turn you push a button to drop some number of balls down towards the top peg, and they bounce around randomly, eventually scoring you points when they land in one of the buckets below. As always, your aim is to score enough points to meet the threshold to proceed past that round. The primary source of strategy here are the beautifully designed tarot cards which you can purchase from the shop. These serve as this game’s jokers and apply all kinds of special effects to your pegboard, balls and even the score buckets at the bottom.
There’s a strong element of randomness to Plinbo, but I think players might enjoy that as a trade-off for the simplicity and straightforwardness of the gameplay. I found it to be a chill experience with great vibes and aesthetics.
Release Date: 2025
7. Coin Shark
Developed by: oAo Games
Published by: oAo Games
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3188730/Coin_Shark/
You might be saying to yourself at this point, “this is getting ridiculous! You can’t just Balatro-ify any game of chance. Surely some games are too simple, too basic to receive the Balatro treatment!” And Coin Shark responds with “hold my beer.” Coin Shark is the coin-flipping Balatro-like, where you make money to pay your fictitious bills by simply getting heads or tails. The coin flip is a little physics-based feature where you click and drag the coin to trigger the flip.
While some of the entries on this list have kinetic gameplay that increases the randomness of the outcome, I actually found after a few flips that it was very easy to learn the weight and timing of the coin. I quickly started gaming the system to get the exact outcome I wanted from the flip. This removed both the randomness and the dramatic tension from the gameplay. I would suggest that the devs look into making the flip truly random by triggering it with a button press or randomizing the physics a little each time.
Otherwise, I found the aesthetics very cute and charming, and the customizations to be very clever. Similar to Tabulo, where you place your joker-like tokens onto your game board, you have to think about the placement of your customizations in Coin Shark. Rather than jokers, you’ll be purchasing stickers that must be applied to one side or the other of your coin. This means you need to choose whether to double-down on one superpowered head or tails, or hedge your bets and apply some of the bonuses to each side. Overall, I think Coin Shark is a clever example of how truly any game can be Balatro-fied.
Release Date: 2025
8. Dogpile
Developed by: Studio Folly, Toot Games, Foot
Published by: WINGS
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3839300/Dogpile/
Few games from recent years have had as viral a spread and as addictive a core gameplay loop as Balatro. One of the few that rival it is Suika Game from 2023, also known as “fruit game”, which asks players to drop and merge fruit together in pursuit of a high score and the elusive watermelon. The upcoming game Dogpile says “why not both?” with its dog-based merging, synergy-building, number-go-big core loop.
Rather than dropping fruit to merge, players must drop dogs of different breeds into the yard. Two dogs of the same breed will merge to create a new, larger breed, adding to your total score. This is where the game makes a significant deviation from the Balatro-like mold: while players get a limited number of turns in which to try to reach the score threshold, falling short of the target score doesn’t end the game. Like in Suika Game, players continue dropping and merging dogs until they run out of space in the yard. There is a penalty to missing the score threshold, though, which is that players must choose a debuff that will impede their progress.
I really enjoyed the thematic end-of-round rewards and the shop. At the end of each round, if you reach the allotted score threshold, you get to take a little trip to the groomer’s to upgrade one of your dogs permanently with a special passive skill. The shop, however, shows up in the same draft as the dogs, and offers a variety of dog tags that can do everything from add multipliers to your score, to change the gravity and physics of the yard. Dogpile was a great time and there’s a ton of content and different synergies to explore from day one!
Release Date: TBA
9. ROGOLF
Developed by: Seabird Interactive
Published by: Seabird Interactive
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3810020/ROGOLF/
I really love seeing a game dev take a classic game or experience and Balatro-ify it in a way that feels really authentic to the original. That’s what Seabird Interactive has done here with ROGOLF, taking the classic digital minigolf gameplay and adding a Balatro-style twist that still maintains the spirit of the core game.
Each round features a score threshold called the “gate”, which you have to reach by completing three minigolf holes. You have a limited number of shots per hole, as well as additional objectives that you must complete in order to move forward. Your score per hole is calculated by how many shots you use, multiplied by how many coins you pick up along the way. In true minigolf fashion, if you find big success with one hole, you get a little leeway to struggle with a future one and still reach your target score.
I found the gameplay both fun and satisfying (who doesn’t love a classic minigolf game?), and found the additional objectives and passive buffs very clever. It didn’t seem like there’s a huge variety in terms of the joker-like boosts you can purchase, but I have high hopes that we’ll see more included in the full release.
Release Date: TBA
10. Dice A Million
Developed by: countlessnights
Published by: 2 Left Thumbs
Demo still available? Yes
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3430340/Dice_A_Million/
There are lots of silly, goofy vibes on this whole list, but the King of Quirks here is undoubtedly Dice A Million! This is yet another Balatro-like that uses dice instead of cards as the core of its gameplay loop, but with each Next Fest I discover that there are still new ways to design a Balatro-like around dice. Immediately Dice A Million introduces you to the silly and strange lore of the world, it welcomes players to their new job at the “dice rolling facility”.
Your deck is composed of a set of dice of various kinds and shapes. Each turn, you draw eight dice from your bag, and choose five of them to roll. Your score is calculated by the values you roll, but quickly that starts to get modified by the special effects of new dice you collect. Between rounds you get to visit the shop which carries a variety of dice with all kinds of effects. Some dice can multiply the values of dice that roll nearby to them, or to the dice that get rolled on the following turn, or multiply even or odd values. There are tons of different effects that combine and synergize with each other.
I really appreciate that this take on a dice rolling Balatro-like uses not only the values that you roll, but also incorporates a little bit of physics. Which dice land near each other is often very important to the overall score, incorporating a high degree of randomization. Dice A Million feels like a fresh take on a formula that we’ve seen many times now, and I look forward to exploring the many styles of dice and other passive bonuses when the game releases in early 2026.
Release Date: January 2026
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