4 ms·

The biggest thing that sets Balatro apart as not gambling to me is you never bet anything of any value. Anything you do only affects that individual <1h run. No

• jerf 2y ago
  It isn't just that you don't bet anything of value. You don't bet anything, period. There is no wager. There is no bet. There is no way to put up $5 and if the outcome goes your way you get $20. You may, with all the various features in the game, be able to construct something that has that effect, although it would still require some squinting and blurring because there is certainly no dialog that ever pops up saying "Bet how much: _____". I'm hedging just because there's an awful lot of features in the game and you can do a lot of weird things if you try. But nothing is immediately coming to mind, without so much squinting that you'll turn Final Fantasy X into a "gambling" game because "you might run around starting fights to get rare loot" or something of a similar level of "possibly true in a really abstract sense but not a useful definition". You can, philosophically, define gambling down to "putting any sort of time or resources in for an uncertain outcome of any sort" and do useful math on such definitions but that's not a useful definition for the discussion at hand because that just describes life, and all games except deterministic solitaire games, which are a legitimate category but also a small minority.