Soapbox: Help! I Can’t Stop Playing Card Games On Switch

Image: Nintendo LifeSoapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, Jim is laying all his cards on the table…

It’s early March and I am already filled with embarrassment at the thought of my 2024 Nintendo Year in Review. Last year’s results were to be expected — “You didn’t see enough daylight once Tears of the Kingdom was out, but here’s another 43 games you played, too” — though this time I am fearful that things might be a little less jolly. “You logged 2,000 combined hours on Balatro and Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!, are you okay?”

Contrary to what you might believe after a brief glance at Nintendo’s 2024 slate so far, my gaming year has got off to a flying start. I loved Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, I finally beat Celeste, Outer Wilds gave me all the feelings. But come the end of the year, all of these are going to be nothing but a drop in the software menu ocean. Why? Because in the last two weeks, my Switch has become a dedicated card game machine.

First with Pocket Card Jockey and then with Balatro, all thoughts of playing a game that doesn’t involve a deck of cards have gone completely from my mind. Where once there was a passion for tactics, adventure, and fantasy, there are now only 52 rectangular pieces of virtual paper. What has happened to me?

I’ll tell you what has happened: Game Freak.

Balatro was a genuine surprise and I have more to say about it in just a moment, but Pocket Card Jockey was entirely my fault. I adore the 3DS game. I had remained hopeful of a Switch port for years. Heck, I even paid for an Apple Arcade subscription so that I could play it on the go. I knew the risks, yet when it was announced in the February Partner Showcase, I hopped back on my mount and was first out of the gate all over again.

to take a break from the trials and tribulations of Balatro, I turn to Pocket Card Jockey. To escape the grind of professional horse racing, I go back to Balatro…

Pocket Card Jockey is a horse racing game at heart, but how well you race depends on how good you are at solitaire. This is the kind of concept that I would tell my friends I had dedicated tens of hours to, only to be slipped a decaf coffee and told to get a good night’s rest in return. But trust me, it’s brilliant. A 9/10 level of brilliant, going by our review. Which, brilliantly, I wrote.

Most card games are one-and-done for me, but once you whack some funky tunes and the promise of a shiny trophy over the top of it, I’m in for the long run. Pocket Card Jockey isn’t a roguelike per se, but there is a definite pull of ‘just one more go’ that has had me pouring away the hours all in the name of seeing my horse, Sensitive Ken, win one more gold.

One week ago, I could have quite happily signed off the rest of 2024 to the pursuit of seeing Ken become the best of the bunch. It was a no-brainer. Little did I know that this town is, in fact, big enough for the both of us (assuming “us” is a couple of card games).

Balatro has taken over my life. With every free moment, I have fired up the Switch and dealt myself another hand. Publisher Playstack has made it very clear that developer LocalThunk’s game “does not feature gambling mechanics of any kind” following its removal from the European, Australian, and Japanese eShops (where it remains unavailable at the time of writing). Unless, of course, the chips on the table are daylight hours. In which case, I’m broke.

You probably don’t need me to explain this one to you since seemingly everyone and their dog is playing it. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder where you play hands of poker to overcome increasingly high blinds. The thing is, the hands can get spicy. Multipliers, bonuses, extra winnings, Balatro is all about making you feel like a master of the cards before rewarding you with a dopamine-inducing ding to let you know that you really are the smartest little poker boii around.

This smart little poker boii is yet to win a round of Balatro. I have dedicated multiple hours to the goal every day and I still haven’t beaten the final ante. It’s crushing in that special way that makes me forget all of the previous pain and dive back in head first with the idea that maybe slightly switching up my tactics will shower me with glory and riches. So far, it has not.

Roguelikes are usually my tasty little palate cleanser between the meatier 40-hour RPG offerings, but now that I am loading up on the bitesize snacks, I never want to go back to a main meal.

In an attempt to take a break from the trials and tribulations of Balatro, I turn to Pocket Card Jockey. To escape the grind of professional horse racing, I go back to Balatro. It’s a vicious cycle and one that I can already see myself attempting to explain once the year is up and I confess that I have played through none of Nintendo’s offerings over the past 12 months because I was “too busy”.

What do you do when your break from a card game is another card game? Will I ever break free or is this it for the Switch now, doomed to spend the final years of its life as nothing more than a deck of virtual cards?

Maybe I need to download something else to take my mind off things. Hey, I hear Slay the Spire is quite good…

Has your life also become overrun by card games, or are you still lucky enough to have some semblance of free will? Let me know I’m not alone in the comments below… please.