Clown emojis all around
That would be the point, yes. Balatro has cards and chips, but chips are just there for keeping points. If Balatro is 18+ for gambling imagery, then so should Solitaire. That would be stupid, so Balatro shouldn’t get it, either.
I think the important note is it’s not just the cards in Balatro. Is it right? Not in my opinion. You have to admit tho, that it uses waaaaay more gambling imagery (you make antes for fuck’s sake)
Agreed, gambling doesn’t have to be for money or even anything tangibly real.
It’s near the line, I agree, I see your point, but it’s just the terminology and no gambling mechanics. You don’t set the ante, you just play. They could change the name ante to level and it would be the same. It’s not like you look at your stuff and decide how much you’re willing to risk. (You could argue skipping blinds is this sort of risk analysis like gambling but that’s hardly unique to Balatro.) There is no benefit from stopping earlier because if you lose on ante one or lose on ante seven it’s the same outcome. Also, if you choose to restart one ante one or ante seven it’s the same outcome. Because it’s just a score keeping mechanism. Nothing more.
You literally do not make antes in Balatro, in any way.
You should know that you’re talking about before drawing conclusions.
The term Ante in the game is used instead of “round” or “level”. It’s a measure of how far you’ve gotten. Each “ante” is made up of three “stakes”, point totals you need to beat in a set number of hands played and cards discarded.
There’s no aspect of choosing how much you risk, of “ante-ing up”, or how much you stake. You either beat the points goal (called “chips”) or you lose. There’s no playing of your hand against other hands, bluffing about how good your hand may be to convince others to fold, etc. It’s just you against the score goal. If you beat it faster than the amount of hands you’re given to work with you get extra rewards.
The game has no elements where you stake chips for rewards or anything like that. It borrows basic elements of scoring mechanics from poker, and uses a lot of poker terms for other purposes, but the closest part to gambling is the ability to buy random card packs between rounds (to customize your deck instead of just having the standard 52 card deck).
In between rounds you have access to buy various things to add further modifiers to your scoring, and to adjust the composition of your deck in order to make getting specific combinations more likely.
You can learn most of this in about 5 minutes with the demo, or by taking some time to watch someone else play on youtube.
