Decko by Haakon Hoel Gaarder
Let’s assume I don’t know Balatro. Or Poker. Will I enjoy this?
Yes! Well, you’ll be able to follow the review at least - This game is different enough from Balatro and Poker that everyone starts with a bit of a learning curve regardless of their background. The game is Poker-like so a Poker background might help, but it also might actively hurt your understanding of the game as enough is different.
I’m going to explain everything as if you’ve never heard of Poker or Balatro3, and you can draw your own inferences if you have!
So, there are cards…
Decko is a deckbuilding game, meaning you start with a basic set of cards. In this case, you have 2 each of the numbers 2 through 8, and none have any special powers. They are distributed amongst the 4 regular suits - spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. (Though do note that you have 4 each of the red suits, diamonds and hearts, and only 3 each of the black suits)
In that first round, someone is selected to be “The blind” which means they have to bet the minimum bet before they even know what their hand contains. The house also puts up the minimum bet, meaning there’s always somewhere to win some chips from.
Right away we can answer the question of how Decko deals with deck-thinning, a staple of deckbuilding games. Each betting round, before you act for the first time, you get to burn any card from your hand, and draw a replacement. The tension here is between making a short-term burn for the purpose of improving this hand right now, or a long term investment in improving the shape of your overall deck.
Then there’s the betting
Then in the betting round each time it is your turn, you have the choice of folding your hand, calling or raising.
Folding takes you out of the betting, you lose whatever chips you’ve bet with already but at least you don’t have to bet any more, but you do get to take one card from the market to improve your deck.
Calling keeps you in the hand by matching the highest bet. If all bets are now equal, the betting round ends and we find out who actually won the hand1.
Raising means pushing the bet up. In this game you can only raise by one chip2, and there is a maximum bet that you cannot raise beyond, but as I’ve only played 3-player so far, it’s been unlikely that 2 players both want to raise and keep pushing the bet up.
Showdown
When the last player calls and all bets are equal, everyone shows their hand and we work out who won. Here some poker experience might help, but there are deviations from poker that you need to take into account:
Full House is ranked lower in this game than in poker because it’s easier to make
Whilst cards are ranked in the scoring set, there is no kicker. This means that for example if you have a pair of 4s and I have a pair of 3s, your pair is better because it’s higher. But if we both have a pair of 4s, we don’t use any other cards in our hand to break the tie - we both ‘win’.
One for Balatro players - there’s no card ranking for 5-of-a-kind or other esoteric hands that are only made possible by the deckbuilding part of the game.
Whoever won the hand wins all the chips in the pot, which is good because winning the race to 60 chips, or having the most chips at the end of round 12, is how you win the game.
But it’s not all bad for the players who stayed to the showdown and didn’t win, because they get to go to the market. Their hand ranking is worth a certain amount of money, to be spent in the shop, but somewhat confusingly money isn’t chips. Money is just what you use in this deckbuilding phase, it’s transient and must be spent in the round it’s earned - you don’t get to keep it over to the next round.
This is where things get weird
Decko 4P setup as taken by Haakon himself.
(The Decko playmat is standard part of the box. The Red space nebula playmat behind is not, despite being really, really cool)
If you’re not a Balatro player, this is where the wheels fall off and start to get crazy, because you get to go to the market and add new cards to your deck, use special abilities, and buy jokers with permanent game altering powers.
This market step uses the money you earned based on the strength of your hand, so typically your early hands are not going to be very strong, giving you a limited economy, and later as your hands get better you’re going to have this ramping feel to what you can do in this phase.
The market is also interesting from a deckbuilding point of view, when I did my rundown of Deckbuilding games that did something different I don’t remember coming across a dynamic market where the cards costs are based on how long the card has been in the market not an inherent quality of the card. That’s usually seen in worker placement or draft-style games like Six Sojourns or similar where having the economy to reach the freshest part of the market gives you an advantage.
Curiously, the most expensive market card costs $4, and early on that’s a difficult amount of money to get in one round. But folding your hand immediately gets you 1 card from the market at any price, meaning there’s an extra incentive to fold if there’s an expensive card in the market you definitely want.
However, folding only gets you a card, and doesn’t give you access to the other parts of the market:
If you’re loaded with money and can’t see the card you want in the market, you can spend a little to flush the market and see new cards.
If getting to burn a card each betting round isn’t enough burn for you, you can spend $2 to burn another card4
If someone’s deck is getting out of hand, you can spend $3 to take a card you previously burned, and put it on top of their deck! That’s a real targeted move, and maybe doesn’t do much by itself, but if multiple players gang up to ‘gift’ the same player in one round that could get nasty!
If you don’t want to do anything to your deck, but need to catch up a chip deficit, you can buy chips here
Crucially, you can only do each of these things once in a round. No spending $8 to burn 4 cards at once.
The jokers
The final move you can make in the market is to buy a joker, giving you a permanent ability for the rest of the game. Jokers cost chips though, so you are effectively investing points and betting power here.
There are 6 types of joker, and the market here is segregated such that there will always be 1 joker available of each of the 6 types. You personally can only buy 1 joker in any given round, and can only ever have 1 of any type - once you’ve got a certain type of joker that ability is locked in.
The 6 joker types are tied to actions in the rest of the round:
Drawing an extra card every turn is obviously powerful. Is it worth 7 chips? Possibly!
DEAL jokers do something right at the beginning of the round when you are first dealt your hand
BURN jokers do something when you choose to burn a card in your first betting round
CALL jokers do something when you match the previous player’s bet
RAISE jokers do something when you raise the bet
FOLD jokers do something when you fold your hand and leave the betting round
BUY jokers do something when you lose the showdown and get to go to market.
Of the Fold jokers, I’m a big fan of Hecate Patchface
The wildcards
There are 2 wildcard rounds, rounds 4 and 8. In them, the rules are altered, sometimes quite dramatically, and crucially you can see those rules alterations in advance so you can deckbuild towards them in the early rounds - they shouldn’t catch you by surprise.
They are very important rounds, as on top of the blind player and the house putting up a minimum bet, every player (including the blind player!) puts another minimum bet into the house pile. Even in a 3 player game that means there’s a minimum 10 chips staked in the first wildcard round, and 15 in the second!
Summary
I love Haakon’s take on the deckbuilding poker game, but I think there’s still lots of room in this space for other expressions of a similar ideas - the space is far from fully explored with just this one offering. There’s lots of power in the familiarity of the regular poker deck, supplemented by extra powers and card abilities.
Will we see a deckbuilding trick-taking game next?
I’m a big fan of Haakon’s take on the worker placement game too, Yonder. In fact, all of his previous games, Villagers, Streets and Moon are all worth checking out.
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Game details
Decko on BGG
Designer and artist - Haakon Hoel Gaarder
1 There’s one exception - if no-one raised so the turn gets back to the blind player with all bets equal, the blind player still gets the opportunity to fold, call or raise. That’s unusual from a poker perspective but is important for this game because of the jokers.
2 Personally I’m grateful of the reduced decision space, it’s only Fold, Call, or Raise, and not Raise-by-how-much. My son didn’t like this aspect because he wanted the chance to raise big, just like poker.
3 Poker is a well known card game with lots of variants that involve betting on the strength of a 5-card hand. Balatro is a video game that combined classic poker hands with deckbuilding and magical jokers making a roguelike game of progressing through tougher and tougher opponents until you reach the end or fail. Decko is Haakon’s answer to ‘what if Balatro was a multiplayer game and kept more of the poker elements?’
4 Watch out for the rule of 7 though - you cannot burn so many cards that your deck contains fewer than 7 cards, and you cannot draw so many cards as to have more than 7 cards in your hand.