I’ve been fascinated by a project that’s been making the rounds lately: BalatroBench, which essentially lets large language models play Balatro, that brilliant poker-inspired roguelike that took the gaming world by storm last year. The concept is simple but elegant — feed the LLM the game state as text, let it decide what to do, and watch it either triumph or faceplant spectacularly.

For those unfamiliar, Balatro is a poker-based roguelike where you build synergies between cards, jokers, and special effects to reach increasingly absurd score targets. It’s the kind of game that requires both strategic planning and tactical decision-making, which makes it a genuinely interesting test for AI reasoning capabilities.