Balatro
I love solitaire games like Klondike and Spider. When I saw that Balatro, a poker-adjacent solitaire, was sweeping the Internet, I had to give it a try.
It's easy to learn Balatro but very challenging—and very fun—to master. The game is organized by rounds. You beat a round by making poker hands that generate a minimum amount of points. When you beat the round, you earn some money and advance to the next round, where the points requirement goes up. Every third round, you get a sort of "boss round" with an added handicap but a larger payout.
Between rounds, you go to the shop. That's where you spend money to build your deck. The shop deals a random assortment of Jokers and consummables each time you go there.
Jokers are the lifeblood of Balatro. Each Joker has a unique ability like multiplying points or making money. The consummables—Tarot cards, Planet cards, Spectral cards, and vouchers—improve your performance by doing things like enhancing your cards or powering up poker hands.
You can skip rounds, provided it's not a boss round. When you skip a round, you don't earn money and you don't visit the shop to improve your deck, but you get a tag with a special ability that can help you in other ways.
The trick is knowing how to combine the effects of all these things—Jokers, consummables, and tags—to maximize your points so you can survive a run of 24 rounds. If you make it to the end of the run, you unlock a run of higher difficulty. And on and on it goes.
But if you lose a round, then you lose all your progress and start over from the beginning of the run. In gaming, this genre of unforgiving gauntlet is called roguelike.
I initially thought the roguelike aspect would be demotivating, but it isn't. When I lose, I'm always eager to go back and try again. This is because the random Jokers you get early in a run tend to dictate your strategy for the rest of the run, so each run is unique and presents an opportunity to try a new strategy.
Balatro is super fun. I recommend it.