Start screen with Play button! Press it and start new journey.

Before I go any further, I feel like I should clarify a few things:

1. First of all, I am not affiliated with LocalThunk or Playstack in any way, and I have no intention of damaging, violating or infringing upon their copyright. This is purely a fan project, created so I can express my passion for this game and also spread word and love about this beautiful, 18+ game.
2. Up until two weeks ago, I had no prior experience with programming in Swift, let alone writing an Apple Watch app in SwiftUI. Because of that, I don’t even have a way of telling if this is done completely and terribly wrong or if it’s somewhat alright. All I know is that I wanted to keep it simple and use only SwiftUI and nothing else. In my humble opinion, it turned out quite nicely. :)
3. Last thing: while I didn’t really manage to port the whole game, as I’ve simply run out of time, I’ve set myself a very clear goal: The port had to be as close to the original and could not lose any of its core, core functional gameplay features. I saw the Apple Watch screen as a challenge to test my UI skills, and not as a problem. So in the end, while this might look and sound like a quick copycat, simplified and, well, ported to Apple Watch, but I can assure you, it’s not.

TL;DR: In this post I explain how I’ve managed to port (for the most part) Balatro to the Apple Watch and showcase all of the necessary changes that had to be done for it to work on its small screen. If you want to just see it in action, scroll to the end, where there’s gameplay video of me playing it on my Apple Watch.
Important to set the record straight: The current version only contains 17 working jokers, every planet card along with secret planets, working shop, working core gameplay with ability to move jokers around, sell them, etc.

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, I proudly present to You, the grand reveal!

Apple Watch Balatro: Wee edition -> in action!

Launching the game

As you can see, I’ve tried my best to make the UI resemble the original thing. The whole concept revolves around utilizing the Apple Watch crown as a specialized scrollbar that allows you to quickly and swiftly scroll through all of your cards in hand! Naturally, you just can’t fit effectively 8 or more cards on the Apple Watch screen, so this idea was the best I came up with. And it works beautifully.

I believe the interface, to the trained Balatro veteran eye, should be rather straightforward and that it doesn’t need any explanation.

Okay, maybe there’s one thing – the “0” to the left of the blue chips counter. That’s the level of the currently selected poker hand.

Choosing the poker hand and playing it:

Playing a hand - a Pair

Discards work the same way and the rest of the gameplay mechanism is basically the same as in the original.

Now onto the shop experience!

Winning a round and getting to the shop!

At this moment, the shop contains 3 cards:

• 2 Jokers
• 1 Planet card

*But there are no implemented packs just yet

Of course You can always reroll the shop, if You either bought everything or want something else!

In order to get around the small working space I've decided to implement a: Inspect Card Feature, which allows user to press and hold a card to see:

• Name of the card (joker, planet card, playing card)
• Description of the card (joker, planet card)
• (Sell value / sell button) || Chips value (joker, playing card)
• Current level (planet card)

Moving jokers around:

A pretty nice collection of jokers!

Gameplay video of me playing on my Apple Watch SE 44 (2gen), baron run:

https://reddit.com/link/1hw7rex/video/1g0cxx7u3obe1/player

At the End I wanted to include a couple of scenarios, I can see potentially happening, if this version of Balatro ever got released\*(About this part later)

Playing Balatro at wedding

Playing Balatro when another Balatro player gets born

Playing Balatro when loosing it all

A few words from me, after creating this port and writing this post for the past 2 hours:

I really love the game, as You probably guessed it, and the funny thing is, the reason why I've decided to do it in the first place, was because my Apple Arcade subscription ended. After that, I noticed that You can't buy it on App Store for Macos, so I went like "okay then, in that case, Imma just write it myself from scratch, and I'm gonna do it for the Apple Watch (??)".

Okaay, that might have not been the sole reason behind it all, but it was a factor too! Mainly I just thought that it would make for a nice Summer Project, but after driving to my family for christmas, I decided to do it now, during the winter-break/holidays, just 'after hours'.
I also thought that this would make for a great project to add to my Github, which leads me to the last part.

I really want to share this project with others. In fact, from the very beginning I wanted to share it on my Github, but after It got, well so big and so close to the actual game, not counting even the fact, that I use original assets, I decided that naturally I can't do that. (Of course I have no intend of earning any money off of this!)

I'm very excited to hear what people think about my project: Balatro Wee edition.
And here's hoping the creator, LocalThunk himself might see this and give the green light to share this project (in one way or another).

Bye!