Prior to Balatro marking its place among some of the best roguelikes around, solo developer LocalThunk considered calling the game something else - and giving it an interactive menu in which players could rearrange the title's letters to spell "random crap."
Balatro is a clever name for a poker-inspired deck builder with unique Joker cards - after all, it translates directly to "clown" or "jester" in Latin. In ancient Rome, a balatro was essentially a professional buffoon paid to jest. Balatro wasn't, however, always the title that LocalThunk had in mind for the smash-hit roguelike game - in fact, it actually turns out that one of the original "candidate titles" for Balatro was Fool's Gambit.
