Steam Next Fest is in full swing, and when I'm not sailing the high seas in search of pirate survival adventures in Windrose, I'm diving headfirst into the big pile of Balatro-like deckbuilders that are showcasing new demos.

As always, there's a bunch of developers hoping to strike Balatro-sized jackpots by twisting well-known games using magic morphing multipliers: I've played demos that use chess, billiards, pachinko, roulette, slot machines, coin pushers, gashapon… even a few that are just doing poker again.

If you're looking for some ideas on which to try first (because we still don't know how far off Balatro 1.1 is), here are the seven best Balatro-likes I played at Steam Next Fest. And if I've missed a few, please let me know in the comments.

♟️ Balatro but it's chess: Gambonanza

I was dubious for a second because Gambonanza's main menu is so deeply Balatro-fied you can even drag the chess piece around the screen, same as you can the ace of spades. But the game quickly establishes its own style and personality and I wound up replaying it a whole bunch of times.

On a tiny chessboard you face off against the computer with just a few chess pieces that move in the standard ways. But after each mini-match you can spend money to enchant tiles and purchase gambits that will change the rules. Create phantom pieces, make pawns move like kings, even duplicate a piece when it gets captured… after a couple hours, I'm still finding new ways to enchant my board and arsenal. The bosses I've seen are distinctive and fun, like one that makes several of its pieces uncapturable for most of the match (that's him at the top of the page). The experience is hurt a tiny bit by how dumb your CPU opponent sometimes is, but I frankly needed all the help I could get.