The best puzzle games like Balatro are Slay the Spire, Luck be a Landlord and Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to puzzle costs you.
Filtering to puzzle means you want to understand something rather than execute it. It is the right filter when what you liked was the click of working out how a system worked.
What you get: The moment of understanding as the reward. Good puzzle games teach a rule, let you feel clever, then show you the rule was smaller than you thought.
What made Balatro worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the puzzle part of that answer, and only the puzzle part.
The deckbuilding roguelike everything since is measured against.
A slot machine as a synergy engine — the closest structural cousin.
Blackjack rebuilt as a roguelike, and very funny.
Deckbuilding with more moving parts and huge combo ceilings.
Pachinko plus deckbuilding, and the same one-more-run pull.
A card game that keeps changing what kind of card game it is.
Inventory as the build, and the synergies are the whole game.
The free content updates, if you have not played the newer jokers.
Momentum. Puzzle games are paced for twenty minutes at a time and most of them get worse past an hour.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Balatro that are not puzzle games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Balatro — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Slay the Spire. The deckbuilding roguelike everything since is measured against.
No. Balatro released on the PC & Modern Multi-Platform, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Rarely. A friendly art style is not a difficulty setting — some of the hardest games ever made look like children's books.
In a well-designed game the piece you are missing was taught two rooms ago. If a solution only arrives by trying everything, the design is the problem, not you.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Balatro list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is puzzle — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the puzzle guide for where to start in the genre generally.