I had big game plans for this holiday season: I was going to finally start playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the second time, build a new city in The First Frontier, and dive into Lethal Company with a friend.

I did none of those things. Instead, I played Baratro, a poker-inspired deck builder, incessantly. Every day I sat on the couch with my Steam deck and played for at least a couple of hours. Not even the full game, just the demo version, but I still played for 30 hours. In short, I was quite disappointed when that wonderful demo was removed from Steam by developer LocalThunk on January 1.

Today, I'm launching the Steam deck again. Today, I'm firing up Steam Deck again, because the deckbuilder demo is suddenly back. Even more exciting, the demo's return coincides with the release date of LocalThunk's poker roguelike. Here's the new trailer:

To briefly summarize the game, you start with a standard deck of 52 cards and begin building your best poker hand to earn enough chips to advance to the next round. The chips earned can be spent on special cards. Tarot cards that can enchant your deck, planet cards that improve the multiplier of various hands, jokers that can boost your score, clone your cards, twist or subvert the rules of poker itself, and all sorts of nonsense. Before you know it, your deck will have twice as many hearts as the first, or 15 aces, or cards made of stone, steel, or glass.

I had a long chat with LocalThunk the other day, and he showed me the new joker in the updated Balatro demo and some of the other features coming in February when the game fully launches.

You can already see that two of these jokers, Rocket and Mail, will help your bank account by discarding and accumulating bills over multiple rounds. The walkie-talkie gives you both extra chips and multipliers every time you play tens and fours... And if you've ever played Baratro, you can imagine what it would be like to have a deck full of 10s and 4s. Campfires are also interesting, and every time you sell a card, the multiplier goes up.

LocalThunk also showed a joker called Shortcut, which allows you to skip a couple of cards to make a straight (2, 3, 5, 7, and 8 are all valid straights). This is a good thing, because in the last demo, building a deck around a flush worked well, but building a deck around a straight didn't work so well.

And there's a new banana.

"One of the first jokers I built was Gros Michel. It was a variant of the banana that really took off in the '50s." Then it was wiped out by a fungus called Panama Disease."

Baratro fans will know the precious but unstable Gros Michel. This joker adds a second banana to the mix.

"Not sure if anyone knows about the banana lore, but after [Gros Michel] went extinct, we replaced it with something called the Cavendish banana. It's a different subspecies," the local thunk told me.

In Baratolo, the Cavendish gives x3 mulch, but only a 1 in 10 chance of rotting. In terms of stability, this is an improvement over the original.

Players can look forward to even more fun stuff in the 1.0 version coming in February, including 20 challenge decks that add all sorts of interesting rules and restrictions. One challenge LocalThunk showed us is called "Omlette"

In this one, players can only earn money with egg jokers.

This doesn't sound too difficult. Egg jokers increase in value by $3 per round, so they eventually become incredibly valuable, and having five of them can quickly save you a lot of money. But with all the other money-making avenues out there, they will have to start selling pretty eggs at some point in order to stay in the game. It is going to be a tough strategic choice. Another challenge deck I saw mimics a five-card draw game, and you can imagine trying to put together a strong hand without the eight cards normally dealt in play.

I can also say that the new jokers are not the only additions, as I was able to check out a new demo a day earlier. There is a new kind of booster pack in the store that you will find super useful (except when you don't). No kidding.