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There's no money involved though, it's a closed single-player game without a betting mechanic that happens to use playing cards and poker hands for scoring. Meanwhile others have mentioned FIFA and stuff with loot boxes/packs, which are borderline slot machine mechanics that eat money.

the game has no gambling whatsoever. it only has poker aesthetic. it uses the term "ante" to mean "level", it uses traditional poker hands, and it uses chips to define points. otherwise it's just a non gambling card game. it would be like putting this rating on go-fish, or solitaire because they use the same cards that poker does. this game could not teach you how to play poker.

the association with gambling is entirely superficial. what has everyone up in arms is that there are many games with micro transactions that are essentially a roll at the slot machine, and intentionally designed using gambling psychology, that people lose thousands of dollars at every day. those games don't have their gambling mechanics considered at all by ratings boards. it shows that pegi doesn't put much work into their ratings. one game that looks like gambling but isn't gets and 18+. the many games that have real predatory gambling tactics but hide them are free to do so with impunity.

hell, do you remember when half of twitch was people "rolling" for cs:go skins and trading them for real money. that was just straight up regular gambling that streamers were faking numbers for to show them making a profit. they used dishonest third party sites to trade the items and broadcast themselves getting unrealistic results. the only reason it stopped was because of the dishonesty of the third party sites coming out. not because of the underage gambling for a promise of actual financial returns. that still happens in many games. most of which have a lower pegi rating than cs:go or balatro.

I don't think that explains the dichotomy in ratings between, say, Balatro and FIFA, one of which let's you gamble with real currency and the other is a pixelated deck builder.

I've played RPGs, aimed at kids and young adults, with full-on casinos in them that didn't get this rating. Belatro has no microtransactions, there's no real money involved after purchasing the game itself. I would say it's less harmful than learning actual poker or blackjack in a kid's JRPG, since Belatro is not a real game that a person could ever play in real life.

There's no gambling in the game. Not with real money, nor with fake money. They labeled it 18+ for "looking like" gambling.

Using the same logic, solitaire should be 18+.