Balatro (Steam/PS5/Xbox Series X/Switch)

[MartyG]

Who's arguing? I'm posting about my experiences with the game and posting about a strategy (discarding cards through playing non-scoring cards) you might not have thought about that could help you with enjoying the game more.

Remember also that you can view your deck at any time



So on your first hand with a hidden cards, you can see what cards you have in that hand with a process of elimination (and sorting your deck either by suit or card value, discarding one or two cards). The Star, Moon, Sun and World Tarot cards allow you to make cards in your hand all the same suit, so those you can use to stack your deck in favour of getting flushes, there's also the spectral card that allows all presented cards into a random same suit. Jokers that let you skip a value in a straight, or having four cards count as a flush etc. There is a lot of hidden strategy that you don't notice straight away - also keep an eye on the blind skips, using these can give your deck a good boost at times.

I've put about 18 hours into this now and keep finding new ways to play the deck.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Who's arguing? I'm posting about my experiences with the game and posting about a strategy (discarding cards through playing non-scoring cards) you might not have thought about that could help you with enjoying the game more.

Remember also that you can view your deck at any time



So on your first hand with a hidden cards, you can see what cards you have in that hand with a process of elimination (and sorting your deck either by suit or card value). The Star, Moon, Sun and World Tarot cards allow you to make cards in your hand all the same suit, so those you can use to stack your deck in favour of getting flushes, there's also the spectral card that allows all presented cards into a random same suit. Jokers that let you skip a value in a straight, or having four cards count as a flush etc. There is a lot of hidden strategy that you don't notice straight away - also keep an eye on the blind skips, using these can give your deck a good boost at times.

I've put about 18 hours into this now and keep finding new ways to play the deck.

Excellent!

Any chance of you posting a seed code for one of your completed runs, Marty?

[MartyG]

So this is what I mean using the sorts to work out hands, and along with building up single pair planets, you can smash the blinds just playing a single pair (and also discarding other cards without using up discards).



So here I knew that the face down cards were either a K of Q or Spades or Clubs and a 2 or 3 of Clubs or Diamonds - so potentially here a two pair (but single pair is stronger due to the planets play). First play was a miss (I should have sorted the cards back to value sort - doh), but second play I knew for certain it was a pair of Queens, and I could just play the pair of 8s to finish. I should have played the K + Q + face down on the first hand, as I would have likely have been able to clear this in two rounds.

But there is loads of strategy to this game, even with the RNG.

This run then went on to Ante 7 boss - you can see the seed at the end - I could have beaten the Ante 7 boss with a slightly different earlier play.



And the run after which went to Ante 6



I can get to Ante 5/6 90% of the time.

[fuse]

A kind benefactor bought this for me and it was my go-to game during a recent extended hospital stay. It's good!

One slight annoyance was that after my first 5 or so runs, I got curious in one of the menus and found that there's no confirmation required on the "unlock all" profile option, and that you can't undo it. So that was me wiping the save entirely and starting again from the top. Balls. Learn from my mistake!

Haven't played too much after my first clear, but do plan to go back and play some more at some point. It's super compelling and I do like that for all of the dependence on luck, there's still buckets of strategy you can apply to bend things in your favour.

One question I do have for folks playing seeded runs: what does/doesn't it fix, exactly? I figure the stuff like boss binds are more obvious, but is it involved in shuffling the deck between binds? Shop inventory?

[MartyG]

You'll get the same boss encounters and shop content, probs same initial deck sort order. So then the variable change are the choices you make (cards you play, jokers/consumables you buy and use etc).

Theoretically, if you made the exact same plays with a seeded run, you'll get the same outcome each time - and you'll turn off achievments.

---

You can set up another profile and have the full unlocks on that, but no confirmation is a bit annoying for sure. My main profile I still have about 30% odd to unlock, although I'm not sure quite how many base difficulty modifiers there are for each deck type. I haven't unlocked all the decks yet.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Trying to complete a Blue Deck run is starting to get on my nerves a little. 5th/6th ante is usually where I bottom out.

[MartyG]

This might be an interesting seed to try - some cool jokers appeared in this one, reckon with the right choices you'd get further than the Ante 4 boss as I only missed by 900.

And this one worth a look


Boom ...


And who doesn't like having Aces in their hand?

[Dogg Thang]

I stuck at this and won a run. Mostly by playing full houses or straights and almost nothing else, with a decent but not special combo of jokers that favoured face cards. Big thing for me was realising I could reorder the jokers - that changes how much you can get on mults. But I also got very very lucky on the last boss, who had an ability that honestly wasn’t an issue and skipping the previous round gave me a massive advantage to beat it. So I got lucky.

Done now.

[Nu-Eclipse]

Still not quite able to complete a Blue Deck run, but got to the final ante so that's something at least (even if I did fall 30k short in the actual Final Boss Blind). Face multipliers really helped here.

969Q5IZ4 is the seed if anybody wants to try it.

[Lebowski]

All the draws are random. That’s expected. A boss removing all discards so I have only a single random hand to hit a high number (which I lost) or a boss where I can’t actually see what cards I’ve drawn (which I won but took zero satisfaction from) both remove everything but the random element. Maybe if I had some consumables to counter those, not sure I’ve seen one that could yet. But those were examples where there was literally nothing but the random and that’s just not for me.

Like I say, it’s not that I’m trying to say this is bad game (it’s clearly not). this could be just about whether it’s a fit for my personality. I like to feel I can have some influence.

This peed me off at first, i had a cracking round where i had a real good set of jokers then got destroyed by a boss that would only let me do one type of hand, which was pretty much impossible with the jokers i had. The thing i learned was I wasn't changing my deck in useful ways enough to tip things in my favour, adding loads of multipliers or removing cards really helps, I had one run where I managed to change a ****load of standard cards to kings so was constantly getting 4 of a kind with all kings, My buffs where all about face cards so was scoring crazy points per hand with this strat, Another run I had crazy multipliers and a card that let you jump numbers in a straight so I could constantly pull straights out of nothing, this made the "one had only Boss" a walk on the park.

[hudson]

BIG update coming next week-ish...

[Nu-Eclipse]

BIG update coming next week-ish...

Looks like a significant rebalancing!

[Atticus]

Just picked this up on Switch. Absolutely class game. When those Jokers start multiplying it’s so good. Perfect handheld gaming too 👍

[Nu-Eclipse]

Failed yet again at the final boss blind on standard Blue Deck/White Stake. Spammed levelled-up pairs and set up multiplier jokers to get all the way there, only to f--- it up on the last hand, 25k chips out. Annoying.

Seed: P3B2IH1M

[Nu-Eclipse]

Finally!

Completed a Blue Deck run with the standard White Stake.

Again, spammed levelled-up pairs and scaled my jokers with multipliers and built retriggers into the deck. Also...thank f--- for the Joker that disables the Boss Blind when you sell it - took the target from 300k back down to the default 100k - far easier!

Dabbled with a bit of Endless Mode after for LOLz. Bottomed out around 10th Ante Big Blind but only missed by about 20k - not bothered by that point.

Seed: P965R2FW