I don’t hang out in this forum so maybe there’s something mysterious and I’m missing it but I just got addicted to this game called Belatro. I thought it was gonna be a little time waster, no big deal and suddenly I’m addicted.
And apparently I’m not alone.
I have a lot of questions about it, even though I’ve been playing it for a bit, and I was really, really hoping that some Dopers would be a source for some info.
But since my searches have brought up a whole lot of nothing I guess maybe I’m out of luck?
My understanding is that there are a large number of videos on Youtube of people playing Balatro. I know my favourite Youtuber was an early booster of the game.
Same, I’ve put in quite a few hours into it. I won gold stake for the yellow deck before the change to stakes, and am working now on getting gold for the other decks under the new system.
Once you’ve lost a run, can you start a new one with the Jokers you have in your Collection from the previous run? Or do you have to start all over with none?
It’s a roguelite, so you typically start with nothing from your previous run except the permanent unlocks… in this case, that means you can choose a different starting deck (if you’ve unlocked any) and higher difficulty modes. The jokers you got before won’t be there by default, but they can come up again (randomly) in shops and packs.
However…
If you don’t care about achievements, you can use the “Unlock All” button in the profile menu to unlock all the decks. Some of the later ones are much better than the default deck.
Normally each run is random, but you can also specify a “seed” to make it not random… if you do, all the cards/packs/etc will be completely deterministic between the runs of the same seed, so you can essentially “practice” over and over again without the element of randomness. Whenever you lose a round, it’ll give you the option of copying the seed. You can use that seed next time to play the exact same run again, without anything being randomly different (assuming you played the same, that is).
For #2, 2K9H9HN is an especially powerful seed that gives you a negative Perkeo and Triboulet in the first ante. Eventually I had nothing but queens of hearts left in my deck and I played a Flush Five (5 of the same card and suit) every hand, which led to each hand scoring several gazillion points. I eventually lost with a final score of 2.5x10122 points… crazy stuff. You can actually get to infinity points with a seed like that.
I have been playing for months but I cannot get beyond a very basic place. It’s a big deal if I can get a score of a few million, and I can never go beyond that.
But I see screenshots of perfectly insane scores and jokers… there must be some essential something tha I am completely blind to.
If you want something that consistently wins at low stakes, focus on Flushes. But Flushes are a mixed blessing at higher stakes and often times a trap. Mainly because they don’t scale well. If you can get the four flush/straight joker and the jokers with flush bonuses and use a checkered deck you can probably win on higher stakes.
The main issue with flushes is they don’t scale well. Which means you are unlikely to get the really high scores. The voucher that always gives you the planet card for your most played hand is very helpful here. But still, flushes are difficult to scale.
Paradoxically, one of the best hands to get high scores are high card or one pair. But you have to shoot for filling your hand with stone cards and jokers that take advantage of all that. You have a lot of versatility, though, because you aren’t constrained by the rules of the hand, like you are with a flush.
You could also try refreshing the Erratic deck over and over until you get a completely unbalanced deck that let’s you pull a lot of five flushes and other “hidden” hands.
Trying to win a stake and trying for a high score are often very different ways to play, so decide on that going in.
One thing that people probably overlook a lot is the importance of generating money. You’re going to want a way to generate a ton of gold so that you can reroll a lot for the jokers you want and for tarot cards to rebuild your deck. There are a lot of gold strategies, but one that meshes extremely well with high scores is having a lot of gold kings (with red seal if possible) and mime + baron jokers.
It’s also useful to have a couple cards that can carry through the early blinds: square jokers, bull, the one that’s +250 chips and - hand size, etc.
It’s often the seed. The seed is the “magic number” that tells the randomization engine exactly what cards to deal you, what jokers you get at which levels, what’s in every card pack, etc. In other words, the seed determines every single possible card you encounter during gameplay.
Balatro requires a few hours of learning how the game works, what the major interactions are, etc., but beyond that, it’s largely a matter of luck.
When you’re given a poor seed, even the most skilled players will struggle. A good seed, like the one above, can make even mediocre players (like me) reach the googols, as in some score followed by 100 zeroes.
With many seeds, you never even see the more powerful cards and combos before you lose. With the insane ones, you start with some of the most powerful ones in the first ante and then become unstoppable by ante 5 or so when the combos can be fully executed.
Normally when you play, the seed is randomized and you don’t know how good the one you got is. If you want to take the element of chance out of it and make it a more skill based game instead of a luck based one, look up a few good seeds (or reuse one at the end of a game you did well in) and practice on that.
Also it’s worth doing the challenges to work out how some things work. The one with glass cards which always break, has the joker (sometimes) where you get a mult per glass card broken. I’ve reached about a billion per round on high card with that one, but I never use the seeds, playing on random to me was how the game should be played.
