Balatro, at a glance, just looks like a poker game, but it’s much more than that. After all, if it was just a boring poker game, it wouldn’t have won indie game of the year in 2024. Balatro was made by a single developer, LocalThunk, who designed every aspect of the game other than the music which was composed by Luis Fernández Clemente. It’s a roguelike where each blind you have to score a certain amount of chips and the way you reach that is by scoring poker hands, getting different jokers along the way also helps when it comes to later antes/levels.
In blinds
Like I said before, each blind requires a certain score which increases a lot by the next ante. There are 3 blinds in each Ante and you “beat” the game by finishing ante 8. On the third blind of the Ante you have to face a boss blind. There are 23 normal bosses and 5 more “final” bosses. Each boss is partially different from disabling heart cards, to disabling already played cards, to even setting your money to zero if you play your most played hand. There are a few ways to make money, and the two most common ways are by either not playing all your hands or having interest. For every hand you save you get $1 and for every $5 you don’t spend you get a dollar. Other ways are by getting hermit which doubles your money unless you have over $20, or using temperance which gives the sell value of your jokers up to $50.
Shops
After beating a blind you go to the shop to find any good jokers, tarot cards, or planet levels. There will also always be 2 jokers/tarot/planet cards, 2 booster packs which have either jokers/spectral/playing cards/tarot/planet cards, one voucher, and the reroll button. There are 12 planet cards and each one has a picture of a planet. They correspond to certain hands and each one you use, you’ll level that hand up. They give more chips, and more mult. Tarot cards either help with fixing your deck, getting money, or helping your score. Spectral cards are very powerful. Card packs are only ok, they might have something you have. Finally, jokers can basically do everything already listed, but mainly help with getting a better score. Vouchers can do anything from increase your hand size to increasing the interest cap, to even increasing your joker slots by one. There are 4 joker types, common, uncommon, rare, and legendary, with 150 total jokers. Getting common, uncommon, and Rare’s aren’t a struggle, but getting legendry’s are very rare since they have a small chance to appear in tarot and spectral packs.
In between
After leaving shops you can either go to the next blind, or skip the blind. Skipping is a pretty rare decision to make since most of the skips aren’t very good. Notable skips that I sometimes go for are the negative skip, double tag skip, rare skip, voucher skip, interest skip,and polychrome skip. If you have the voucher that rerolls bosses you can also use that but other than that there isn’t anything else to do.
Jokers, Editions, Enhancements, and seals
Since there’s only 5 joker slots it’s hard to make a decision when there’s another 150 jokers. You don’t get all 150 unlocked right away so you’ll have to do some unlocking to get them all. I normally go for jokers that give mult at the start and jokers that can make some money. If you don’t get jokers that make money you’ll be fine for the first few antes but after that, you won’t have enough money to find jokers to survive the harder blinds which means your run will be over. Not getting jokers that help with score will end your run faster than econ jokers. By around ante 5-6 you should have an X mult joker which is just a joker that will multiply your mult by however much it says, x2, x3, 1.5x, ect.
Jokers have a chance to have editions on them when they show up. The possible editions are holograph, polychrome, foil, and negative. All of these editions have an equal chance other than the negative edition which is about 1/300. Foil gives +50 chips, hologram gives +10 mult, polychrome gives x1.5 mult, and negatives make it so that specific joker wont take up any space effectively allowing in an extra joker. It’s without saying negative editions are the most powerful since it’s basically a free added joker, the only catch is that it’s probably a joker you don’t need. Playing cards can also be hologram, polychrome, or foil. You can’t have multiple enhancements on the same joker/card.
Cards can get enchantments from jokers and tarot cards. The better enhancements are steel, glass, gold, and lucky. Steel give x1.5 if card stays in hand, glass x2 when triggered with a ¼ chance to break, and lucky gives a ⅕ chance to give +20 mult and a 1/20 chance for +20$. Gold cards give +3$ if you keep them till you beat the blind. Other enhancements aren’t really worth getting unless it’s very early in the run and you need them. You can’t have multiple enhancements on the same card.
There are a total of 4 different seals and all of them are pretty powerful depending on how much value you allow them to get. Gold seals give +3$ every time that card is triggered which is good with retriggers. Red seals retrigger the card once which is very powerful. Purple seals give one tarot card if you discard them making deck fixing very easy. Blue seals if in hand (not played) for the final played hand give a planet card for that hand making scoring easier. I think the most powerful one is the red seal, but people say that in gold stakes the blue seal is the best since it’s not reliant on anything other than the hand you play. You can’t have multiple seals on the same card.
Synergies
The most powerful synergies you can get are jokers that retrigger x mult. The most famous combo is Photograph+Hanging Chad. Photograph gives x2 mult for the first scoring face card and Chad retriggers the first card twice. It’s very easy to get in a run since both joker are common. A much harder set up is Idol+Sock In Buskin. Idol gives a random card in your deck x2 mult each time it’s scored and Sock In Buskin retriggers face cards once. So if you manage to get all the cards in your deck to be the same face card using tarot cards, you get an extremely high score. Less powerful synergies are ones like Oops All 6’s+Lucky Cat, and Midas Mask+Vampire are pretty good. These ones don’t require retriggers and scale. Oops doubles all probabilities and Lucky Cat gains x0.25 for each time a lucky card triggers. With dice the chances of a lucky card activating go up which means you’ll be getting more x mult from Lucky Cat. Get some retriggers and you’ll be able to get very far in the run. Vimprire gains x0.1 mult by removing the cards enhancement. Since Midas Mask makes face cards gold, each time you play a hand you’ll get more x mult. Two cards that always synergies with your jokers are Blueprint and Brainstorm. Blueprint copies the joker to the right and Brainstorm copies the left most joker. These are flat out the best jokers to find since they can just copy whatever joker you think is the best one. The only time you don’t get them is when you either don’t have the money, or you line up needs every single joker in order to function.
