Balatro’s Secret Sauce Is Not Requiring Perfection

One of the best feelings in a roguelike is when all the elements come together to create a perfect race. In Hades it’s a powerful combination of powers, in Dead Cells it’s a perfect weapon set, and in Balatro it’s all about getting the right combination of Jokers. With the right set of Jokers, a run at Balatro can seem almost easy at times. There are so many Joker effects that the game starts to speed up the animations and your score catches fire because you’re not about to just win the round – you’re about to outrun it, thus getting the score that you need to achieve. seem trivial in the process.

These races are amazing in Balatro and other roguelikes, but that’s because that’s not how every race plays out. In fact, this is how very few races usually take place. Most runs in Balatro, including many of my winning runs, have me barely beating each round with my final hand. Every shop or bonus for jumping a blind becomes extremely important, because I need another boost of chips or multiplier; otherwise, my race is about to crash and burn. This frivolity is what makes Balatro special, and there are multiple mechanics that allow you to take some of the risk in these races, making it just as viable to fight tooth and nail to win a race as to completely break the game with your build.

Balatro lets you control your destiny (mostly)

While it’s not uncommon for roguelikes to allow you to influence what powers or weapons you might receive during a run, Balatro consistently gives you the ability to make risk/reward assessments. Each ante has three blinds, two of which can be completely ignored. You won’t earn money and visit the store, but you will get something else. Sometimes it’s as simple as a pack of cards to add to your deck, or it can guarantee a Joker of a certain rarity or with a specific type of bonus. It is important to note that the reward is never a specific Joker, but only certain modifiers or rarities. At no time can you guarantee the exact Joker you need, which puts the emphasis on working with all the Jokers you get.

One of my favorite decks is the Plasma deck, which combines and then averages your chips and multiplier each time you play a hand, turning 50 chips with a multiplier of two into 26 times 26. Although it can seem easier to win a game — and it’s definitely the first or second bet — this deck also doubles your target score, making it much harder to hit. A quick way to increase your total using this deck is to significantly increase your token total, as this number can be easier to inflate than the multiplier.

This means that a Joker foil, which automatically adds 50 chips to each hand played, can offer a pretty significant boost to your score in the short term, even if the Joker itself doesn’t work with a run. A guaranteed Joker foil is one of the rewards that can appear for jumping a blind, providing what is essentially an easy way to keep a race alive. Even though the Joker’s effect doesn’t help your build and you may have to abandon it later, it can still help you complete more turns, meaning you have a higher chance of getting the good items in the store.

This type of influence on your rewards, no matter how small, is extremely important in Balatro because it is a game about mathematics. In an action-focused roguelike, you can make up for a few bad throws with skill, provided you have the skills to dodge or parry consistently. On the other hand, you cannot win games of Balatro through pure skill: you must work with the materials offered to you. This design seems useful, based on other aspects of how the game works.

When you reach a new stake, Baltro presents you with a ton of information. You can see exactly what you need to score in all three blinds to win, what your rewards are for skipping either of the first two blinds, and what the special condition is at the third blind. You may not know exactly what will be in the store, but you know there will be two packs, two slots for cards that could be Jokers, Tarots or Planets, and a voucher. purchase. You also have a pretty good idea of ​​how much all these items cost and how much you’ll win for each blind beaten.

All of this information is important because it allows you to make decisions based on both the short and long term impacts of each element. Of course, the first Joker in the store may not be the one you want in the long run, but any amount of multiplier can help. A foil Joker adding 50 chips could be a huge boost right now, even if the Joker itself focuses on straights when you build around two pairs. Even as you raise the stakes and the game becomes more difficult and complex, with the addition of Eternal Jokers that cannot be sold or destroyed or Perishable Jokers that stop working after five rounds, having this information allows you to organize more disjointed races.

What you can do with this information and the little influence Balatro gives you is the ability to adapt. Limiting the number of Jokers you can have at once makes races more dynamic. It’s common in roguelikes, especially deck builders, to have no limits on powerful items like Jokers, whose powers stack on top of each other. The problem is that you usually can’t get rid of these items easily.

Even though you have a limited number of slots for Wilds, you’re rarely stuck with just one, allowing you to remove all conflicting Wilds in an instance, allowing for greater flexibility. The Joker that gains a multiplier when you play a hand but loses one when you discard may seem good at first, but if you have to discard to play the hands needed to win, you can easily drop it for something else the next times. shop.

These races don’t sing like breakthrough races do, where you score so much that it starts showing up in exponential form instead of numbers. Despite this, they feel just as satisfying, albeit in a different way. Overcoming a rough start, bad Joker throws, and special blinds that seem targeted to your specific build is its own kind of magic, creating the kind of rush that takes up most of my time playing Balatro. It’s much easier to allow yourself just one more game when you always feel like you can create a combination of Jokers and cards just good enough to get you through, instead of your run collapsing because you Didn’t get the perfect combination of items.

All of this comes together to create a roguelike experience where I never feel like I have to abandon a race. Every playthrough feels like it could succeed, right up until the moment the game screen appears and even then I’m sure I could have had it if I had if I I had made better choices. This feeling allows you to immediately start another run, over and over again, which is perhaps the biggest compliment you can pay to a roguelike.