Balatro #2

Last year I wrote a blog post about why I like (or, love) the game Balatro. While I said at the time that it is a game I can come back to again and again, I thought at the time that I was done with Balatro. I usually stop playing a game when I reach 100% of the achievements (or, the causality might be reversed, I want to stop playing the game so I play it to get 100% of the achievements). It turns out I was not fully done yet.

Balatro is now, at the time of writing, my most played game on Steam (beating Euro Truck Simulator 2, a game which I have been playing on and off for more than ten years). It turns out that it is truly a game I can return to now and again and always have a new experience with. No two runs are the same (if for no other reason that you will always end up playing a different seed), and even if you gravitate towards the same jokers and deck building strategy, the challenges you encounter will differ. If I, for example, find the Spare Trousers joker early on in the game, I usually decide to turn it into a Two Pair run, even when I know that it will not scale well beyond ante 8.

There are two things in particular that I have spent time on with Balatro as of late. First, you can beat your high score and try to reach the maximum score in the game (naneinf). There are different strategies you can rely on to reach naneinf (see, e.g., this page), but you realistically need to rely on the Baron and Mime combination. The general idea is that it is not about the value of the hand you play (although it helps to have some levels on your High Card), but all the retriggers left in your hand to multiply your mult due to the composition of your jokers and hand. Here is the final hand when I finally reached naneinf (in an unseeded run):

It is no coincidence that the boss is The Serpent which can explain the hand size for my final hand (and the round score prior to playing my final hand). I could have played my econ a bit better but I made it work with a bit to spare when I was rerolling boss blinds. It is also no coincidence that we are in ante 26 to make sure that I could get the hand size before beating the blind. Ante 24 can be difficult as the antes divisible by 8 have different boss blinds (and The Serpent is not among them). And, finally, I played on the Plasma Deck which is just making life easier due to AM–GM inequality.

So I played a High Card and it took a while to play the hand (or, more specifically, for all the retriggers to retrigger), and it gave me the round score of naneinf:

Once you reach naneinf your high score will be naneinf, but not forever. The next time you play a run the high score will be whatever score you reach, so do not expect your stats to keep the naneinf. Here are my overall stats from my first run where I reached naneinf:

I also tried a few times to reach naneinf with Flush Five but I was unlucky with the legendary jokers. There is in theory no limits to what jokers can reach naneinf, and there is even an example of how to reach naneinf with The Stuntman. However, I can say with some confidence that I do not find it interesting to play with the goal of reaching naneinf anymore.

There are of course other metrics I can try to beat my score in, such as my best win streak (which is currently only at 4), or see how much I can earn before I lose, although it is not really that interesting (as the money will always just be instrumental for achieving other goals, just as in life, I guess).

Second, as I mentioned in my previous post, there is a big modding community, and a lot of people are now playing Balatro Multiplayer. I also mentioned in my previous post that what I love about Balatro is that it turns "multiplayer poker" into a better game. However, Balatro can work surprisingly well as a multiplayer game. There are different rulesets and mods you can play with in Balatro Multiplayer, so it will usually not be a completely similar experience to playing Balatro singleplayer, but that is only a good thing..

I have been playing a bit of multiplayer Balatro, and it is great fun. The basic idea is that you have to beat the first boss blind and the subsequent boss blinds will be about beating the score your opponent makes in that blind. As you play the same seed as your opponent, it is interesting to see what choices you each make and what build you each go for (and whether any of you decide to pivot to a different strategy in the middle of the game).

There are also several streamers playing multiplayer Balatro. These days you can find a lot of entertainment with Major Balatro League, with good Balatro players such as Roffle, Bean, DrSpectred, and BelenosBear, playing against each other. It is fun to see how they each have their own play style and preferences in terms of deck.

There is still very much to get out of Balatro, and LocalThunk, the developer behind the game, has confirmed that he is still working on version 1.1. This is all to say, if you have not tried Balatro, I can still recommend it.