Board 8 > Balatro releases today [roguelike] [card game] [amazing]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Sure enough, yeah this game got a lot easier now that I understand the X1.5 stuff. Now I'm winning like half the time, or so.

I'm really enjoying the different settings to start the game! The different decks and the little difficulty levels are very cool.

This might be the best game ever made.

changmas posted...

midas mask turns all face cards into gold cards, vampire instantly turns them back into regular cards and gains x0.2 mult

Ahhh nice, I just saw the vampire clown tonight and I was like "oof that sounds hard to use." cool combo. I really appreciate that being able to reorder things manually, takes out a lot of the guesswork.

In general, everything's pretty obvious how it will interact in this game, which is insanely impressive.

I can't think of any game with better tooltips.

vampire is pretty easy if you can generate tarot cards, but I actually hadn't thought about midas mask working with it before. If only you had pareidolia too, huh

WazzupGenius00 posted...

vampire is pretty easy if you can generate tarot cards, but I actually hadn't thought about midas mask working with it before. If only you had pareidolia too, huh

honestly would not have made too much a difference i think. in the mid game i was already two shotting most blinds just by playing a high card (trying to farm extra vampire stacks)

but by late game i still don't think the extra 4 procs i get each round off of that (because midas buffs cards that don't score too) would have allowed me to hit the 40 billion or so i need to beat ante 13

Just cleared the third difficulty ("stake") with the Yellow Deck (start with +$10), which is my favorite of the basic decks for some reason. It looked useless at first, but I can just more reliably get into that >$25 range quickly, getting the full $5 Interest earlier, and the whole money curve for the rest of the game is better.

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I might see a bit of a "flaw" in the game. You really want to pick ONE hand type per run and keep upgrading it (with planet cards). It doesn't make a lot of sense to upgrade them all, that's just spreading your resources thin. To defeat a blind, you need ONE SICK HAND with all the multipliers you can muster. You can't play 5 different mediocre hands and win, the math won't scale upwards quickly enough.

Which means the poker part of the game isn't that important--when you look at your dealt cards, you're not considering what hands you can aim for. Instead, you're discarding to get that one hand type you've strategized around. (Or when you're in a Boss Blind, you're probably simply discarding the debuffed garbage, to get some usable cards.)

Which is still fun! But it makes each run more like mathematical test, and not as much of a hand management (poker) game. You start to play each Blind on auto-pilot pretty quickly. Which is fine too I suppose, the strategies and synergies are the real fun.

But the real flaw is, from my perspective, you want to center your run around either "Flush" or "One Pair". They're the most reliable hand types you can invest in safely, and reproduce every Blind. Anything else is just too risky.

Honestly I think the fact that this game has such an exponential scoring system is a really big problem. Scoring anything except your best hand is almost the same as scoring nothing for practical purposes and it kinda makes runs feel samey once you've got your setup going. There's less room for interesting tactical maneuvering than I'd like.

Yeah the telescope voucher does make certain builds a little too easy to achieve but I don't think planets are really that strong.

Epyo posted...

But the real flaw is, from my perspective, you want to center your run around either "Flush" or "One Pair". They're the most reliable hand types you can invest in safely, and reproduce every Blind. Anything else is just too risky.

This is how I felt initially (I leaned very heavily towards flush and didn't see much reason to do anything else) but the more I play - and now, start winning - the more I see how much room there actually is to do really stupid, fun and crazy stuff. Like my last win was founded by getting Walkie Talkie early and I said "fuck it" and tried making a "10-4" build that constantly shat out Two Pairs and Full Houses comprised of entirely 10s and 4s... and it was by far my most successful run yet, almost clearing Ante 11!

That run kind of provides my answer to Para's concern as well, since at least in my experience it's pretty easy and consistent to get at least two hands to level 10+ by late game, which depending on your jokers and deck construction can give you a good amount of room for strategic decision-making. (i.e. with my "10-4" build I would regularly be checking remaining card amounts to judge whether it made more sense to pivot towards a full house rather than a two-pair, since full house is a notably better hand if they're even remotely close in level.) My bigger concern right now is that Supernova just seems really damn good for a common Joker and I'm finding it hard to tear away from it even though it absolutely does encourage a "just one hand" style of play.

alright when i played the demo i owned and now that the game is live i suck

the only explanation is that the devs ruined the game gg

Epyo posted...

But the real flaw is, from my perspective, you want to center your run around either "Flush" or "One Pair". They're the most reliable hand types you can invest in safely, and reproduce every Blind. Anything else is just too risky.

On my run I focused on straight and got the joker that lets you have gaps in your straight. That makes it way more reliable.

But I can't imagine focusing on full houses or something.

I usually like aesthetics like this but for some reason I am violently not vibing with this presentation

certain Spectral cards can make something like Full House or Four of a Kind viable, but right now Flush is just way more reliable and accessible to build around.

Also a good number of Rare jokers I havent unlocked yet, maybe those will help other strategies

I think I fundamentally disagree with most of you. While the within-run hand diversity is low, that's true for basically every deck builder. (if you're doing a poison build in slay the spire you're not suddenly going to switch it up and start playing a bunch of the cards that add shivs to your hand mid run)

plus if you really want to go hard on within-game diversity there is the obelisk joker which explicitly encourages this, with huge payoffs (or at least before it got nerfed in the demo)

but i think the game to game diversity is extremely high and basically every hand type and build is viable to beat the base game with. if you're stuck playing flush almost every game it's only because you're doing it to yourself.

besides straight flush (which is basically only viable with the joker that makes straights and flushes only require 4 cards because the two effects stack), every other hand type is a possible build-around. full house for example is probably my 2nd most built around hand.

also the planet cards are imo a little overrated, the diminishing returns start to kick in pretty hard once you hit level 10 or so on them. manipulating your deck with arcana cards to improve the quality, quantity, or probability of your best hands becomes much more important. (and a good joker setup but that's flat out a given)

AriaOfBolo posted...

I usually like aesthetics like this but for some reason I am violently not vibing with this presentation

I got over it and turned some of the options down, game rules

I barely understand poker strategy but this sounds intriguing.

foolm0r0n posted...

On my run I focused on straight and got the joker that lets you have gaps in your straight. That makes it way more reliable.

But I can't imagine focusing on full houses or something.

That gaps in the straight card is nuts. It's not just one gap - you can have tons of them. Ace Queen Ten Eight Six is valid straight

Four Fingers is also an awesome card which lets you make a Flush or Straight with four cards. Combining them would mean straights every hand

Full Houses sound outlandish but I think it could be doable. If would require a lot of messing with your deck though. If you used Tarot cards to transform a lot of your cards into certain ranks, destroy cards you dont need, and add more of the ranks you want to make pairs of, you could shift your deck to have a bunch of 10s and 6s but no 9s or 4s or something. Would make pairs/three of a kinds/full houses happen all the time

But can you get this off the ground fast enough?

I've been getting insanely lucky on some of these challenge runs, to the point where it makes me wonder if everyone gets the same luck.

I was doing the Medusa challenge that adds a bunch of stone cards to your deck and the first Joker I found gave me +25 per stone card in my deck. Then I found Red Card and just started skipping packs. Found a few other multipliers and it was busted. I was hitting 300k in Ante 4 lol

CoolCly posted...

Four Fingers is also an awesome card which lets you make a Flush or Straight with four cards. Combining them would mean straights every hand

the two effects of four fingers also stack!

if your 4 card straight has three hearts for example, you can play any other heart regardless of number and it counts as a straight flush because your scored hand contains both a 4 card straight and a 4 card flush

changmas posted...

the two effects of four fingers also stack!

if your 4 card straight has three hearts for example, you can play any other heart regardless of number and it counts as a straight flush because your scored hand contains both a 4 card straight and a 4 card flush

Oh holy hell, I didn't realize this one. Now I want to see if I can get a legit Straight Flush build online with this and Shortcut

That is definitely interesting

Raka_Putra posted...

I barely understand poker strategy but this sounds intriguing.

There's very close to 0 poker strategy in the game, you just need to be able to recognize the hands. I guess it helps to know some standard draw percentages but that goes away fast.

I am having way more success when I build two pair into full house than when I build straight or flush

red deck is probably better for the more specific hands because of the discard? I dunno

foolm0r0n posted...

There's very close to 0 poker strategy in the game, you just need to be able to recognize the hands. I guess it helps to know some standard draw percentages but that goes away fast.

This is pretty much spot on - every run of this game starts as Poker but the whole point is to slowly (and sometimes very quickly) warp it into something totally unrecognizable that's more and more to your advantage. All you need to know is how to make hands, and there's an in-game cheat sheet to help anyone completely unfamiliar with the game.

in fact knowing a bunch about poker can cloud your judgment in that you have to fight your instinct to chase the highest ranked hands instead of the ones that will score more

won with all the basic color decks and a couple of the more special ones. I was messing with Challenges but I think you can't get unlocks from there so I'll wait on that for now

I think the most relevant poker strategy is understanding "if i throw away cards here, what are the chances of getting the cards I need to complete my combo". Which you can toy with by messing with your deck, but still relevant.

I kinda wish there was a "fake score" or "preview score" feature before you play a hand. Sometimes I think my hand is going to be close to winning/losing and I don't want to sit there and do all of the math to make sure.

I know there are jokers that add random chance stuff but you could just approximate those or something.

CoolCly posted...

I think the most relevant poker strategy is understanding "if i throw away cards here, what are the chances of getting the cards I need to complete my combo". Which you can toy with by messing with your deck, but still relevant.

Right, so it's helpful to know the 4/2 rule from texas hold em

If you discard 2 cards, you multiply the # of cards you're looking for by 4, and that's the % chance you'll get one of them. If you discard 1 card, you multiply by 2. So if you discard 2 cards and you're looking 1 of 10 remaining hearts, you'll have a 40% chance to get one.

I don't know if that scales to higher discard numbers, like for 3 do you multiply by 6?

Thanks for all the extra context. I might get this with my next paycheck.

Xiahou_Shake posted...

This is pretty much spot on - every run of this game starts as Poker but the whole point is to slowly (and sometimes very quickly) warp it into something totally unrecognizable that's more and more to your advantage. All you need to know is how to make hands, and there's an in-game cheat sheet to help anyone completely unfamiliar with the game.

That does sound useful.

changmas posted...

plus if you really want to go hard on within-game diversity there is the obelisk joker which explicitly encourages this, with huge payoffs (or at least before it got nerfed in the demo)

I just won a run with obelisk - was doing a run with pairs in hand buffed and was trying to feed aces and kings into my deck - had ten two pair hands by the time I got obelisk, then just ran on three of a kind, four of a kind, and full house (also got the three of a kind gets buffed joker as well).

was able to beat ante 8, but probably not enough juice to go much further

Somehow I have lost my last four games with the Checkered Deck (almost certainly the easiest deck in the game)

I have two wins, and both of them rolled the 8 boss pretty easily and immediately got WRECKED by 9

I've made it to the 12 boss and got soul crushingly demolished

Look ma, Im a billionaire!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/c/c21262a6.jpg

I built a Straight Flush run with Checkered Deck, Four Fingers (thanks for that tip earlier about combining a Straight with a Flush btw), Shortcut, and like five x-mult Jokers and it STILL wasn't enough to beat Ante 11. If some of my jokers had been Foil or Holo I think I would've pulled it off. I had Straight Flush leveled up to like 7 or 8 and regular Flush was at least 6

oh shit

https://efhiii.github.io/balatro-calculator/

I am on challenge 20, the final challenge

challenge 20 is no jokers

i am not having good time

bumpo, more people buy this

I don't know what changed from the demo but I felt like I beat the game every run there but here I was getting rolled after like halfway through the run with everything I tried with flushes and straights and three of a kinds / full houses.

Then I did two runs in a row where I just did Pairs and then Two Pairs and it was absolute money. Easiest runs of my life.

Just had my first High Card run and it hilariously ended up being by far my most successful run ever. Made it to Ante 12 for the first time but still got summarily crushed, what an insane leap that was. Build was Mime + Baron focused and just stacked Kings to the point that I would just play a single card and then have it do 1.5x twice for very often every other card in my hand, then get big flat mult before a huge scaling final multiplier in Constellation, which got up above 5x since I was getting constant doubled blue sticker triggers from my Kings. That was a real dopamine rush.

Last big run I did was a 2 pair/4 of a kind with the abandoned deck, didn't go into the 9-16 blinds (still unlocking) but chaining 5 of a kind every once in a while was fairly fun, especially picking up some planet x to go with.

I'm working on trying to beat the Purple Stake with the Blue deck and it does feel like I'm getting into the habit of restarting runs if I don't have anything by the end of the first round.

You don't get any money for the first blind after a certain stake so the tag you get for skipping is really important because a lot of them are useless. So I wish there was more balance between the tags.

Also boss blinds are a good idea in concept but sometimes they just completely stop your whole build which is annoying. That happens in all of these deckbuilding games I suppose, and rerolling exists, but it's still frustrating.

I had one run where the Crimson Heart kept disabling my 2-3 necessary jokers each hand instead of hitting my utility ones lol.

I'm just noticing this topic now...I saw this game getting some good reviews, and I like card games in general so it kinda piqued my interest. (my interest is more with traditional 52 card deck-type games, and not Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic type card games) Kinda tempted to get it, we'll see.

I haven't played very many roguelike games, so I'm sorta having trouble picturing the overall gameflow. Like, is it just the main card game mechanic and you get different challenges as you go? Or is there some overarching something, to it?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2861660/ULTIMAHJONG/

looks like someone else is making Balatro for mahjong

Fiop posted...

I'm just noticing this topic now...I saw this game getting some good reviews, and I like card games in general so it kinda piqued my interest. (my interest is more with traditional 52 card deck-type games, and not Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic type card games) Kinda tempted to get it, we'll see.

I haven't played very many roguelike games, so I'm sorta having trouble picturing the overall gameflow. Like, is it just the main card game mechanic and you get different challenges as you go? Or is there some overarching something, to it?

There's no overarching goal. You could compare it to an arcade game where you do a run, try to get a high score, die/succeed, then try again. There are a number of challenges to accomplish in the game though, so completing those goals can help drive you.

Yeah the replayability comes from the randomness in each run. So you might find a joker in one run that makes your high cards give more points. Or you might find one that allows your straights and flushes to be played with 4 cards instead of 5. So you're building a strategy based on the cards you find in a run.

You also unlock new decks each time you win so beating the game with each deck can be a challenge. Decks have slight differences like a deck with no face cards or a deck where every card is either a heart or spade.

My runs are super polarized still which is why I'm mostly turned off from the game. I had a run where I was making 2.5m scoring hands if I got the right cards, or 100k if I didn't. And then the next run I struggled to make 50k and lost quickly. Some people like that but I like more steady progression.

Yeah ultimately I think that's my problem with deckbuilding roguelikes too. I don't like the thought that some runs are just completely unwinnable.

If I play a game like Isaac or Dead Cells then I could technically win every run with enough skill. But that's just not possible in a game like Balatro with so much randomness.

But it does make the runs where your build gets online more satisfying. I'm just not sure those runs are common enough to keep me hooked beyond the 20-30 hours I've played.

I wish there was a projection of what a hand might give, even if it's a range because of randomness.

Maybe part of the skill is piloting the hands and figuring out what the high score plays are, but quite frankly the math gets out of control to the point that I'm often surprised by what happens.

https://gyazo.com/2cda316d3801a219f6ce0eb3ff22c326
I'm in the -handsize for every $5 challenge and this a heck of a way to learn that that affects Arcana draws as well

I can either sell a Joker or be softlocked >_>

Why is Skip greyed out, is that a stake effect or something?