I've always loved completionist games - whether it's finding 100% of the gems, dragons, and eggs in Spyro, getting the coveted 112% in Hollow Knight, or completing all of the Skyrim questlines - but Balatro has been the most time-intensive challenge yet.
A Mysterious Drug
For anyone that hasn't played Balatro, it's basically poker on steroids. You can upgrade, clone, and remove cards from your deck, there is a shop where you can buy and sell items, and you have a set of Jokers which come with all kinds of abilities - from being able to make flushes/straights with 4 cards, to giving bonuses based on the suits, poker hands, and card values you play, to adding a new random card to your deck every round, and those are the easy to explain bonuses. Explaining every aspect of this game would take hours - from decks, enhancements, editions, seals, and tarot/spectral/planet cards to vouchers, tags, antes, blinds and bosses - but it mainly centers around scoring as many points as possible with your deck and this set of jokers.
Balatro is a roguelike game, which means that you are meant to lose. The game gets harder and harder and harder until you simply cannot keep up anymore, you lose, and then you start a new run, with very little "benefits" being carried over between games.
There are 31 achievements in the game. You will get 20 of them if you just play casually for long enough. 7 of them require you to strategize and structure a whole run around, or else you get exceptionally lucky and stumble upon them. And 4 of them will cost you your soul.
Something equally ethereal and visceral pushes me towards 100%ing games like these - I think it's the same force that pushes me to make games until 2 in the morning, like it is at the time of writing this.
Couch to 5k
If you're still a beginner, winning a run is probably still a foreign concept to you - and I say that this no condescension, becuase I was absolutely there myself.
In my opinion, these 7 are, in the order that I completed them:
- You Get What You Get - Win a run without rerolling the shop (this is the only one I found by accident)
- Nest Egg - Have $400 or more during a single run
- Speed Runner - Win a run in 12 or fewer rounds
- ROI - Buy 5 Vouchers by the end of Ante 4
- Big Hands - Have 80 or more cards in your deck
- Tiny Hands - Thin your deck down to 20 or fewer cards
- Flushed - Play a Flush with 5 Wild Cards And then there were 4. Each of these Final Four might as well be their own standalone game, with the amount of time, dedication, and grinding they require. The first one is what "100%ing a game" typically looks like:
Gotta Catch 'Em All
- Completionist - Discover 100% of your collection Playing casually for long enough will likely get you about 90% of the way there, and the final 10% just requires some grinding, keeping your eyes peeled, and waiting patiently. Still though, this achievements requires you to discover and purchase or use:
- 150 Jokers
- 15 decks
- 32 Vouchers
- 22 Tarot Cards
- 12 Planet Cards
- 18 Spectral Cards
- 8 Enhancements
- 4 Seals
- 5 Editions
- 32 Booster Packs
- 24 Tags
- 30 Blinds
Discovering the 15 decks alone means winning the game at least 14 times - which, when you're first starting out, winning once feels hard enough.
But I digress. Completionist is still the easiest of the 4, by far.
Robinhood
- Rule Breaker - Complete every challenge run
Right around the time that I completed the You Get What You Get achievement (completely by accident), I unlocked the Challenge Decks. These unlock after you win 5 unseeded runs with 5 different decks. It was at this time that I finally started to grasp just how much was packed into this game, and this was before I had any intention of 100%ing the game.
While those 7 achievements center around pushing 7 different game mechanics to their extremes, these 20 Challenge Decks require you to win runs with restricted rulesets. A lot of them are fun, with a little strategy:
- The Omelette
- 15 Minute City
- Rich get Richer
- On a Knife's Edge
- Mad World
- Medusa
- Bram Poker
- Blast Off
- Monolith
- Five-Card Draw
Some can be just a tad annoying: 5. X-Ray Vision 7. Luxury Tax 8. Non-Perishable 11. Typecast 12. Inflation
Some can be quite difficult, but can be brute-forced: 10. Double or Nothing 14. Fragile
If I was going to show you a graph of the difficulty of these Challenge Decks, I imagine it would look something like the of wealth inequality in America: [](wealth-inequality, add picture here please)
The final 3 are truly cruel. Imagine the most fundamental mechanics for being able to keep up with the exponentially increasing score thresholds - and then just toss them out the window.
Multiple hands? Nahhh, you only need the one for the whole game. Why don't we take The Needle, which is already one of the most notorious run-killers out there, and make every single round like that? Thus was born The Golden Needle.
Money to buy things? Nahhh, you just need to work harder! What's that, you're relying on Big Blind's paycheck to get through the day? Ahhh that is just too bad. Also, I'm stealing half your jokers. Thus was born Cruelty.
What about them Jokers, the things I told you earlier are basically the whole point of the game? You'll be okay without 'em, right? Cool. And thus was born Jokerless.
In all seriousness, The Golden Needle and Cruelty didn't end up being too bad, but Jokerless really does trump them all.
Habitual
Jokerless might be the hardest individual challenge this game has to offer, but doing something very difficult once is very different than doing something difficult in 100+ different ways. That's where the second to last achievement comes in:
- Completionist+ - Win with every deck on Gold Stake difficulty
Let's do some quick math:
- 8 Stakes - White, Red, Green, Black, Blue, Purple, Orange, Gold
- 15 Decks - Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Black, Magic, Nebula, Ghost, Abandoned, Checkered, Zodiac, Painted, Anaglyph, Plasma, Erratic
- 15 x 8 = 120 times beating the game, minimum
Once you get used to them, White, Red, Green, and Black Stakes become basically menial. Blue and Purple can be a bit more troublesome, but alone they still aren't very scary. Orange feels like a big jump if you're not used to it, as does Gold.
But we're not talking about a sprint - this is a marathon.
The first 20 achievements are akin to taking walks on your lunch breaks. The next 7 achievements are akin to 5Ks - you should prepare some, but most people will be able to finish no problem. Completionist is like visiting all of the National Parks, seeing all the pretty sights, and collecting all kinds of souvenirs and patches. Rule Breaker is like a [Spartan Race](please add a link to a Spartan race), essentially a 5K obstacle course through thick mud. Completionist+ is like running a 5K every day for a few months.
Honestly, I thought I was going to stop after finsihing the Collection. Then I thought I was going to give up on Golden Needle, Cruelty, or Jokerless. Then I thought I'd never do Gold Stake after doing those challenge runs. Then I thought I would stop after Completionist+, stopping short of the final challenge:
Mad Scientist
- Completionist++ - Earn a Gold Sticker on every Joker
To continue the running analogy, Completionist++ is like trying to run a 5K with every single person you know on this Earth, one at a time.
Sometimes you end up running the same 5k as 6 of your friends, but you're only allowed to cross the finish line with one. Sometimes you find your friend that you haven't seen for years, but he bails right before the finish. And sometimes you just end up crossing the finish line with people you've already crossed it with.
Either way, day after day, you get up and you run.
And one day, you will have done it. And it won't feel like you did anything particularly special that day, or that week, or that month.
What's the Point?
Anyways, I built this tool (using the Balatro Calculator as a base) while I was doing Completionist++. It's simple and effective. That was the original point of this post.
You can track my live progress here:
I'll probably have some more existential thoughts to share when I finish.