Reaching Infinity

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. Balatro is the most recent entry to this collection, with some of the most gruelingly difficult and time-intensive challenges I've ever taken on.

A Hypnotically Satisfying, Rule-Bending Game

For anyone that hasn't played Balatro, it's basically poker on steroids. Unlike normal poker, the 52-card deck you start with can be dramatically altered by removing, cloning, and upgrading cards, as well as managing a set of Jokers that give you special abilities and bonuses. Instead of playing and betting against other players, you are faced with a series of levels and bosses that become harder and harder and harder until you simply cannot keep up anymore and the game inevitably ends.

In gaming, this is called a "roguelike" or "roguelite" game - you start a "run" that gets progressively harder, you inevitably lose, and then you start a new run, with very few benefits being carried over between runs. This is not unlike, say, playing Euchre with friends: everybody starts with the same "abilities" (different than "knowledge" or "skill"); when someone wins a game of Euchre, they don't get to carry over a bonus into the next game, like, for example "start your next game with 3 points". However, each round of a Balatro run demands more and more points to be scored, which makes it quite different from Poker, where the same hierarchy of poker hands (e.g. Royal Flush > Flush ? Two Pair) determine the winner each round.

For example, one of the Jokers in Balatro gives you "+1 Hand Size" - can you imagine starting a hand of poker with 3 face-down cards instead of 2? Another Joker multiplies your score if the hand you play contains one of each suit (Spade, Heart, Club, Diamond) - can you imagine a Two Pair with 1 Spade, 1 Heart, 1 Club, 1 Diamond beating out your opponent that played a Royal Flush? This is the kind of craziness you can expect in Balatro - and I've barely scratched the surface. In addition to the 150 unique Jokers, there are also various decks, stakes, vouchers, tags, tarot cards, spectral cards, planet cards, new poker hands, enhancements, editions, seals, blinds, and much more to explore.

Game "Completion"

There are 31 achievements in the base game of Balatro: in my experience, you will get 20 of them if you just play casually for long enough; 7 of them require you to strategize and structure a run around completing each one; and 4 of them will cost you your soul.

The game color-codes them according to difficulty, differing slightly from my "casual", "stragetical", and "soul-sucking" categorizations:

(For any achievements that I think are too easy/hard for their color, I put them at the start/end of their corresponding sections with notes about my reasoning.)

A Walk in the Park (Achievements #1-18)

If you're new to the game and the idea of winning even a single run seems far away - don't worry, everyone was there at some point, including me, and you only get to experience Balatro for the first time once, so enjoy it! I personally didn't pay any attention to the achievements until I already had ~20 of them. Also, if you are new to the game, there will be some "spoilers" ahead, and I personally loved exploring this game blind.

If you're more experienced, there isn't much to discuss about the Blue achievements, but I do feel that ~7 of them could/should be in the next category (Green).

Rule Bender

[image of 22 with caption: "Complete any challenge run"]

Unlocking Challenges is when I truly realized just how much this game has to offer. In order to unlock Challenges you have to win a run with 5 different decks - once you do this, doing one of the easier ones and completing Rule Bender becomes more fun than it is challenging, but I still think that unlocking Challenges in the first place is more of a Green-level task.

Shattered

[image of 13 with caption: "Break 2 Glass Cards in a single hand"]

While this can be done quite easily if you're trying to do it, I completed Shattered before I had really cared about achievements yet, so unlocking it unintentionally felt super big-brained, like I had just discovered a new advanced strategy.

Astronomy

[image of 25 with caption: "Discover every Planet Card"]

Another big "Aha!" moment in Balatro is when you finally figure out what those "Undiscovered" Planet Cards could possibly be when you've played everything up to and including a Royal Flush. Similarly to the Shattered achievement, pulling off a Flush House and Flush Five feels more like you've entered into the "Intermediate" realm of Balatro, which I associate more with the Green achievements and "discovering more advanced strategies", whereas I associate Blue achievements with a "Beginner" level, where you understand the basics and start winning runs.

You Get What You Get

[image of 21 with caption: "Win a run without rerolling the shop"]

This was the second-to-last achievement I "unintentionally unlocked" before finally gaining an interest in exploring the rest of Balatro's achievements. Again, it's really not very difficult if you're intentionally going for a no-reroll run, but I wasn't even aware that this was an achievement, so seeing it pop up at the end of one of my runs felt like discovering a hidden achievement, and I honestly think that this was probably the moment that Balatro went from being a "really fun game" to me being completely hooked on it.

Nest Egg

[image of 9 with caption: "Have $400 or more during a single run"]

I distinctly remember Nest Egg being the first time that I started a run with a clear goal that wasn't just "win the run" or "unlock a new deck", but instead something like "push this single aspect of the game to its extreme". Even if it only took me 1 or 2 tries, this new level of strategy made me think that Nest Egg should be a Green achievement, since many of the Greens focus on pushing individual elements to their limits.

It's also probably worth mentioning that, before completing Nest Egg, I completed the 100,000K achievement - again, without intentionally going for it - which is 1 of only 4 Red achievements in the game.

ROI

[image of 12 with caption: "Buy 5 Vouchers by the end of Ante 4"]

ROI fits the same bill of "likely needing to strategize and structure a run around a specific goal", even if it only took me a couple attempts once I started.

Flushed

[image of 10 with caption: "Play a Flush with 5 Wild Cards"]

Interestingly, Flushed was my 27th achievement, followed only by Completionist, Rule Breaker, Completionist+, and Completionist++. This also means that all of the Green achievements and half of the Red achievements came before this final Blue one.

Again, it's not particularly difficult - part of the reason it was so late for me is because I found it to be the least interesting "push this aspect to the extreme"-type achievement.

Couch to 5k (Achievements #19-25)

To recap from the previous section, I personally think that the following 7 achievements could be Green instead of Blue: (Rule Bender, Shattered, Astronomy, You Get What You Get, Nest Egg, ROI, Flushed)

Similarly, a few of the Green achievements could easily be Blue. Since Black Stake, 1,000K, all spectral cards, vouchers are all basically just "a matter of time", that leaves Speed Runner, Big Hands, and Tiny Hands for what I personally consider a bit more difficult to get.

Left off here, work in progress!

• Speed Runner - Win a run in 12 or fewer rounds
• Big Hands - Have 80 or more cards in your deck
• Tiny Hands - Thin your deck down to 20 or fewer cards

Running a Marathon (Achievements #26-29)

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:

1. 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

• 150 unique Jokers ranging from Common and Uncommon to Rare and Legendary

• 15 different starting decks to choose from

• 8 difficulty levels

• 8 enhancements, 4 editions, and 4 seals used to modify your cards/deck

• 22 tarot cards, 18 spectral cards, and 12 planet cards that act as "consumable items"

• New poker hands like 5-of-a-kind, Flush House, and Flush Five, which are normally impossible in vanilla poker

• 32 vouchers, 24 tags

• 28 unique bosses

• 15 booster packs available in the Shop alongside Jokers and tarot/planet/spectral cards

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

2. 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:

1. The Omelette
2. 15 Minute City
3. Rich get Richer
4. On a Knife's Edge
5. Mad World
6. Medusa
7. Bram Poker
8. Blast Off
9. Monolith
10. 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:

The Ultramarathon (Achievements #30-31)

3. 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

4. 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. But the list will be complete.

Updated Difficulty Ranking

Breaking Physics (Unofficial Achievements)

Naneinf Win streak Cryptid

Finale (or is it?)

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 see my completed board here:

Here is my final timeline of achievements:

• April 11th, 2025: Ante Up! (Reach Ante 4) Blue
• April 11th, 2025: 10K (Score 10,000 Chips in a single hand) Blue
• April 11th, 2025: Retrograde (Get any poker hand to level 10) Blue
• April 11th, 2025: Ante Upper! (Reach Ante 8) Blue
• April 11th, 2025: Cartomancy (Discover every tarot card) Blue
• April 11th, 2025: Heads up (Win a run) Blue
• April 12nd, 2025: Card Player (Play at least 2500 cards) Blue
• April 12nd, 2025: Legendary (Discover a legendary joker) Blue
• April 12nd, 2025: Card Discarder (Discard at least 2500 cards) Blue
• April 13th, 2025: Royale (Play a Royal Flush) Blue
• April 13th, 2025: Low Stakes (Win a run on at least Red Stake difficulty) Blue
• April 14th, 2025: 1000K (Score 1,000,000 Chips in a single hand) Green
• April 15th, 2025: Clairvoyance (Discover every Spectral Card) Green
• April 15th, 2025: Rule Bender (Complete any challenge run) Blue
• April 15th, 2025: Mid Stakes (Win a run on at least Black Stake difficulty) Green
• April 21st, 2025: Shattered (Break 2 Glass Cards in a single hand) Blue
• April 23rd, 2025: Astronomy (Discover every Planet Card) Blue
• April 29th, 2025: Extreme Couponer (Discover every Voucher) Green
• April 29th, 2025: You Get What You Get (Win a run without rerolling the shop) Blue
• May 6th, 2025: 100,000K (Score 100,000,000 Chips in a single hand) Red
• May 7th, 2025: Nest Egg (Have $400 or more during a single run) Blue
• May 7th, 2025: Speed Runner (Win a run in 12 or fewer rounds) Green
• May 9th, 2025: ROI (Buy 5 Vouchers by the end of Ante 4) Blue
• May 10th, 2025: Big Hands (Have 80 or more cards in your deck) Green
• May 11th, 2025: High Stakes (Win a run on at least Gold Stake difficulty) Red
• May 17th, 2025: Tiny Hands (Thin your deck down to 20 or fewer cards) Green
• May 18th, 2025: Flushed (Play a Flush with 5 Wild Cards) Blue
• May 18th, 2025: Completionist (Discover 100% of your collection) Red
• May 19th, 2025: Rule Breaker (Complete every challenge run) Red
• July 24th, 2025: Completionist+ (Win with every deck on Gold Stake difficulty) White
• August 22nd, 2025: Completionist++ (Earn a Gold Sticker on every Joker) White

Breaking the Game (literally)

For anyone moderately familiar with Balatro, you've probably heard of the term "naneinf". This is an actual score that can be attained in the game, and it essentially requires breaking the game. While it's not an official achievement, it might just be harder than all of the previous achievements.

To be more precise, we can write it as "NaN e^inf". Achieving naneinf is essentially breaking the game. Spelling it out, "naneinf" means "not a number, infinite exponent". To put a normal number in this format, we could simply rewrite 1,000 as 1.0 e^3. The US National Debt could be written as 3.731 e^13. To achieve naneinf in Balatro, the player must score above 1.80 e^308. This is a pretty incomprehensible number for humans. Let's write it out just for fun: 1.80 e^308 = 180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

You can read about the computer science behind this number here, but for our purposes, we just need to know that once we hit this number, the game breaks and gives us a score of naneinf.

There are plenty of guides out there with several reliable methods, especially when using a seed (seeds are alphanumeric codes that determine all the random elements of a game; therefore, anyone who uses the seed will get the same exact random elements). With the right guide and seed, even someone who's never played Balatro before can get naneinf. This is cool from an inclusivity standpoint, but we're here to talk about hardcore completionism.

If you Google "how hard is naneinf", one of the first results might be a video of someone claiming to have put 400 hours into attempting naneinf, only to get to 3.024 e^123. Strategy-wise, they're only missing a couple elements - percentage-wise, this is still only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000168% of the way to naneinf!

What makes naneinf difficult is when you try to achieve it with an unseeded run. I honestly can't say how difficult it truly is. After just a few days of attempts, I got this far:

e^53 is still a long way off from naneinf, but this still blew my previous high score out of the water, somewhere around e^21.

Wish me luck!

Links

• Live Application
• GitHub Repository