When you're re-watching the first episode of the first season, look out for the bearded guy in the map room with Merle Dandridge that's upset because everyone died, that's me. :)
I got a call to be an extra and figured what the heck, was totally worth it. Got to very briefly meet Craig Mazin too.
Hey! I've played it for a while now (and haven't even followed any Reddit / YouTube guides yet).
Early game: Get a joker that gives you a big mult (e.g., Half Joker w/ +20 Mult for small hands). This will allow you to survive while you build out your points engine. (You can survive with flushes in the early game, but it can get harder to win with flush later, due to Bosses, unless you have flush friendly Jokers and a large hand size.)
Mid game: Generate $$$ so you can buy planets and tarot cards. Once you're happy with your jokers, you want to level up the hands that work well with those Jokers. Try easier hands like Two Pair or Pair or High Card. (Assuming you can generate enough cash to level up those hands.)
Tip: Blue Seals are helpful!
To Win: Look for jokers that get you increasingly higher +mult or xmult for things you'll do anyways. There are jokers that increase mult for using tarot cards, or jokers that increase xmult for adding new cards to your deck.
Tip: Steel cards are also awesome.
Tip: If you have an xmult joker, move it to the right side, as jokers trigger from left to right. You want to multiply after you add!
Disclaimer: I have not beaten ante 11 yet. I can get a couple million points with my strategy, but 7+ million is too difficult. I don't see an easy path to naneinf (not a typo). I guess I'll need to give up and watch some YouTube guides as some point.
I feel like I win about 50% or more of my games on regular white stake difficulty. I've won some red stakes, but I don't really feel a need to make the game much harder. I think if I played it safe I could win 75% or more of my games on white stake. The reason my win rate on base difficulty is lower is because I like to try weird strategies with different jokers.
The amazing thing about Balatro is.... there are many many different paths to a victory. Everyone has their own favorite joker, and it might all be different.
For a long time, I liked two pair hands the most. Now most of my games use pair or high card. I find it too difficult to get to ante 9+ with a 5-card strategy. (4-card flushes are OK.)
> Disclaimer: I have not beaten ante 11 yet. I can get a couple million points with my strategy, but 7+ million is too difficult. I don't see an easy path to naneinf (not a typo). I guess I'll need to give up and watch some YouTube guides as some point.
It took me a bit too, but now I'm up to 15 (it starts getting exponentially harder around 12). And finally started seeing "e"s in my scores (highest is 2.799e15)
At first, I used the deck taht would give doubles when you skipped a blind. I'd save those up until yuo can get a negative joker when skipped and would end up with like 12 jokers.
Now, I use the plasma deck for high scoring. It's weird since you focus on points instead of mult, but the scores get higher much quicker.
Another tip is to try and shape your deck as early as possible. Going for a deck of Kings and Queens is good because of the rare joker gives that 2x for them.
>Try easier hands like Two Pair or Pair or High Card
I've always found that bigger hands like Flush, Full House, Straight are easier to work with because they get more chips and mult whenever they level up. I've only used small hands if i've leveled them up a ton with "burnt joker"
I suppose it depends on how you use your discards. If you debuff discards and hand size, then it is harder to get big hands.
All of this, though unless I have a planet-based joker, then I don't personally find the planets all that appealing - it really feels like a drop in the bucket compared to jokers in terms of base chips and mult.
I find Planets are more powerful with better hands. A pluto for instance is nearly useless early game, but a single saturn can get you through the first two antes on its own.
I had a run on nebula deck today where I made it to ante 6 just slamming saturns and straights over and over, no scoring jokers.
Eventually you need X mult to make it to ante 8, but I think you can usually get away with as little as 2X mult if you are hitting saturns.
One difference is that this is mult that comes before cards-in-hand get scored, so steel cards (or 1.5X for kings in hand joker) have something to work off.
For me it was Battleship Solitaire (https://lukerissacher.com/battleships), which I found via hackernews. For the first few weeks I played it every day at every opportunity, and since then I fire it up at least every couple days and burn through it. Its a less involved Sudoku logic puzzle that is mind-bogglingly satisfying to complete.
Or do you perform a quick season on the cooktop right before frying / searing? In that case, you could also use stainless steel cookware, which is even less maintenance than carbon steel.
Awesome project. What are you planning for text and font support? Some graphics engines don’t support all the ways you might want to display text. Will we be able to load OTF or WOFF2 files and display arbitrary strings? :-)
Thanks! I haven't looked deeply into font yet, but I've always been partial to HarfBuzz for shaping, so will probably build on top of that. It also has an experimental Wasm shaper which certainly served as a bit of inspiration for the design of this.
There is a well maintained Wasm build of harfbuzz: <https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzzjs> with both OpenType and AAT shapers support, which should be enough but you can also provide your own shaper implementation in Wasm yes.
We're successfully using Wasm harfbuzz to render text in a web-based design tool with relatively high usage so there should be no issues integrating it :)
