[superultra]

I love this post a lot. Our entire world is perpetuated by platforms that are desperately begging us for engagement. It feels to me at least that I'm being pulled in a hundred directions, for all my time for all time.

My engagement with Balatro is not quite the same as localthunks. I go in phases where I play a lot and then put it down and walk away, and then weeks later I get back into it. But that also feels like it's in the spirit of what localthunk is talking about here. It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.

I wonder what our digital world would look like if more tools and platforms adopted an approach that was not clinging desperately for everything all the time all at once.

[cwizou]

> It's a comfort game. A pasttime rather than an addiction. Balatro is a stress reliever for me and I can jump in, play, and jump out and it's fine.

Exactly.

To me there are two specific things that gives it that stress reliever, jump in/out spirit of Solitaire :

- You know from the start you may not win every round.

- Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.

I think both are perfectly captured in Balatro, and it manages to achieve it with a vastly more complex design.

And it manages to add more depth while keeping that formula with a large number of jokers that, depending on what you get at the start, will dictate a different type of playstyle.

Sure, you can develop some strategies over time (money), but you (usually) can't force the direction of a run (at least early on), you have to work with what you're given. It's truly a brillant design.

[bigstrat2003]

I think Balatro is way too hard to be a good stress reliever. Unlike solitaire, I can barely win a run in Balatro and there's no indication as to what I could do better. I actually find it stressful more than stress relieving, if anything.

[beeflet]

On the first day I played, I would always get stuck ante 5-6. The thing is, you need to build your strategy around the "X Mult" jokers in order to progress past that point, which often involves completely pivoting your strategy in the middle of the run.

I think the term they use online is "CMX": First get CHIPs-boosting jokers, then get MULT, then get X Mult.

You also have to have good economy and take advantage of interest or some other money-generating card. It's very much a win-more game where you need to get the steamroller going. I don't think I've ever beaten the game without a good money generator, either a money-generating joker or interest.

[__turbobrew__]

You can get better at it, that is what makes the game so rewarding. Im just average at the game and I can probably win on the easiest difficulty 95% of the time.

Part of it is also just being OK with losing, if anything I think you deterministically lose more often in solitaire than in balatro.

I also see belatro similar to poker where you can take all the right actions, play to your outs, and still lose to bad variance. All you can do is your best.

[ronyeh]

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.)

[mexicocitinluez]

> 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.

[beeflet]

>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.

[junon]

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.

[__turbobrew__]

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.

[IsTom]

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.

[sepositus]

It can turn into a brain burner very quickly. Tracking the interactions from five jokers (in order) can be a mental gymnastic session in some instances :) I find I enjoy it more when I've not just ended a taxing day (writing/troubleshooting software).

[ChainnChompp]

> - You know from the start you may not win every round. > - Things can instantly and dramatically turn one way or another.

Nailed it. A good rogue-like deck-builder should always have these qualities. My favorite for a few years now - Slay the Spire - lives by this.

[ronyeh]

Maybe it’s a comfort game for you. But it’s an addiction for me. I need to stop, so I can find something else to get addicted to.

[bombcar]

Hello, it's me, Factorio.

[joquarky]

Factorio is not a game, it's a lifestyle.

[ronyeh]

I have known about this game for a while. I have never bought it because I fear for my productivity.

[pjerem]

No worries, you can just go to Satisfactory then. :D

It’s Factorio but you also can make your factory aesthetic (and by aesthetic, I mean, glorious).

[rc5150]

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.

[sdwr]

I don't know how you can say that with a straight face. Balatro is building on 50 years of addiction-seeking game design. Everything from the sound effects, to the random round rewards, to the pacing of unlocks is optimized to be as attention-grabbing and dopamine-releasing as possible.

It's like praising Coca-Cola for not tasting as sweet as Pepsi

[banannaise]

It's a roguelike deckbuilder. The randomness is necessary to the genre.

I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized. The only way the developer makes more money is through players telling other players how fun the game is, which convinces them to buy it.

[kevinmchugh]

There's also nothing timed in balatro, so there's no need for the next game to be _now_.

[bscphil]

> players telling other players how fun the game is

I wonder if we've collectively been trained to perceive addictiveness as fun. It's good that the developer isn't being directly monetizing eyeball-hours, but when users have grown to expect that specific dopamine hit that proves addictive, you end up having to include it anyway.

[junon]

Idk, I think it's also just fair to say that one finds Balatro fun. Not everything has to have a psychological basis for harm.

[djeastm]

>I think you've missed something important: none of these elements in Balatro are monetized.

Monetization doesn't really affect addiction, which was the question at hand.

[banannaise]

It absolutely does, because monetization leads to weaponization of patterns of addiction.

Key things Balatro does not have, that make it a poor example of the problem of addictive games:

1. Monetization. See above.

2. Anything timed. At all. No hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly anything. Nothing that tries to coerce you into reopening the app, aside from "I want to play Balatro now".

3. Lootbox cosmetics. All cosmetics are deterministic. All unlocks are part of gameplay. The collection tracker is dependent on obtaining items (mostly cards) at random, but is focused on the challenge aspect to diversify gameplay: rather than "can you get these cards" it asks "can you win with these cards".

Balatro does belong in a nuanced discussion of how we often conflate addictiveness and fun, and how that presents itself in media and games, but that's not because it's a particularly egregious example of weaponizing addiction.

[endgame]

What's interesting to me is that despite all that (the escalating lights and noise as your score ticks up, and the hypnotic effect of the sound slowing down and speeding up when you fail/restart the run, are two big examples), I seem to be the only person who hit a wall with Balatro. I enjoyed it for a few days, saw what grinding out all of the jokers/stickers would be like, and put it down. Not in an insulted way, but in a "I've had a good meal, I'm full, and I'm happy to leave the rest of my plate" way. I find this particularly interesting because other games do have an ability to grab me by the throat.

Perhaps it was too overt?

[khalladay]

I was this way too, until I bought it again on my phone. Now its my commute game and I have clocked in a huge number of hours. But in small, 1-2 run sessions

[mfro]

I think both of these are true. Balatro is a like a finely honed blade of dopamine harvesting -- it truly does build on the most addictive facets of gaming we have discovered thus far. It is also laudable in the ethos of its designer, expressed through the game. As others have said, there is not and will never be monetization, per LocalThunk's distaste for gambling(we can be pedantic and argue that at the core of each roguelike is a gambling aspect but).

I think there is a fine line here between the cynicist 'never indulge' and the consoomer/accelerationist 'do as you will'