To the extent that the best “strategy”, is basically to start going all in on a certain playstyle, that requires 3+ things to be viable, and then die or reset if the necessary components don’t show up before the ante outpaces you.
Yeah, I feel this. Slay the Spire ability to choose paths gives you some control over fixing some bad RNG, so Balatrofeels more luck-based.
That said, it doesn’t really feel like a “gambling” game. Gambling games have essentially no skill, whereas Balatro does have a lot of player choice, where the “best” choice isn’t obvious (i.e. can’t just follow a system). Gambling, however, usually has minimal player interaction, or there’s optimal play that cuts the gap between the house and the player the most (but never more than 50%). It’s basically like other deck building games, just with a poker theme and a bit more RNG.
Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, I called out someone who was trying to defend Balatro’s RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that only 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty.
I don’t know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game.
That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance… at absolute best you could only have an 80% win rate on the hardest difficulty.
I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd.
The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button… this is so beyond the realm of “just git gud scrub”.
Yeah, I feel this. Slay the Spire ability to choose paths gives you some control over fixing some bad RNG, so Balatro feels more luck-based.
That said, it doesn’t really feel like a “gambling” game. Gambling games have essentially no skill, whereas Balatro does have a lot of player choice, where the “best” choice isn’t obvious (i.e. can’t just follow a system). Gambling, however, usually has minimal player interaction, or there’s optimal play that cuts the gap between the house and the player the most (but never more than 50%). It’s basically like other deck building games, just with a poker theme and a bit more RNG.
Somewhere in my comment history, back when Steam did their 2024 yearly awards I think, I called out someone who was trying to defend Balatro’s RNG by saying that players and modders had proven that only 1 in 5 RNG seeds resulted in a truly unwinnable game on the max difficulty.
I don’t know how true that is, but it definitely lines up with my anecdotal experience of the game.
That would mean that at best, playing 100% optimally (the RNG is deterministic, so the same actions on the same seed lead to the same RNG outcomes), with the ability to cheat by undoing your moves and by seeing the rng outcomes in advance… at absolute best you could only have an 80% win rate on the hardest difficulty.
I enjoyed Balatro, but that is cuckoo fucking bananas absurd.
The average player is not playing 100% optimally with full sight of RNG outcomes and an undo button… this is so beyond the realm of “just git gud scrub”.