Balatro: Achievements and Challenge Guide

As of version 1.0.0j-FULL, there are a total of 31 achievements and 20 challenges. While most of the achievements are pretty straightforward to get, I will still list them out for completion, along with some notes of the various challenges (since they are required for two of the achievements). Notes will be provided for the more involved requirements.

This shouldn’t need to be said, but achievements are most easily completed on White Stake (base difficulty) unless the achievement explicitly requires higher stakes. You cannot unlock achievements in Challenge Runs.

These will be listed in the order as displayed on other websites, since Steam sorts them by player completion %…

Essentially the same as reaching Ante 9. All three of the above achievements should be naturally acquired as you work towards beating the game normally.

There are a total of eight stakes, otherwise known as difficulty modifiers, that unlock on a per-deck basis. Beating a stake unlocks the next stake (again, on a per-deck basis), and each stake compounds on the previous one.

The stakes are as follows:

You should get these naturally over prolonged gameplay.

There are a good amount of items that can assist with hitting this value. Don’t forget to rely on interest or related mechanics as much as possible.

The following tables list the cards/vouchers that directly influence monetary values in a positive way with respect to working towards the achievement, although many other items can indirectly assist with it, such as allowing you to complete rounds with less hands used.

Don’t forget that you can use Endless mode to get this and other achievements as well, if you aren’t able to reach your goals by the end of Ante 8. I will not mention this again.

Jokers

Tarot Cards

Spectral Cards

Vouchers

The Lovers tarot card can help with consistently generating wild cards, although the Familiar/Grim/Incantation spectral cards can also generate these less consistently.

Assuming no round skipping, a standard run is completed in 24 rounds (Small, Big, Boss Blinds * 8 Antes). Therefore you will have to skip at least 12 rounds to get this achievement.

Probably most easily done with the Anaglyph Deck (After defeating each Boss Blind, gain a Double Tag) if you have that available (Win a run with any deck on at least Black Stake difficulty).

You will not be able to get this achievement without skipping blinds, since by Ante 4 you would only be able to get 3 vouchers (not sure if the achievement means you need 5 vouchers before reaching Ante 4, or 5 vouchers before you finish it). You’ll have to rely on a bunch of RNG to get 1 or 2 Voucher Tags (Adds one Voucher to the next shop), as well as having enough money to buy them as well.

Examples of decks that may have a slightly easier time of completing this achievement due to boosted money/tag manipulation:

• Yellow Deck – Start with extra $10
• Green Deck – At end of each Round: $2 per remaining Hand, $1 per remaining Discard, Earn no Interest
• Anaglyph Deck – After defeating each Boss Blind, gain a Double Tag

The Justice tarot card can help with consistently generating wild cards, although the Familiar/Grim/Incantation spectral cards can also generate these less consistently, on top of not really guaranteeing that you can play the glass cards in the same hand.

If you are having trouble with glass cards breaking, the Oops! All 6s joker (Doubles all listed probabilities (ex: 1 in 3 -> 2 in 3)) can help with this. There is a challenge centered around this mechanic, anyhow.

A straight flush consisting of the highest scoring cards (10 J Q K A). You will probably get this naturally over time, but there are a myriad of ways to make getting this more consistent (wild cards, suit manipulation, card add/removal, etc.).

Poker hands are normally leveled via Planet Cards, with one of the twelve planets upgrading one of the specific hand types.

The High Priestess tarot card (Creates up to 2 random Planet cards), along with the Telescope/Planet Merchant/Planet Tycoon vouchers, can assist with getting this achievement more easily. You also have cards like the Burnt Joker (Upgrade the level of the first discarded poker hand each round), Space Joker (1 in 4 chance to upgrade level of played poker hand), and Black Hole spectral card (Upgrade every poker hand by 1 level) that can also assist.

There’s a lot of tips and tracks to getting a high score, so for the sake of brevity, I will link to this 4 hour+ long video talking about reaching high score hands:

The Hanged Man tarot card (Destroys up to 2 selected cards) will be your main driver for getting this achievement, although you can also rely on cards like Trading Card joker (If first discard of round has only 1 card, destroy it and earn $3), Sixth Sense joker to a much lesser degree (If first hand of round is a single 6, destroy it and create a Spectral card), or most ideal, the Immolate spectral card (Destroys 5 random cards in hand, gain $20).

Recommended to try for this with the Abandoned Deck (Start run with no Face Cards in your deck), since you have 12 less cards to contend with compared to the other decks.

You’ll need to add at least 28 cards without removing anything to get this achievement. Things that help with this include the Marble Joker (Adds one Stone card to deck when Blind is selected), Certificate joker (When round begins, add a random playing card with a random seal to your hand), DNA joker (If first hand of round has only 1 card, add a permanent copy to deck and draw it to hand), the Familiar/Grim/Incantation spectral cards (they create more cards than they destroy), and of course, buying standard packs and/or player cards directly via the Magic Trick voucher.

Pretty straightforward. Just watch out for accidental clicks I guess…

Challenges are unlocked by winning a run with at least 5 different decks, and can be accessed as the third tab after clicking the Play button, next to the New Run/Continue options.

We’ll get to challenges in more detail in a later section.

Legendary Jokers are generated via The Soul spectral card. You will have to luck into this naturally over extended gameplay and acquiring Spectral Packs, although playing the Ghost Deck (Spectral cards may appear in the shop, start with a Hex card) may marginally increase your chances of finding The Soul (assuming it can even spawn in the shop).

There are a total of 12 planet cards. If you look at the Poker Hands seen in Run Info, you may notice that there are only 9 hands available. However, there are actually 3 other hidden hands (Five of a Kind, Flush House, Flush Five) and their respective planets (Planet X, Ceres, Eris) which will only appear in a run that you’ve played said hand. These are hidden hands because you cannot naturally achieve these in standard games of poker, so you will have to do some card manipulation in efforts to get this achievement.

Don’t forget to buy Celestial Packs.

There are a total of 22 tarot cards, and none of them have unlock requirements, so you should get this naturally over an extended period of time.

Don’t forget to buy Arcana Packs.

There are a total of 18 spectral cards, with 2 of them being particularly rare (The Soul and Black Hole) on top of spectral cards being more uncommon than planet/tarot cards to begin with.

The Ghost Deck (Spectral cards may appear in the shop, start with a Hex card) can potentially help with this achievement, although again, I am unsure if The Soul and Black Hole can even appear in the shop with this.

Don’t forget to buy Spectral Packs.

There are a total of 32 vouchers. A lot of these have unlock requirements on top of being kind of expensive to boot early-game, so it may be more troublesome to get this achievement compared to the other collection-based achievements above.

For reference, you can check out this guide for more information on all the vouchers/unlock conditions, alongside all the other items:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3165479230
(Don’t forget that most of this stuff is also accessible in-game via the Collection screen, and you can even make a second profile and toggle it between new/”Unlock All” state to check on things.)

There are a total of 340 items to collect. With some redundancy since this encompasses all the above discover-based achievements, these are the item counts:

Reminder that Gold Stake is the eighth difficulty, and there are 15 decks. Even if you were a god-gamer/luck-meister and won every run in attempts of this achievement, that is a minimum of 120 runs. You will not win every run.

Good luck.

There are a total of 150 jokers, and a gold sticker means that you beat a Gold Stake run with that joker in your inventory. This is meant to be the longest-of-term goal achievement, so compared to a lot of other indie-games, it may not be so reasonable to aim for a quick 100% achievement goal for this one…

If you want to split the finest of hairs, you may complete this marginally faster with the Black Deck (+1 Joker slot, -1 hand every round), assuming you don’t end up losing runs you could otherwise win due to the negative trait. Otherwise, the Negative edition modifier on Jokers can also marginally help you clear this faster assuming it is on jokers you haven’t gotten a gold sticker on yet, and aiming for this wouldn’t result in you losing the run.

Challenges are games with certain cards, rules, restrictions, and/or deck modifications to fit a certain theme, which modify the gameplay in an interesting or annoying way.

To simplify the later section, I will put down the base game modifiers here, then list any changes from that base in the following table. Standard modifiers are as follows:

• 4 hands per round
• 3 discards per round
• 8 hand size
• 5 Joker Slots
• 2 Consumable Slots
• Start with $4
• $5 base reroll cost

The Deck column will only be filled in if it deviates from the standard deck.

The challenges (as of version 1.0.0j-FULL) are as follows:

While you no longer directly get money from any rounds played, you essentially get $15 from your five starting eggs backloaded, until you start selling them. You can also get money from most other means such as tarot cards, vouchers, a bunch of joker card effects, gold playing cards, and so on. Just keep the eggs for as long as possible, selling off individual ones to make space for any good jokers, and this should be pretty straightforward.

The Ceremonial Dagger and Swashbuckler Jokers may also somewhat trivialize this challenge if you stumble upon them.

Ride the Bus is a great card to start with, and Shortcut makes it an easy decision to focus on building into straights from the get-go. As long as you don’t accidentally play scoring face cards, you shouldn’t have much trouble with this.

You start with a ton of money, but are pretty incentivized not to spend it due to your score being tied to it. You’ll be getting a lot of interest from the get-go though, so keeping your money at a healthy level while maybe putting a bit more focus on multiplier-focused effects can ensure this one is not very problematic.

Our first and only instance of seeing the Pinned keyword (This Joker stays pinned to the leftmost position). This is important to pay attention to in the context of Ceremonial Dagger, since it forces you to sacrifice a joker if you ever have more than one.

When you buy a joker, its sell value is half of its buy value, rounded down (minimum of $1). Therefore, a $2 and a $3 joker will sell for the same value, and of the two to buy for sacrificing, you should be buying the former.

As long as you keep this in mind and constantly buy random jokers to feed the dagger, while keeping three other useful jokers away from it, this should be another straightforward challenge, granted you don’t run into the Verdant Leaf boss blind…

Potentially one of the first “harder than base” challenges; The Wheel is a boss blind that draws 1 out of 7 cards face down, and now we have that as a permanent effect that is almost twice as bad.

Two basic tips of note that may help with this challenge:

• You can abuse either of the “Sort Hand” features to give yourself a slightly better idea on what face-down cards you are holding. For the Suit sorting in particular, the cards are sorted in the order of Spades – Hearts – Clubs – Diamonds; you can then use face-up cards to guarantee whether or not cards on the far-left are Spades and/or cards on the far-right are Hearts which can allow for safely played Flushes, something you can consider directly building towards.
• If you don’t want to deal with trying to figure out what cards are what, you can employ a “hand-agnostic” strategy to work towards beating this challenge, which essentially involves getting jokers that reward/scale based on playing non-specific hand types.

This second point is actually a strategy that can be used for a good amount of the challenges; it is a kind of “head empty” play-style where you literally play nearly whatever hands you want, and the point generation will be good enough to beat the game regardless (it will obviously not scale as well as dedicated combo builds, but the whole of this is consistency).

Since this is not an official term, I will give a general framework of the Hand-Agnostic strategy:

• Focus on jokers that reward/scale based on playing non-specific hand types, as well those that benefit from not using Discards (since we mostly don’t care about playing specific cards outside of the obviously boosted playing cards). Examples include:
  • Half Joker (+20 Mult if played hand contains 3 or fewer cards) OR Square Joker (Gains +4 Chips if played hand has exactly 4 cards (Currently 16 Chips))
  • Banner (+40 Chips for each remaining discard)
  • Delayed Gratification (Earn $2 per discard if no discards are used by end of the round)
  • Supernova (Adds the number of times poker hand has been played to Mult)
  • Blue Joker (+2 Chips for each remaining card in deck)
  • Green Joker (+1 Mult per hand played -1 Mult per discard)
  • Red Card (Gains +3 Mult when any Booster Pack is skipped)
  • Fortune Teller (+1 Mult per Tarot card used this run)
  • Marble Joker (Adds one Stone card to deck when Blind is selected)
  • Burglar (When Blind is selected, gain +3 Hands and lose all discards)
  • Constellation (Gains X0.1 Mult per Planet card used)
  • Card Sharp (X3 Mult if played poker hand has already been played this round)
  • Hologram (Gains X0.25 Mult per playing card added to your deck)
  • Ramen (X2 Mult, loses X0.01 Mult per card discarded)
  • Stuntman (+300 Chips, -2 hand size)
  • DNA (If first hand of round has only 1 card, add a permanent copy to deck and draw it to hand)
• In the context of jokers like Square Joker/Supernova/Green Joker, you will want to focus on playing as many hands as possible over the course of the game to scale these high enough for overcoming the boss blinds, although this means you probably die to The Needle and Violet Vessel blind, while trivializing a lot of other blinds
• Planet cards should be focused around High Card and Pair, since those hand types are way more likely to occur when not discarding and/or playing semi-blindly
• Wild Cards and Red Seals are much less valuable, but Steel Cards are much easier to work with

Since you don’t get money from extra hands, you are incentivized to play more hands to increase the amount of money you get via the Pareiodlia/Business Card combo, which means you could make about the same amount of money as a standard run would. Your average hand score starting off though will be a bit lower due to the removal of the higher value cards.

Other jokers centered around face cards become a lot more valuable and can easily carry you through this challenge if you happen upon them. These include:

• Scary Face (Played face cards give +30 Chips when scored)
• Faceless Joker (Earn $5 if 3 or more face cards are discarded at the same time)
• Photograph (First played face card gives X2 Mult when scored)
• Smiley Face (Played face cards give +4 Mult when scored)
• Midas Mask (All face cards become Gold cards when played)
• Reserved Parking (Each face card held in hand has a 1 in 2 chance to give $1)
• Sock and Buskin (Retrigger all played face cards)

Other jokers that focus on specific-valued cards can also be pretty good, since you start with 20 less card than normal. Just don’t take the Ride the Bus Joker thinking you have no face cards in your deck…also hope you don’t run into The Plant or The Mark blinds…

Keeping $14 or less on hand whenever you start a round turns this into a normal run. Once you’ve gotten a good baseline of jokers, the 10 hand size you get at $4 or less should make this easier than normal.

The banned cards include all of the jokers that can destroy themselves or have a sell benefit. Make sure you only buy “useful” jokers (this decision can be made a bit easier if you put more emphasis on enhanced/edition Jokers (i.e., Foil/Holographic/Polychrome/Negative)).

Employing the Hand-Agnostic strategy may be useful here, since it can get difficult building any strong hands with all the stone cards clogging your deck. You can also consider skipping blinds more often than usual to reduce the amount of times Marble Joker triggers.

Another one of the more difficult challenges, as although you have a bunch of red seals which makes the early game easier, late game will see yourself without any cards that can provide individual scores unless you can somehow add enough cards and/or skip enough blinds to preserve your deck as long as possible.

The Hand-Agnostic strategy works well here (and may be the ideal method), as there are a ton of Jokers that lose a lot of value when more and more of your deck is debuffed. In those situations, focusing on jokers that provide score boosts irrespective of played card values/enhancements is the most consistent way to beat this.

Don’t forget to create enhance unplayed starting cards with steel whenever possible, as these work quite well when paired with the red seal and never played. The other enhancements can still find some use if you can save them to get through the bigger blinds.

This challenge is very similar to 8. Non-Perishable, except that you have a bit more sell flexibility up until the end of Ante 4 where you want to finalize your roster. Otherwise, employ the same strategy as that challenge, while manually ensuring you don’t any of those perishable/sell jokers on hand by Ante 5.

Jokers that can create cards become a bit more useful here, but otherwise, this challenge isn’t too bad if you can get some jokers early-game that scale without shop involvement. Much like actual inflation, you are incentivized to spend less frivolously until you can amass enough money to only buy the essentials (in the context of Balatro, it’s stuff that has a high chance of directly improving the run).

You can still generate Jokers through Buffoon Packs, so you can amass a full roster without too much issue, while getting strong benefit from the Vampire pretty early on with all the other starting cards. This should be another one of those “easier than standard” challenges.

Somewhat similar to 10. Double or Nothing in that you have a strong start, but are disincentivized from playing too many cards lest you end up with nothing by end-game. However, you cannot employ the Hand-Agnostic strategy here, since the large ban list ensures that your starting deck is all you’re going to get, without any chances of getting rid of those 100% shatter chance cards.

While you have those two Oops! All 6s stuck in your roster though, might as well make the most use of them. As expected, positive chance-based cards function very well here, which include:

• Business Card (Played face cards have a 1 in 2 chance to give $2 when scored)
• Hallucination (1 in 2 chance to create a Tarot card when any Booster Pack is opened)
• Space Joker (1 in 4 chance to upgrade level of played poker hand)
• Reserved Parking (Each face card held in hand has a 1 in 2 chance to give $1)
• Bloodstone (1 in 3 chance for played cards with Heart suit give X2 Mult when scored)
• The Wheel of Fortune tarot card (1 in 4 chance to add Foil, Holographic, or Polychrome edition to a random Joker)

Erosion (+4 Mult for each card below 52 in your full deck) is obviously a very strong card here if you happen upon it.

Outside of specific cards, the general strategy is to be conservative with your played hands, both through skipping blinds as well as minimizing score overkill when you can use those to safely clear the later blinds (for example, you don’t need to play a flush on Ante 1’s Small Blind when a small card’s three of a kind is sufficient).

Similar to 9. Medusa, where if you ignore Obelisk, you are trading having a standard deck with your face cards returned, at the cost of losing 12 stone cards and a joker slot.

That said, Obelisk is a very strong card if you know how to play to its strengths (i.e., purposefully amassing high play count on a hand type that you will then actively choose to ignore by mid-game, such that you will have a high enough multiplier to cruise in end-game). Otherwise, you can still rely on the Hand-Agnostic strategy here while getting small bursts of benefit from Obelisk every now and then.

This one’s pretty scary. Constellation is a top-tier joker with the starting planet vouchers to boot, but the hardest part of this is getting out of the early-game with only 2 hands per round and no way to increase it (remember that less hands = less money at the end of the round too, so it’s a compounding issue). Expect a lot of restarts looking for good enough hands to get you to the point where Rocket can scale to a reasonable enough level to feeding Constellation with more planet cards and get you through to the end, being very mindful not to play any wasteful hands.

You will probably have to hunt for jokers that provide very strong initial base/mult score boosts to get out of the early game, then pivot to other multiplicatives once all the planet boosts provide enough of a base coverage.

The Hand-Agnostic strategy nearly trivializes this challenge with the extra discards and joker slots. You can try to play this “as expected” with trying to deal with all the draw RNG as you burn discards searching for high-value hands otherwise, but sometimes you just don’t want to think, you know?

We now reach the trifecta of challenges from hell…

If you thought 16. Blast Off was bad enough with its 2 hands restriction (but at least with some good starting cards), now we have this garbage with a one hand restriction and no “good” starting cards. To reward you for your troubles, you are given extra discards and money alongside the Credit Card, which basically gives you about $30 to work with for your first round should you choose to put all your hopes and dreams in the first shop rather than drag the torture out. Oh, except even with those extra discards they now cost money to use, so you are penalized for trying to work with the tools you’re given. What fun.

Since attempting to skip the first blind is now mostly a death-wish unless you get some early hand upgrades, you will have to get accustomed to beating the first blind in one hand moving forward (it was always considered ideal to do so, but now it’s mandatory). This requires a 300+ point hand with a base deck; this means you must be able to get one of the following hands:

• Straight starting with 8 or higher
• Flush with an average value of 8 per card
• Full House with an average value of 7 per card
• Any Four of a Kind
• Any Straight Flush

Even with 6 discards, you can still potentially get screwed by draw RNG if you are looking for very specific cards, so the most you can do is maximize your chances throwing out a bunch of the low value cards that are guaranteed to lose you the game if played. From there, focus on the jokers with strong multipliers that don’t rely on the shop, and ignore those that scale based on hands played since you have no longer time for that. Remember that you are going to get a lot less money than standard runs due to absolute lack of “hands remaining money”; expect a LOT of restarting for this.

Cruelty indeed. There is not much incentive to play any of the non-boss blinds outside of the shop refresh it provides, or if you get jokers that scale off of hands played. Even then, since you are down two joker slots, you will really have to make what you get count, or luck into (free) negative jokers with vouchers via skips since you’ll likely not have enough money to buy them outright.

Ah yes, the game featuring a bunch of jokers with various effects and you aren’t allowed to use any of them for this run. The only “upside” to this is that you’re way more likely to see tarot and planet cards now, but that’s still 34 cards to cycle through, with you really not having much leeway to spread out your upgrades; you will have to hyperfocus into a good scoring combo and pray that all the RNG consistently lines up (i.e., always getting relevant upgrades, not getting screwed by draw RNG, not getting screwed by boss blind RNG).

Best of luck.