Balatro and I had come to an agreement. I was only allowed to interact with it under certain conditions. I was almost free of its grasp again when I hit the cruelest scenario of all: Golden Needle. I was trapped in a prison of my own creation until I found a way to win.
Some context: I had previously banished Balatro from my personal computer. If it’s on there, like Vampire Survivors before it, work just doesn’t get done. I knew instinctively that the mobile version was going to be far more insidious, and largely resisted its call until I had a six-hour Thanksgiving train ride to my parents I needed to kill. So I allowed it back into my system under the condition that I delete it immediately from my phone after the holiday was over.
This arrangement largely worked until I tried to reinstall the game for a Christmas train ride and found out that cloud saves were nonfunctional for a huge portion of users on iOS. This is a huge issue and you will see tons of pissed off reddit threads on the topic. All that progress I had previously was gone. Lucky, the developers were smart enough to include an option in the menu that lets you just unlock everything. The problem with that is that I am goal oriented when playing Balatro, and with nothing to unlock I decided to go after the 20 “challenges,” custom scenarios built into a special mode in the game.
Most of the challenges in Balatro are fun and fairly straightforward. The Rich Get Richer starts you off with $100 and vouchers that max out your interest, but limits your scorable chips to the amount of money you have. Medusa gives you a single, indestructible Marble Joker, which rapidly fills your deck with stone cards. Fragile gives you a deck of entirely glass cards and gives you two jokers that double all probabilities, which makes glass cards break every time. Each of these scenarios forces the player to work around the limitations of their deck and often upend how the game is played.
Challenges are fair for the most part until you get to the last three and the difficulty skyrockets tremendously. Cruelty forces you to operate at a disadvantage – small blinds and big blinds give no reward money. This sucks but is very reliably beatable. Jokerless forces the player to operate without jokers. This also sucks, but there are ways to get to the end without jokers – building on four of a kind or straights, which scale more aggressively. Of the three, Golden Needle is the cruelest.
Golden Needle starts you off with a Credit Card joker and $10, allowing you to go -$20 in debt. Each used discard costs you $1. You have six discards a round, and can only play one hand each round. Welcome to hell.
What makes Golden Needle so frustrating is that it is the scenario most dependent on random chance. You get past the first round by aggressively cycling through one of the few hands that can beat it – usually a high end straight, flush or full house. What you pull in the first shop determines how you must proceed, if you can at all.
Golden Needle also subtly changes the way you play the game. Certain MVP jokers that would carry you through the game, jokers that get stronger each hand like Ride The Bus or Spare Trousers, do not scale fast enough to account for the scenario. Conversely, other jokers that shine in a scenario with one hand and six discards become elevated in importance – jokers like Acrobat (which gives you a 3x multiplier on the final hand), Dusk (retriggers the final hand), Ice Cream (which gives you a massive chip bump but reduces every hand played) and Castle (gains +3 chips every time a specific suit is discarded).
The constant financial drain of discarding means maintaining a functioning economy becomes twice as hard, and you are forced to take a risk to pull yourself out of debt, or function exclusively in the negative. On top of this, certain boss blinds like The Mouth or The Needle become irrelevant, while others like The Water will destroy you outright. This unique combination of pure chance and elevated strategy mean that you not only have to be lucky, you also have to be good. Every round played is on a knife’s edge. One move and you are done.
That’s where I was for days: refusing to delete Balatro until I bested Golden Needle. Through a series of convoluted circumstances I engineered a prison of gaming that I could technically leave but refused to out of pride. I have gotten to the final round multiple times, only to come up short by inches. And this morning, as I was writing this, it finally happened. A combination of the Banner, Acrobat and Onyx Agate while focusing on juicing flushes (which is normally a bad idea but far more viable due to the number of discards in this specific scenario) carried me through to Ante 8. The joy I felt was sublime.
I love and hate you, Golden Needle, and now I have defeated you. Time to delete Balatro until my next train ride.
