Balatro — Achievement Walkthrough

Just survive your first few antes (each ante = 3 blinds). You'll hit Ante 4 in almost any run — unmissable.

By the mid antes a decent hand with a few Jokers easily clears 10k. You'll get this on the way to your first win.

Ante 8 is the final ante (its Boss Blind is the win condition on base difficulty). Reaching it means you've nearly won a run.

Beat the Ante 8 Boss Blind on White Stake. Build any scoring engine — a couple of mult Jokers plus levelling one poker hand is plenty for your first win. The Red Deck is forgiving for beginners.

Use Planet cards (and the Telescope/Observatory vouchers) to level a single hand. Pick the hand you play most and feed it every matching Planet — level 10 comes fast if you focus one.

10-J-Q-K-A of one suit. Build toward a single suit (flush-deck vouchers/Jokers help), or use Tarot/Spectral cards to convert ranks and suits until you can assemble it.

There are 22 Tarot cards. Buy them from shops and Arcana packs across runs — the Tarot Merchant / Magic Trick vouchers raise their appearance rate. They unlock permanently once used.

A lifetime total across all runs — every card in every played hand counts. Accrues naturally; you'll pass it just by playing the game.

Legendary Jokers (Canio, Triboulet, Yorick, Chicot, Perkeo) only come from Soul cards — the hidden Spectral that appears in the Arcana/Spectral packs. Open lots of those packs; a Soul card grants a random Legendary.

Lifetime discard total. Racks up as you sculpt hands each round — no effort needed beyond playing.

One million in a hand needs a real mult engine — stack multiplicative Jokers (e.g. a high-mult Joker plus retriggers) and level a hand with Planet cards. Common in any run that reaches the late antes.

Red Stake is the second difficulty (Small Blinds give no reward). Win once on Red or higher. Beating White Stake with a deck unlocks Red for that deck.

Never press the Reroll button in any shop for the whole run. Take what's offered and lean on packs instead of rerolls. Easiest on a low stake with a forgiving deck so you don't need a perfect shop.

Black Stake is the 4th tier (eternal Jokers can't be sold). Win a run on Black or above — you unlock each stake by winning on the one below it with that deck.

Spectral cards are rarer than Tarots — they appear in Spectral packs and via the Ghost Deck / Omen Globe voucher. Run the Ghost Deck and open every Spectral pack you see to collect all of them over time.

100 million needs a snowballing xMult build. Aim for scaling Jokers (Hologram, Constellation, etc.) plus multiplicative ones (Brainstorm/Blueprint copying a xMult Joker). A strong endless-style run blows past this.

One Planet per poker hand type, including the secret ones (Planet X, Ceres, Eris) for the hidden hands (Five of a Kind, Flush House, Flush Five). You must first PLAY those secret hands to unlock their Planets — build a flush-five-style deck to trigger them.

A full run is normally 24 blinds; you must win by skipping blinds. Skip Small and Big Blinds aggressively (taking their tags) so you only play Boss Blinds — that's 8 antes × 1-2 blinds. Stack skip tags and a fast-scaling build, and skip everything you can survive.

Add cards instead of removing them: copying Tarots/Spectrals, the Marie Antoinette-style adders, and the Erratic/extra-card effects. The Spectral 'Cryptid' and card-duplication packs balloon your deck quickly toward 80.

Glass Cards give xMult but have a 1-in-4 chance to shatter (be destroyed) when scored. Make several Glass cards (the Glass enhancement via Tarots/packs), then play a hand using at least two of them — you need two to break in the same hand, so play 3-4 to be safe.

Money caps your interest at $5 per $5 (so $25 = max base interest), but you can hoard far more. Run an economy build (Bull, To the Moon, Rocket, Golden Joker) and avoid spending — let interest and gold cards pile cash to $400.

Only one voucher appears per ante, so you need extra ones from Voucher Tags (skip blinds that offer a Voucher tag). Stack voucher tags early and save money to buy all 5 by the end of Ante 4.

Challenges are special preset runs (unlocked after your first win) in the main menu. Beat any one of them — the easier challenges (e.g. 'The Omelette', 'Jokerless') are good first picks.

Gold Stake is the hardest (8th) difficulty — stacked modifiers (eternal/perishable/rental Jokers, scaling antes). Win once on Gold with any deck. Use a proven powerful deck (e.g. Plasma or a flush build) and a reliable xMult engine.

Use card-removal effects to shrink the 52-card deck below 21: the Hanged Man Tarot (destroys 2), Spectral cards like Immolate/Ankh, and the Glass/Cert death effects. A thin deck also makes your good cards come up more often.

Vouchers appear one per ante in the shop, and tier-2 vouchers need their tier-1 bought first. Buy every voucher you can across many runs; it's a long collection grind tracked in the collection menu.

Unlock every Joker, deck, voucher, Tarot, Planet, Spectral and poker hand in the collection. A massive long-haul goal — many Jokers have specific unlock conditions (win with a deck, reach a score, etc.). Use a collection checklist and chip away at the locked items.

Wild Cards count as every suit. Apply the Wild enhancement (The Wheel of Fortune-style packs, or the 'Wild' card enhancement from Tarots) to at least 5 cards, then play all five as a Flush. Build a thin deck so you can reliably draw all five Wilds together.

Beat all 20 Challenge runs. Several are brutal (Jokerless, Typecast, Cruelty). Look up a strategy per challenge — each has a specific gimmick, and knowing the trick (e.g. which hand to spam) is most of the battle.

Win a Gold Stake run with all 15 decks. The hardest milestone short of gold-stickering every Joker — you have to grind each deck up through the 8 stakes and then clear Gold. Lean on the strongest decks' identities (Plasma, Anaglyph, Nebula) and proven xMult builds.

The rarest achievement (~0.8%). A Joker gets a Gold Sticker by being in your collection when you WIN a Gold Stake run. So you must win Gold Stake runs over and over until every one of the 150 Jokers has appeared in a winning Gold run — an enormous endgame grind.