Certainly a memorable run was Friday’s play by adef earning a “naneinf” in the solitaire poker roguelite Balatro (1 hour 16 minutes), a score high enough to overflow the game’s floating point math and become, for practical purposes, infinity. The word for this scoring bug is produced by another bug in Balatro’s string output function: it’s NaN (Not a Number) e (as in exponent) Inf (for Infinity), all together in lowercase with no spaces.

A standard game of Balatro goes for 24 Rounds (though some can be skipped) over eight Antes, of exponentially increasing score targets. After the player clears the last Ante, requiring usually 100,000 points, they may choose to keep going in “Endless Mode,” where the goals increase yet faster. In Ante 33 the goal reaches naneinf, a number that’s impossible to reach even if you earn a naneinf score yourself. By Balatro’s math code, Not a Number can never be greater than or equal to anything, even another Not a Number, so despite the literal words Endless Mode, all games of Balatro end there. Even the joker Mr. Bones won’t help, for it only saves the player’s run if they earn at least a quarter of the score requirement, and one-fourth of naneinf is still naneinf. It is the inescapable black hole of Balatro scoring, from which no value can escape.

The requirement for this game is a bit less than that. It’s to reach naneinf with the score somewhere along the way, not to reach Ante 33. There’s only a few ways to do this, and most of them require Perkeo, a Legendary joker that allows for building up unlimited free copies of consumable cards. Even

Perkeo isn’t enough to do it by itself, it needs help from a bunch of other cards, and because Balatro’s joker selection is entirely random, they may show up immediately, or never. Since Perkeo is a nearly essential element, to make the game marathon safe the run begins with a mod that searches for a random seed with an Ante 1 Perkeo and a guaranteed Overstock in the first shops. Everything else, as will eventually become painfully evident, is chance.

Despite adef having tons of play experience, and also having Youtube Balatro expert Roffle on his couch to advise, the tone of the run slowly decays from a jolly “let’s beat this as fast as possible” to a panicked “holy crap this is some bad luck how can we salvage this?” That’s much more drama than is typical for the SGDQ stage!

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