The one sentence version
Jokers resolve left to right, and a ×Mult joker multiplies whatever mult exists at the moment it fires. So additive effects should sit to the left of multiplicative ones.
If you fix exactly one thing about your play today, make it this. It costs nothing and it is frequently worth more than an extra joker slot.
Two phases, not one long line
It helps to think of the joker row as two groups rather than one:
- Effects that fire while cards are being scored. Anything that triggers on a played card, on a suit, on a rank, or that retriggers another card. These resolve inside the scoring step.
- Effects that fire on the accumulated total. Anything that adds or multiplies the running chips/mult once the hand is scored.
Within each group, order is left to right. Between groups, the scoring-step effects happen first because the hand has to be scored before a total exists.
This is why some reordering “does nothing” — you moved two jokers that live in the same group and do the same kind of thing. Multiplication is commutative; two pure ×Mult jokers give the same answer either way round.
The placement rules
Rule 1 — Additive before multiplicative.
+Mult jokers to the left, ×Mult jokers to the right. Always, unless a specific card text says otherwise.
Rule 2 — Chips feed the product too. A +Chips joker helps the left-hand number. Because score is chips × mult, chips are not “worse” than mult. They are a different input. If your chips are the smaller side, a chips joker placed early is the correct buy.
Rule 3 — Put retriggers next to the thing worth repeating. A retrigger effect re-fires another effect. Ask: which of my effects is the most valuable per trigger? That is usually your largest ×Mult, or a scaling joker that grows on each trigger. Place the retrigger so it re-fires that one.
Rule 4 — Read copy effects literally. Copy-style jokers duplicate a specific other joker — a neighbour, the leftmost joker, or whatever the card text names. Their value is entirely a function of position. Read the text, decide what you want duplicated, then place the copier accordingly and re-check after every new joker, because “leftmost” can change when you buy something.
Rule 5 — Scaling jokers want triggers, not position. A joker that grows when something happens cares about how often that something happens, not where it sits. Put retriggers and hand-level scaling around it instead of worrying about its own slot.
The mistake that costs the most
It is not putting ×Mult first — that one is obvious once you read it. It is leaving a +Mult joker to the right of a ×Mult joker because it arrived later in the run.
The row you built in ante 1 is not the row you should have in ante 6. Every time you buy or sell a joker, spend five seconds re-reading the line left to right. The cost of not doing so compounds every single hand.
A 20-second audit to run before each boss
- Read your row left to right.
- Move every
+effect left of every×effect. - Check that each retrigger is adjacent to your biggest multiplier.
- Check that any copy effect is still copying what you think it is.
- Check that your economy jokers aren’t eating a slot you need for scoring in the next two antes.
If two jokers genuinely seem interchangeable, they probably are — and that is itself useful information, because it means one of them can be sold.