Information about the Barca Casino on Chapter 1 Day 1 in The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, including details about Poker, Blackjack and Roulette, and the most efficient way to play these games of chance to win sets of the Martial Arts Uniform and Purrfect Boots.

You’ll gain access to the Barca Casino (located in the Entertainment District) at the start of Chapter 1 Day 1. In fact, you can access it immediately after the mandatory story scenes that set up the main quest Monster Damage Investigation. You’ve good reason for doing so, too, as there are new pieces of armor that can be won at the casino that are better than anything else you can get your hands on currently. Not only is this armor superior, but if you save/load the games of chance offered at Barca Casino, they’re considerably cheaper, too.

Best Items in the Barca Casino¶

When you enter the casino, talk to the… ah… bunny girl behind the exchange counter and pick the “Exchange” option, then pick “Exchange” again. This allows you to trade Mira for Medals at the rate of 5 Mira per Medal. Medals are the in-house currency for the Barca Casino, and you’ll spend these Medals to play the casino’s various games of chance and, should you win, you’ll earn excess Medals which in turn can be exchanged for various prizes.

Check out the “Trade” option to see what’s offered at this point in time:

The items we want are the armor and shoes, the Martial Arts Uniform and Purrfect Boots, both of which have stats superior to or on par with the best items you can obtain at this point in the game. You’ll be doing yourself a great service by acquiring a set of four of these suits of armor and shoes, although this will set you back 6,000 Medal. To buy these outright would cost 30,000 Mira, and while this gear is good, it’s not THAT good.

Fortunately with a little time and save-scumming you can get the 6,000 Medals you need for this gear at a much better price.

Best Way to Win Medals in the Barca Casino¶

You will need to spend some Mira to acquire a starting pool of Medals - 500 Mira will buy 100 Medals, and this should be sufficient. Perhaps excessive. Once you have your starting purse of Medals, you’ll find three games of chance on the casino floor: blackjack, poker and roulette.

Blackjack¶

The games of blackjack and roulette offered are fairly standard, and while they’re usually our preferred methods of raising money in video games casinos, they’re not ideal here. Blackjack requires a 5 Medal buy-in and while it’s a simple and quick enough game, the reward payouts start at 10 Medals and slowly increase each time you win, as follows:

You’d have to win four games of blackjack in a row to get a reward that’s even remotely worthwhile, and ignoring losses you’d have to repeat this feat a dozen times to get the money you need. The dealer isn’t shrouded in an armor of unlikely RNG, but they can still win often enough to further slow this process down. Not ideal.

Roulette¶

As for roulette, your odds and the payout are even worse. You can stack 10 chips on a single result for a payout of 36-to-1, meaning the max payout at these odds is 360 Medals. Not terrible, but you’re going to win the card games more often than you’ll get the 1-in-36 roulette roll. Worse still, you can’t keep your chips down and just keep spinning, you have to place them every time, which makes this game far more trouble than it’s worth.

Poker¶

Poker’s where it’s at. This version of poker is a bit odd (we’re no connoisseurs) - you’ll get three cards which you can choose to hold or redraw as you wish, along with three cards laid out on the table that are immutable. You and the dealer will share this second set of three, and your goal is to make a hand of five cards that is stronger than whatever the dealer can assemble. Check out the in-game rules for information about the various hands you can assemble if you’re not familiar with poker, but the majority of the time you’ll be trying to assemble pairs, two-pairs or three-of-a-kinds, which should win you most games.

Like with blackjack, the more consecutive games of poker you win will increase the prize. Buy-in is a mere 5 Medals, and you’ll reach the max payout of 1,000 Medals(!) after seven rounds… which isn’t great. Fortunately in poker you can choose to “Raise”, which will increase the prize value by one tier at the expense of 10 Medals, allowing you to reach the max prize of 1,000 Medals in a mere four games, and at the risk of only 45 Medals.

This is not a great system for a casino that wants to make money, and you should take advantage of it by playing poker and raising every game.

This opportunity is further enhanced by the fact that the dealer is borderline incompetent, struggling to make any hand whatsoever with startling consistency, and most games they won’t be able to assemble anything higher than a pair, which you can easily tie or beat. The highest we’ve seen the dealer assemble is a flush, and this happened one time during our 6,000 Medal buildup. Win six bouts of poker (twenty-four hands, total) and you should be most of the way to your goal. Overall the process should take less than an hour.

Not a bad time investment for significantly better armor and shoes, if we do say so.