EveryGameMade

Free · no signup · a poker roguelike

ANTE — see the score before you commit

Build poker hands, buy jokers, survive eight antes. Select cards and the exact chips × mult appears instantly — the thing the game that made this genre famous still will not tell you. Also free: nine men's morris · go · chinese checkers.

ANTE

Build a five-card poker hand big enough to beat a target score — then do it twenty-four times, each one harder. Between rounds you spend your winnings on jokers that bend the scoring your way. Four hands and four discards per round.

🔍Live score previewSelect cards and see the exact chips, mult, total, and whether it clears — before you commit. Same function that scores it for real.
⚡Speed you controlA continuous slider, not three presets. Click during any scoring animation to finish it instantly.
🎲Every run has a visible seedDeterministic, so a brutal deal is repeatable and shareable instead of feeling like the game cheated.
This is our own game in the poker-roguelike genre — our jokers, our art, our engine. It is not Balatro and not a copy of it. If you want Balatro, buy it; it is excellent.

How it works

ANTE is a free poker-hand roguelike you play in a browser — no signup, no download. You build poker hands from a dealt hand of eight cards, each hand scores chips × mult, and you must beat a rising target across eight antes. Between blinds you spend winnings on jokers that change how scoring works.

Each blind gives you a target, four hands and four discards. Play up to five cards as a poker hand; its score is chips × mult. Beat the target and you cash out and go shopping; run out of hands and the run ends.

One hand, scored

K♥ 9♥ 7♥ 6♥ 3♥ — that is a Flush

A flush is worth, before anything else35 × 4
Each card that scores adds its own chips (10+9+7+6+3)+35
So the hand scores70 × 4 = 280

Against a target of 300 that is 20 short — and you can see that before you spend the hand, which is the thing this game is built to do.

The words on screen

Chips
the blue number. Your hand type sets it, then every scoring card adds its own.
Mult
the red number, short for multiplier. Chips × mult is your score.
Blind
one target to beat. You get four hands and four discards for it.
Ante
three blinds. There are eight antes, and the targets keep climbing.
Joker
bought between blinds. Adds chips, adds mult, or multiplies the mult outright.

Only scoring cards count, and that is the whole game. A two pair scores four cards. A high card scores one. So the real decision is never "what is my best hand" — it is which five cards to commit, and which to throw away to draw into something better.

Looking for games like Balatro? Here is what ANTE does differently

These are not guesses. They are the things players of the commercial game ask for most often.

1. A live score preview. The game this genre is named after does not tell you what a hand will score before you play it, and players ask for that constantly — to decide between two hands, to know whether they clear the ante, to know whether the run is already lost. Here, selecting cards shows the exact chips, the exact mult, the total, and either "CLEARS THE BLIND" or how far short you are. It is generated by the same pure function that scores the hand for real, so the preview and the result cannot disagree.

2. Animation speed you actually control. The juice is the best part of this genre — chips flying in one at a time, mult stacking, then the two slamming together. It is also the most common complaint: players report the animations are slow enough to stop them playing, and that the speed setting jumps in coarse steps. Ours is a continuous slider from a quarter speed to triple, and clicking anywhere during a scoring animation finishes it instantly. Juice you can turn down is juice you get to keep.

3. The seed is on screen. Every run is fully deterministic. A run that was unwinnable is reproducible, comparable and shareable, instead of leaving you wondering whether the game was ever fair.

How we know the numbers are right

A roguelike lives or dies on its arithmetic, and this genre has no published solve to check an engine against. So we checked it against a different engine, written for a different purpose: a Python implementation of these mechanics built months earlier for machine- learning research, which passes its own end-to-end suite including exact scores and joker scoring.

That engine generated 4,000 random hands, each recording its classification, exactly which cards score, and the final number. Our browser engine reproduces all 4,000 on all three counts on every build. A reference built by a different program, for a different reason, before this page existed, is about as close to independent verification as a modern genre gets.

What this is, and is not

ANTE is our own game. The jokers, their names, the art and the engine are ours. The genre — poker hands, escalating blinds, run-modifying jokers — is not something anyone owns, and this is our take on it.

It is not Balatro, and it is not a copy of Balatro. Balatro is a paid commercial game by LocalThunk, it is superb, and if that is what you are looking for you should buy it. We mention it because it is how people describe this genre, and because being straight about that is worth more to us than a few minutes of someone's confusion.

Worth knowing if you searched for a free browser version: of the three sites currently ranking for that, one is an article with no game on it, one opens a modal containing a Commodore 64 BASIC prompt, and one is a generic games portal that does not have the game at all. That is the market this page is in, and we would rather be the honest alternative than the fourth of those.