Beat The House

▌ BEAT THE HOUSE

Beat the House is a casino roguelike about surviving one bad run through the wrong side of town.

Start nearly broke in low-stakes rooms, scrape together a bankroll, dodge heat from the house, manage debts to dangerous people, and push your luck toward the Grand Casino. The city runs on its own clock now: venues open and close around you, and the run keeps moving whether you are ready or not. Every run is seeded and deterministic, built from procedural venues, games, items, services, lenders, and events. The odds are never kind, but every risk has a readable upside and a consequence waiting behind it.

▌JOIN DISCORD

https://discord.gg/uDsZgbGY6

▌PLAY FULL-SIMULATION CASINO GAMES

Seven playable casino games, each with its own rules, state, controls, and pressure points:

Blackjack: shoe play with hit, stand, split, double, side bets, count pressure, and risky hole-card peeks
Roulette: full betting layout, inside and outside bets, chip placement, rebet, recent numbers, and live wheel resolution
Baccarat: mini-baccarat with Player, Banker, Tie, pair bets, shoe state, roads, squeeze reveals, and commission
Video Poker: multiple game variants with bet, hold, draw, double-up, and advantage tools
Bar Dice: Ship, Captain, Crew rounds with keep/reroll decisions against bar patrons who have their own personalities
Pull Tabs: finite deals, sealed ticket windows, staged tab-peel reveals, and item interactions
Slots: generated Pinball and Buffalo machines with free games, Hold and Spin, wheels, jackpots, autoplay, and a real-physics pinball bonus with flippers, nudge, tilt, skill shots, and multiball

▌BUILD A LIFE BETWEEN RUNS

Every run starts and ends at home. Walk your own place, upgrade from a back-alley squat to a motel room, an apartment, and finally a house. Stash finds in storage, open collection bags, and build a loadout of favorites to carry into the next run. Spare finds sell for gold at Sal's Pawn Shop, and gold buys the next roof over your head.

▌PLAN YOUR ROUTE

Travel on a persistent world map with fog of war, day, and night. Every venue keeps its own hours: the bar pours until 3 AM, the corner store opens early, and a room that closes around you will put you on the street mid-run. Scout routes before you pay for them, take cheap roads that might get you shaken down, and return to venues that remember the state you left them in. Climb from corner stores, bars, gas-station casinos, and motels up through the Kitty Cat Lounge and the Delta Queen riverboat, unwind at the beach, or hunt bargains and quick cash at Sal's Pawn Shop. The underground shortcut still runs straight toward the Grand Casino, but money alone will not open its doors anymore: someone inside has to hand you an invitation first.

▌SURVIVE THE RUN

Buy, use, and sell 64 items: contraband, consumables, security tools, travel gear, lucky charms, and game-specific tricks. Items feed into each other, so you can build toward a clean grinder, an advantage player, a cheat specialist, a drunk gambler, or a debt surfer. Borrow from five very different lenders, from a family phone call to Sal's pawn counter, which loans real cash but holds your items hostage until you buy them back. Room events can open doors, burn you, save you, or leave you with a choice you will regret. Some sit in the room waiting to be touched. Others walk up and force the issue.

The music listens too. It blurs when you drink, distorts when heat climbs, and tightens when the pit boss starts watching.

Seven authored challenge runs and daily seeded runs wrap the same arc in new constraints.

▌CHEAT WHEN YOU DARE

Cheating is optional, but temptation is part of the run, and now it takes skill. Every game has a skill-based cheat: time a holdout swap at video poker, control a bar-dice roll, past-post a chip after the ball settles, edge-sort a baccarat shoe, count the blackjack deck, nudge a reel one stop. Alcohol dulls your timing. Contraband sharpens it. Push too hard and heat climbs toward police capture, house pressure, or a back-room reckoning.

▌BEAT THE GRAND CASINO

Earn your invitation at the city's bigger rooms, reach the Grand Casino, and win one of two ways: cash out clean for a Players Card while staying low-heat, or survive Pit Boss Rourke's back-room showdown when the house decides you have gone too far.

Lose by going broke, getting stranded, getting captured, losing the showdown, or walking away before the house takes everything.

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Beat the House is a roguelike about gambling. It is not a real-money gambling product. There is no real-money play, no purchasable in-game currency, no cash prizes, and no gambling monetization.