Beat the AI · a Layatown game · free in your browser

It guesses your next move. Prove it wrong.

One tap: Strike, Block or Charge. Your opponent shows its guess before you tap.

Play Beat the AI How a duel works

No account, no download, nothing to buy, nothing to type. Your hero is saved on the game server under a random key your browser keeps, and you can delete it from the menu. What the game keeps.

REAL SCREENS a duel with Pip: its guess before the tap, then the reveal. Captured from the game on a test server; the empty middle of each screen is trimmed.

How a duel works

Three moves. One guess to beat.

Strike beats Charge. Block beats Strike and hits back. Charge beats Block and powers up your next Strike.

The one reading you is the Reader, a pattern reader written in the game's code: it counts what you tend to play after your last one or two moves, in this duel and in what that opponent remembers of you. The opponent's own move is sealed before you tap, and you can check it.

  1. 1 Read its guess

    Before the round, the opponent shows the move it expects from you, how sure it is, and its reason, quoting your own counts once you have played: “After you Strike, you Block (4 of 5).”

  2. 2 Tap one move

    Its move is already drawn and sealed. Play what beats its guess, or stay where it expects you, if you think it expects you to dodge.

  3. 3 Fooled it, or read?

    After your tap you see its move, the odds it rolled from and a check that it was sealed before you tapped. When the hearts run out, the result shows how often it read you, and your habit.

The world

Fields, the Darkwood, and rivals who keep count.

Walk the village and its fields, bump into a creature and the duel starts. Win for experience, gold, gear and move cards. Lose to a creature and you wake at the last campfire.

  1. The village fields on a phone: farmers at work, a mushroom roaming the rows, the Giant Slime's tag (Boss, not yet), and the guide's next step: Beat Pip on the Rival trail.

    Creatures with habits

    Slimes, mice and mushrooms in the fields. Each plays a habit you can learn, and the Mindex writes it down once you have beaten it three times.

  2. The Darkwood camp on a phone: the Rival trail and Camp signs, a campfire to rest at, and the guide: Beat a spider in the Darkwood. Each creature here has a habit.

    The Darkwood

    Past the village gate: bats, snakes, spiders, owls, skulls and wolves, and the Tengu at the ravine. The Giant Slime waits in the fields.

  3. Mira the careful on the Rival trail, marked NEMESIS, with what Mira has counted: Mira called your move in 1 of 8 rounds; you opened with a Block in 3 of 4 fights; after a Strike, you Block (4 of 5 times).

    Rivals who keep count

    Pip, Ulla and Mira guard the trail. Each counts how you open and what you play after what, says so, and reads a rematch with those counts. Lose to a rival three times and it becomes your nemesis.

  4. A daily boss result on a phone: You win, 4 of 10 times it read you, 6 times you fooled it, and the grid of rounds to share.

    Levels, gear, cards

    Levels give you hearts. Gold buys a blade, shield or charm, each leaning on one move. Cards found on creatures bend a round. The stronger you get, the more you have to hide.

Real screens, captured from the game on a test server; the counts on them are from those test heroes.

Every day

One boss for everyone. Humans vs AI.

  • The daily boss. One boss and one twist a day, fought by every hero on the same footing. Your opening try is scored; after it, practise all you like. Share the grid.
  • Bounties and streaks. Three bounties a day that make you change your style, and a streak for the days in a row you play your scored try.
  • Humans vs AI. The game counts every hero's opening try at each rival and boss that day: wins for the humans against wins for the AI. The count is on the map and on the Rival trail.

The study

Can a small model read people better than the Reader?

Every guess in the game today comes from the Reader. The minds study asks whether a small model, retrained each night on the rounds players choose to share, predicts people's next move better than the same model frozen, and better than a count of each player's habits.

  • Off unless you say yes. After a rival duel the game asks once, with “Not now” as large as “Yes”. Players who do not share play exactly the same game. For those who do, about one shared duel in five (never a tutorial duel or the daily boss) shows the guess only after you move, for a fair comparison; everything else, rewards included, is the same.
  • Written before the data. The question, the groups, what counts as a yes and when it stops were published on 26 September 2026, before anyone's rounds were recorded. Changes are dated amendments.
  • Nothing trained on people yet. The nightly retraining stays off until enough players have said yes, by a rule fixed in the plan. Until then the Reader makes every guess.

Read the plan What sharing keeps

The lab

Before Beat the AI, a city and a village.

This project began as a city of a thousand people decided by a judgment model, then a village game, for which our fine-tune of Laya was taught to read its villagers offline; it never decided for players. The studies and their failures are kept, dated.

19 to 25 Sep 2026

The lab's history

The city run by TypeSafe's Jev (19 to 21 Sep), then by our fine-tune of Laya, Convai Innovations' open model, until it closed on 22 Sep; the Laya study (23 to 25 Sep), which passed its own tests on villager decisions and is not used in duels; the end credits, the model and data cards, and the archive, each dated.

It thinks it knows you. Prove it wrong.

Beat the AI is open in your browser. No account, nothing to buy.

Play Beat the AI

Follow along: @elberacasa on X

An experiment by elberacasa