Instructions

keybamine is a typing game with stakes. You bet on your own accuracy: the game offers you strings, and you stake part of your balance on typing one of them to the end without a mistake. Make it, and you get the stake times the odds back. Lose, and the stake is gone.

You play in runs. A run is a fixed number of bets with a fixed starting balance; the header of the offer shows which bet you're on. The goal is the highest possible balance at the end of the run. Every bet takes three steps: choose a bet, type, result.

Everything runs in the browser, and that is where your progress is stored. No account needed. What we count anonymously is under Data and cookie.

At the top are one to three cards, each a challenge: win condition, string type, length (characters without spaces), extensions and lives depending on how far you are, and the odds. Below that you choose the stake and, once you own boosters, how many of them to use.

• ↑ / ↓: switch between the rows (cards, stake, boosters).
• ← / →: choose within the row, that is the card, the stake option or the number of boosters.
• Enter: place the bet.

Stake: there are presets from small to “All-in”, worked out from your current balance and rounded up to round amounts. On top of that there's “Custom” for an amount of your choice. With “Custom” the amount field is active: digits and Backspace edit the amount, Shift + ← / → move the caret in the field; the arrow keys on their own keep navigating as usual. The game remembers what you last bet with and suggests it again at the next offer.

The bet slip shows the profit if won live (net, without the stake) and, with boosters, the effective odds. The stake is deducted from your balance the moment you place the bet.

Everything also works by click or tap. There is no Enter key on a phone; there the bet button sits in a bar at the bottom edge.

The string sits large in the middle, the cursor marks the next character. Just start typing: the first keystroke starts the clock and, in a race, the monster. There is no Backspace and no correcting; every keystroke counts. Shift and the other modifiers are fine of course, and browser shortcuts stay with the browser.

• Correctly typed characters turn bright. A wrong character is marked red and costs a life; the cursor moves on regardless (see Lives).
• At the end of a screen line the space is optional: type it, or go straight on with the first character of the next line.
• The header shows the bet, the remaining hearts and the bet's numbers; below, progress, time and speed tick along. A survived mistake briefly shows which character it happened at.
• The sidebar collapses by itself while you type and expands again afterwards. Expand it yourself in the meantime and it stays open.
• If your typing isn't getting through, click the text. On a phone, a tap on the text opens the keyboard.

Forbidden Character and Forbidden Character Race begin with an announcement showing the forbidden letter. Any key or a tap skips it right away; otherwise the bet starts by itself after a few seconds. During the bet the letter stays in the header as a red sign and faintly as a watermark behind the text; in the text itself it is never marked.

Reloading or leaving the page while a bet is running counts as a loss: the stake is gone, and the bet is settled as “Forfeited” at the next start.

Here you see whether you won or lost and what that means for the balance, alongside time, speed and the bet slip with all details. After a loss, the reason and the place of the mistake in the word are added. Whatever else the bet brought you is a line on the bet slip: a booster earned, streak lives earned or used. If the Minimum absorbed a loss, a card of its own says so.

• Enter: continue to the next offer. The Space key deliberately does nothing here.
• ← / →: switch Double or Nothing off or on when one is offered. The switch sits above the Continue button and starts out on; Enter confirms: on starts the Double or Nothing, off moves on to the next offer. A click on the card toggles it as well.
• ↓ / ↑: expand and collapse the bet slip when it doesn't fully fit on the screen. The “All details” / “Less” button and a click on the bet slip do the same.

Once the bet budget is used up, the summary appears instead of the next offer: final balance, peak, wins, average per bet and whether that's a new record on this level. Enter or the “New run” button starts the next one: balance, counters and unlocks start over, your progress across runs stays.

The odds are the payout multiplier: on a win you get stake × odds back, so the profit is stake × (odds − 1). The odds depend only on the bet, never on you: the same bet pays the same odds for every player. They are the fair price for an imagined reference player whose error rate your difficulty level sets. Type more accurately than them and you win in the long run; type less accurately and you lose.

What drives the odds up:

• Length: the longer the string, the higher.
• Lives: every life makes the bet safer and the odds lower.
• Characters: capitals, digits, punctuation and special characters are harder than lowercase letters. A string with numbers or special characters has higher odds at the same length.
• Context: races and forbidden letters are harder than a Trial, Repeat and Nonsense harder than Normal.

Bets stay at a level that fits your difficulty: not too easy and not too short, but not arbitrarily long and high either. Only Godlike is open upwards.

Behind every odds figure stands an imagined player: the reference player. They type with a fixed error probability per character, and your difficulty level sets it. At Novice they slip often, at Godlike almost never; the table in the settings shows how many letters they type, on average, per mistake.

Not every character is equally hard for them. Lowercase letters are the yardstick; capitals, digits, punctuation and special characters, and anything that needs Shift, AltGr or a dead key, they mistype more often. Context counts too: in a race, with a forbidden character, in Repeat and in Nonsense they make more mistakes than in a Trial with Normal. Lives work for them as they do for you.

That is where the odds come from: the game works out how likely the reference player is to get exactly this string right under exactly these conditions; the odds are the inverse of that. If they manage a bet half the time, it pays odds of 2. For them, every bet breaks even in the long run. Type more accurately than they do and you have an edge on every bet, and the longer the bet, the bigger the edge.

The adaptation measures you against them too: at the start of every run the game assumes you type like they do, and corrects that with every bet. So the difficulty level is your choice of opponent. The higher the level, the more accurately they type and the longer a string gets for the same odds. A higher level doesn't bring higher odds, only glory.

Four win conditions, all without Backspace, typos cost lives. The difference:

• Trial: type the whole string to the end. No time pressure, no monster.
• Race: like Trial, but a monster has a head start and runs ahead of you through the text. You win by catching it. You lose when it reaches the end or gets so far ahead that it disappears from the visible window. Both count immediately, no matter how many lives you have left. The game places the monster by your current speed so that the race is real but doable. Type faster than usual and you catch it sooner.
• Forbidden Character: like Trial, plus one letter is forbidden for this bet. It appears only in the red sign in the header (upper and lower case); in the text it isn't marked, spotting it is the task. Wherever it occurs in the text, you type a space instead. Typing the letter itself is a mistake, anywhere and in either case.
• Forbidden Character Race: both together.

Three string types:

• Normal: randomly drawn words of the typing language, separated by spaces.
• Repeat: one word repeated several times in a row, several such blocks strung together.
• Nonsense: random letter sequences built from letter pairs as they occur in the typing language; no real words.
• Code: with the typing language Code, the words are short, real expressions from the technologies in your stack: statements, commands, tags, selectors. Braces, operators and digits are part of the language here, not an extension.

Extensions come on top; a card carries none, one or several:

• Punctuation: capitals at the start of sentences, brackets, quotation marks, punctuation, hyphens. Reads almost like prose.
• Numbers: groups of digits with thousands separators and decimals, written the way the language writes them.
• Special: sprinkled-in constructs such as temperatures, prices, percentages, section signs, email addresses or hashtags.
• Random Case: some of the letters are randomly capitalized; in Repeat the share grows from repetition to repetition.

Repeat never comes with a forbidden letter; the same word over and over would be too easy.

A bet has no lives or a few: the hearts on the card and in the header. Each heart stands for exactly one mistake you survive: the wrong character is marked red, the cursor moves on, the heart is gone. An empty row of hearts means the next mistake is the end. Without hearts, the very first mistake loses the bet.

Lives only exist once you've made your first typo; until then every card comes without hearts. How often a card carries lives, and how many, depends on your form (see Adaptation).

The game is lenient with slips: swap two letters, skip one or type one too many, and it costs one heart, not two. The game works out on the next keystroke what happened and puts the cursor back in the right place. Without a heart it still holds: the first wrong keystroke loses.

Monster losses are not typos: if the monster reaches the end or runs out of view, the bet is lost no matter how many hearts you have left.

With the Streak extra, streak lives come on top; they are used up only after the bet's hearts (see Extras).

A run is a fixed number of bets on one level. Double-or-Nothing rounds don't count towards it, forfeited bets do. The sidebar shows the counter.

What a run puts on the table is its pot: of the four win conditions, three string types, four extensions and four extras, each run plays only a part, drawn afresh at the start of the run. Available from the start are one win condition, one string type and the run's extras. The remaining elements of the pot are unlocked over the course of the run, in random order and at random times, and from then on they appear in the offers.

Finished runs are numbered across all levels. An aborted run (Settings: “Abort run & start over”) leaves no entry in the statistics and doesn't count.

Length and lives adapt to you; the odds don't.

The game keeps track of how accurately you type and sizes its offers accordingly. Type cleanly and you get longer strings with higher odds; make mistakes and you get shorter ones, more often with lives. The same bet always pays the same odds, though. So more accuracy means more on the cards.

Every offer has one card within your reach; the others ask for more, or for less. Which one you take and how much you stake is your call. It takes skill, courage and nerves: type cleanly, pick the right card, stand by your stake.

Every run starts from scratch: the game forms its judgment of you anew each time, so every run has the same shot at a record.

Across runs the game opens up step by step. You play each win condition with Normal first; once you've won it that way, Repeat and Nonsense join in for it. New things are introduced with two comparable cards, so you can see the difference in the odds.

Four extras. Each run plays some of them, drawn at the start of the run and active from the first bet. If a run doesn't play an extra, it shows up nowhere in that run.

Minimum and minimum raise

No bet can take the balance below the Minimum. It starts at the starting balance and sits in the sidebar under the balance. Lose more than you have above the Minimum, and the balance is lifted to the Minimum at settlement; the result tells you so. So there is no wipeout, and at the Minimum a bet is practically risk-free.

The minimum raise extra lets you lift the Minimum. A minimum raise is a special bet in the offer: win it, and you only get the stake back, but the Minimum rises to the stake; the bet slip shows the new Minimum instead of the profit. Lose it, and it's a normal loss. The card comes a few times over the course of the run, never as the only card and only while your balance is well above the Minimum. Boosters have no effect on it, and there is no Double or Nothing after it.

Double or Nothing

After a settled bet, won or lost, the game now and then offers you a Double or Nothing. You get the same kind of challenge as just now (win condition, type, extensions, lives, length) with a new text, without odds of its own, without choosing a stake and without boosters. What's at stake depends on how the bet before it went:

• After a win you risk the payout you've just received. Win, and the same amount comes on top once more; lose, and the payout is gone, which nets out like a lost bet.
• After a loss you risk the lost stake once more. Win, and the loss is made good and the same amount is added as profit; lose, and the loss doubles.

After every Double or Nothing another can follow; that's how a chain forms. The amount at risk doubles with every link, won or lost. Which of the two rules applies always depends on the outcome of the last link. A link is only offered if your balance covers the amount at risk, so the chain brakes itself. Declining ends it for good.

Double-or-Nothing rounds don't count towards the bet budget, but they do count as typing experience: for the Normal-first rule, the activation of lives and the streak. The Minimum applies here too.

Booster

A booster doubles a bet's profit, the net profit, not the odds: with one booster the profit if won doubles, with two it quadruples, and so on. You use boosters when placing the bet; the booster row on the bet slip appears as soon as you own some, and the bet slip shows the effective odds. A booster can be used only once: after the bet it's spent, won or lost.

You earn boosters with a booster bet: a card marked as such, otherwise an ordinary bet with normal odds. Win it with a stake of at least half your balance and you get a booster on top; the hint under the stake picker tells you whether your stake qualifies.

Your booster stock expires at the end of the run; every run starts with none. Boosters have no effect on a minimum raise or on Double or Nothing.

Streak

With the Streak extra, the game counts how many characters you type correctly in a row; the header shows “Streak count/threshold”. Reach the threshold and you immediately get a streak life, even mid-bet, and the counter starts over. The counter carries across the bets of the run; every typo resets it to zero, and spaces don't count.

Streak lives collect in a pool: the lime heart with a number in the header and, after the first life earned, a tile in the sidebar as well. They are used up only once the bet's hearts are gone, and they carry across the bets of the run, not across runs. The bet slip on the result screen shows streak lives earned and used.

The sidebar shows the balance with the Minimum below it, the run's bet counter and, once you've earned a streak life, the pool of streak lives. At the bottom, the navigation: Play, Settings, Instructions, Statistics.

• The button at the top collapses it into an icon rail and back out again. On the rail, a click or hover on an icon shows the value as a popover.
• On narrow screens the expanded sidebar overlays the content; a click beside it closes it.

Everything also works by click or tap; the keys are the shortcut.

We count anonymously how the game is played: which bets are offered and chosen, how they turn out, how fast and how accurately you type. That shows us where the game gets stuck and lets us tune the balance.

The data goes to PostHog and stays in the EU. It contains no names and no addresses.

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If you send us an answer through the feedback form, that text goes to PostHog too. Names and addresses don't belong in it.