01
The pot climbs
Both of you put in the same stake. From the moment the bell goes, the pot grows every tick — and it keeps growing for exactly as long as neither of you moves.
One button · Twelve seconds · No chance
Hold longer. Win bigger.
Two players ante the same stake and a shared pot climbs every tick. The longer you hold, the bigger the share you take — right up until they beat you to it by a tenth of a second. Grabbing early is safe, and barely worth winning.
No download · Plays in any browser · 18+
01 / How it works
You can learn NERVE in the time it takes to read this. Getting good at it is the part that takes a while.
Both of you put in the same stake. From the moment the bell goes, the pot grows every tick — and it keeps growing for exactly as long as neither of you moves.
One button. Whoever hits it first wins the pot. The winner takes a share set by how deep the bout went, and everything left over goes straight back to the loser.
Ride it to the cap and the bout dies. Every stake is returned in full, the house takes nothing, and neither of you wins. Twelve seconds of held nerve for exactly zero.
02 / Tiers
A bout climbs through five named tiers, and each one recolours the whole screen so you always know exactly how exposed you are. The deeper it goes, the bigger the winner's share of the pot — and the less your opponent gets back.
03 / Settlement
This is the part that makes NERVE a duel rather than a coin toss. Winning early gives most of the pot back to the player you just beat. If you want to actually hurt them, you have to stay in.
Grabbed in
Did the winner lock?
Where a $100 pot goes
04 / The lock
Hit LOCK IN and neither of you can grab for 2.9 seconds. The pot keeps climbing the whole time — you just have to watch it, and so do they. You take a bigger share of whatever it becomes.
05 / Skill, not chance
Nothing in NERVE is decided by a random number. The only event that moves anything is a player being first to act. There is no shuffle to blame, no bad beat, no house edge hiding in a probability table — just you, them, and who breaks first.
06 / Score
Points run alongside the money and are never cashable — which is exactly why they can afford to be generous about holding. Even a standoff pays you in points.
Take the pot in IT'S FIRE or ABOUT TO BLOW and the whole bout score is multiplied by 1.5.
Only a win at GETTIN' HOT or above grows a streak. Cheap wins hold it; a loss wipes it.
Best bout score, longest streak, longest hold, biggest pot. All four are tracked.
Three leaderboard windows, so a great night still counts even if you never top the board.
07 / Questions
Twelve and a half seconds at the outside. The clock runs 30 ticks at 420ms each, and the cap ends it. Most bouts are decided well before that — the tension is that nobody knows by how much.
Standoff. Every stake goes back where it came from, in full. It's the one outcome where there is no winner and nothing is taken — which is what makes riding the cap a genuine risk rather than a free option.
No. There is no random number anywhere in settlement — no shuffle, no roll, no hidden tiebreak. The only thing that decides a bout is which player acted first. An early build had a 50/50 tiebreak and it was deliberately removed.
Almost never. After the winner's share, whatever is left goes back to you — that's 35% of the pot if they grabbed in EARLY DAYS. Only a grab at the very top of ABOUT TO BLOW leaves you with nothing.
That's the trade. A lock buys you a bigger share, but it costs you 2.9 seconds in which you cannot take the pot either. You get one. If both of you spend one, nearly half the bout passes with the pot climbing and neither of you able to touch it — and the cap is getting closer the whole time.
Yes. Call someone out with a private link over WhatsApp, SMS or Telegram, and they drop straight into a held seat opposite you. Series play is best of three.
Yes. You'll need an email address and to be 18 or over. Your handle, your record and your wallet are held against that account, so they follow you to any device rather than vanishing when you close the tab.
Simulated opponents with their own timing habits — some twitchy, some ice cold. Real-time play against other people needs a referee server to rule on who pressed first, and that's in progress. The profile screen tells you the same thing, plainly.
Twelve seconds
One button. One opponent. Nothing between you but the will to wait a half-second longer.
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