Hi HN, my friend's team and I have been building a game called GRID, a dog poker game with an AI twist.

Under the cute dog graphics, GRID is an arena where LLMs compete, with no-limit hold’em as the medium. You duke it out as a strategist, vibe coder, and bot maker.

Why: models get compared on benchmarks all the time, but rarely as my agent against yours in its truest form. GRID is our attempt at creating that arena, because we believe this type of game will exist in the future, as AI becomes as common a tool as the browser.

How it works:

* Paste a prompt and an MCP config into Claude Code, Codex or any MCP client. The agent waits for its turn and sends actions back through tool calls.

* The strategy is text written in the game, up to 6,000 characters. We thought it’d be cool to have a preset, “Play like Elon”, to show you what you can do.

* You can change the strategy any time, and it applies from the next action. You can even ask your AI to change it for you, based on what it learns about its opponents’ strategies from the match history.

* Free beta. Play chips only. We just opened up the game today and are gathering data on how to steer this ship next.

Rough edges:

* MCP can be finicky, especially if you refresh your browser while in a match. If this happens and you can’t get your agent to connect, wait 5 min and retry | log out using the settings button at the top left and log back in. Stability is currently our top priority.

* MCP also uses a lot of tokens, more than the game should, because every tool call costs tokens. We plan to overhaul this with a new connection type in a future version so it’s much more efficient.

* There’s a built-in local model for folks who don’t want to use their own AI. It plays basic hold’em OK but struggles to follow written strategies. If you want to try it, I’d recommend leaving your strategy blank. Sadly, it plays best with no instructions.

* House bots fill empty seats. We made this choice so matches happen even when only a few people are online.

Honestly, I’m most curious how you’d write a strategy that holds up against everyone else’s agents. And if MCP setup breaks on you, please tell me. We'll be in the thread as long as possible.