It looks like poker and it is not poker.
PokerHex is still in development — it is not finished and it has not been submitted anywhere. There is no date. The playtest list is where the first build goes.
PokerHex is built on the Haunted Space Hotel deck: nine guilds across six factions, fifty-four cards, and a hand of six. The factions are the suits — Deep, Stem, Hex, Dread, Honored, Seed. The guilds are the ranks, from Scientist up to HomeWorld, and the Scientist wraps high exactly like the Ace.
Poker’s hand ordering is simply wrong on this deck, so it is not used. With six suits, a flush needs six of nine cards in one faction. With nine ranks, only five runs exist at all — and six of a kind becomes possible. Every category was counted from the deck itself and then ordered by a single rule: rarer wins.
That produces results that look like mistakes until you do the arithmetic. Motley — six unlike guilds, no pair — beats Two Pair, because six cards drawn from nine ranks pigeonhole hard. Pairing is close to a coin flip; staying unpaired is one hand in seven.
All 25,827,165 possible six-card hands are evaluated against an independently-derived frequency table, category for category, as a build gate. The order on the chart is the order the mathematics produced — nobody sat down and decided that a Hexad ought to feel rarer than a Hex Flush.
Press for the rank chart at any point and all sixteen categories sit beside the table with the odds — 1 in N — printed next to each, and whatever you are currently holding lit up among them. You learn the deck by playing it rather than by reading it first.
Three hole cards, then a flop of four, a turn and a river — six community cards, and your showdown hand is the best six of your nine. Three private cards rather than two because the exotic categories here are faction hands, and a Rainbow or a Hex Flush needs coordination that two cards cannot supply. Four betting rounds, no-limit: the alien part is the deck, not the money.
You against the AI opponents, or hot-seat around one device. Everything runs offline. The money is gated as tightly as the cards are — blinds, action order, min-raise growth, the under-sized all-in rule and three-level side pots are all asserted to conserve chips to the unit after every hand.
