Free browser game
A free online fighting game where the martial art you pick is your moveset. Seven real arts, one road through all of them, and a floor game underneath every fight. Attacks are on the number keys, so your hand never leaves the shape of the pad.
An open mat is what a gym calls it when they throw the doors open and anyone can spar anyone, whatever they train. That is the whole game. A boxer has six hand strikes and no kicks at all. A taekwondo fighter outreaches everybody and falls apart in the clinch. A wrestler decides where the fight happens. You are not choosing a costume — you are choosing what you are allowed to do.
Seven arts
Hands only. The fastest strikes and the best guard, and nothing at all once it hits the floor.
Chains of fast light strikes that flow into each other, low sweeps, and a stance that eats one hit.
Long committed strikes and the hardest counter in the game. Punishing if you read them, exposed if you guess.
Five of its six moves spin and two of them leave the floor. The biggest single hits in the game, and the longest recovery if you miss.
Elbows and knees that hurt more than anything else at close range, leg kicks that take your movement a piece at a time, and a plum clinch nobody else can answer.
No strikes at all — not even the grip, which deals nothing. Take hold, break the balance, throw them, and let the mat do it. A throw off a grip cannot be sprawled on.
The worst striking in the game and the best floor game by a distance. Snap them down, put them on the mat with a takedown, then out-work them wherever you land.
There is also Circuit Style, open from the start: six empty buttons and all forty-two moves to fill them with. Take three taekwondo kicks and three BJJ submissions, or one from each art, or six punches. Nothing is locked and nothing is off limits — it is the one art nobody has trained for, because you just made it up.
Measured, not guessed
No art is designed to counter another. To check that this is actually true rather than merely intended, every art fights every other art hundreds of times with the game’s own opponent driving both sides, and the seven win rates get compared. The seven currently sit between 44% and 52% — eight points from best to worst.
They did not always. Judo was winning 73% of everything. Two reasons, and neither was obvious from playing: the grip was quietly dealing damage, which contradicted the art’s own rule that a judoka does no striking and was 16% of everything judo dealt; and the BJJ ground game was calculating damage without ever looking at either fighter’s stats, so BJJ’s two ground stats — the entire reason to pick it — did nothing on the only floor BJJ ever plays on. Judo arrived on top and beat BJJ on its own mat 84% of the time. Both are fixed.
One matchup is still lopsided. Boxing beats taekwondo about 19 times in 20: every taekwondo strike but one takes 13 to 22 frames to come out, and a jab takes five, so up close there is nothing taekwondo can do about it. Taekwondo then beats almost everything else. That is a real hole and it is being worked on rather than papered over.
What changes is how the fight feels. A boxer wins by never letting it slow down. A taekwondo fighter wins by never letting you close. A judoka wins by getting hold of you at all. They are different problems to solve, not a ladder with a right answer at the top — so pick the one you like the look of, not the one you think is strongest.
Two people, one keyboard
Online needs a working broker and somebody else awake at the same time as you. Two players on one keyboard needs neither, and it is now on the title menu. Player one keeps the left hand and the numbers; player two gets the arrows and the right-hand letters (I O P / K L ; to attack, / to block, . to sprawl). The two sets share no keys at all, which is checked rather than assumed.
Both of you pick an art, and neither side has an AI on it. Everything else — the ground game, the clinch, the sprawl — works exactly as it does against the computer.
The one thing everybody has
A takedown lands about half the time. A well-timed sprawl stops it dead, every single time — and every art has one, on its own button.
That is the balance of the whole game. Grapplers do not win because their numbers are bigger; they win against people who cannot read a shot. The sprawl window is about a fifth of a second, and throwing it at nothing leaves you flat-footed and open. Watch the hips drop and you have learned the single most useful thing in Open Mat.
On the floor
Fights go down. The fighter on top strikes and passes the guard; the fighter underneath can sweep, hunt a submission, or work back to their feet against a meter that takes a few seconds to fill. Being caught in a submission is not a cutscene — you fight the grip, and a failed submission costs the person who tried it their position.
Playing with someone else
One player hosts and gets a short code, the other types it in, and you fight — wherever either of you happens to be. No sign-up, no server and nothing installed: the two browsers talk to each other directly.
Common questions
Yes. It runs in your browser with no download, no account and nothing to buy. Your progress saves on your own device.
Seven: boxing, kung fu, karate, taekwondo, Muay Thai, judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, each with its own six moves. There is also Circuit Style, open from the start, where you fill six buttons with any of the forty-two moves in the game.
It changes your entire moveset. A boxer has six hand strikes and no kicks at all. A taekwondo fighter outreaches everyone but crumbles up close. A judoka only needs one grip. You are not picking a costume, you are picking what you are allowed to do.
Sprawl. Every art has it on its own button, and a well-timed sprawl stops any takedown completely. The catch is the timing — the window is about a fifth of a second, and if you throw it at nothing you are wide open. An untimed takedown lands about half the time.
No. None of the seven is built to beat another, and there are no hard counters — every matchup is meant to be even. What changes between them is how you have to fight, not how likely you are to win.
Yes, online. One of you hosts a room and gets a short code, the other types it in, and you fight. There is no sign-up and nothing to install.
Fights can go to the floor, and there are two different floors. Most styles play the positional one: the fighter on top strikes and passes, the fighter underneath sweeps, submits or works back to their feet. BJJ plays a harder one — five techniques, both fighters can throw all of them from either position, being on top is worth about double, and three landed from underneath rolls the position over. No dice, just work.
You choose. A real throw puts them on the mat and then asks whether you are going down there with them. Follow and you land on top; stay on your feet and the slam itself does extra damage, because a throw you do not follow is the one you got all your weight behind. Say nothing and you stay standing — a judoka’s default is not the floor.