Poker Night at the Inventory news & patch notes

Eagle-eyed players have spotted a bunch of new Easter eggs in our Poker Night at the Inventory remaster, including this unassuming mug with an SDN logo on it. (Max isn’t holding it in the game — you’ll have to find it yourself!)

This Easter egg is a nod to Dispatch, the superhero game made by our friends at AdHoc Studio. Our team and some of their team worked together at Telltale back in the day — including on Poker Night at the Inventory. And now we’re teaming up on a contest!

Answer these trivia questions and you could win one of five real-life SDN mugs from the AdHoc Studio store. Entries are due by June 7 at 11:59pm PDT. Each correct answer gives you a chance to win!

Btw, if you’re in the mood to play Texas hold’em with Max, Strong Bad, Tycho, and The Heavy, the Poker Night remaster is on sale for the first time:

Poker Night at the Inventory has been updated to version 1.4.0, which may be the best version of Poker Night yet. We hope so at least. This update focuses on the much-requested ability to play Poker Night in the background while doing other things, and we fixed some bugs and restored a few missing dialog lines while we were at it.

We added a few new quality of life features around background play and improved gamepad support:

• Poker Night can now optionally keep running in the background. Go to Gameplay Settings and turn "Pause When In Background" to "Off."

• The game can now also automatically deal the next hand, skipping past the "Click anywhere to deal" screen entirely. Go to gameplay Settings and turn "Auto Deal Next Hand" to "On." The host will still call out the raised blinds verbally, and you'll see them up in the top UI as people around the table pay the blinds.

• When playing with a gamepad, you can now press Left Trigger to see your current call amount, and Right Trigger to see your bet amount.

This patch also fixes a bunch of bugs:

• Tells no longer occasionally play during showdowns and while skipping to the next hand.

• Fixed instances where a character's acting performance would blend in on top of their poker playing animation, causing strange hovering hands or other visual glitches.

• The Heavy's minigun sound now loops when he brings it out after a big loss. His laugh also doesn't get cut off when he wins.

• Fixed the "Three Wise Men" achievement being possible when your Full House only had two wise men. Three kings are now required, as intended.

• Characters around the table will now more accurately look at the competitor they're taunting about their bad hand.

• Characters around the table won't play dialog that uses plural nouns when there are only two players left in the game.

• Fixed Tycho's hair getting overly bright when he walks away from the table after busting out.

• Fixed mid-game music sometimes starting up a new track during showdowns.

• Fixed a bad game state that could be caused by adjusting your buy-in amount, saving and loading.

• Fixed empty pots not always getting removed properly, which may help resolve rare instances where someone can appear to win a hand after folding.

• Fixed a handful of pops and glitches, including: Strong Bad's cards flying into his hand when he checks them before folding, Tycho popping in and out of a folded "leaning back" pose when he loses, and Max taking his chips twice when claiming the pot when he wins against Tycho.

• Added a bunch of missing poker chip sound effects.

• Found places where Tycho's uncensored lines were still not showing up properly in subtitles, and fixed them. Also fixed a missing uncensored version of Tycho's "I guess you don't f*ck around" line.

• Fixed a bunch of little typos in subtitles.

And finally, we found a few short "check" and "fold" related lines of dialog that never got played in any version of the game due to logic errors in the dialog scripting. You'll now occasionally hear them!

We also recently fixed a bunch of stuff in the 1.3.0 patch, so if you haven't played in a bit and are wondering about another bug, it might have been fixed then. If not...

As always, thanks for letting us know when you find a bug. If you've got a bug that you've encountered but don't see it here, please let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to squash it.

Poker Night at the Inventory has been updated to version 1.3.0, a fine vintage in our estimation. For all of what's included, read on...

We added a few small new features, and restored a little missing content:

• Your stats and unlocks are now saved separately from the game settings, so when you switch between devices, your unlocks, stats, and progress will come with you, but not your settings. This was especially notable for Steam Deck players who were bringing desktop graphics and sound settings with them when changing devices.

• If you play with uncensored dialog, the subtitles are now also uncensored. We also fixed Tycho's "sh*t hot" line: it is no longer censored when playing in uncensored mode.

• You can now adjust the bet or raise the amount using your scroll wheel.

• Ambient Sound now has its own volume slider in settings.

This patch also fixes a bunch of bugs:

• If you felt like you won an item and it went to the wrong player, it was almost definitely a game where the pot was either split, or there were one or more side pots. We found and fixed some instances where the item would go to nobody if the pot was split, or to the winner of the last side pot. Now, if a character has bought in with a special item and busts out during a side pot, the winner of the biggest side pot gets the item. If the pot is split, both winners of the split pot get the item.

• Fixed the game sometimes not progressing after certain conversations were interrupted.

• The Heavy's minigun sound now loops when everyone at the table draws their guns on Tycho. (And yep, we missed the looping minigun sound where he flips the table over but will get it in the next patch.)

• Strong Bad doesn't leave his shovel floating above the table when dialog is skipped mid-shoveling.

• Fixed a bunch of camera pops throughout the game.

• Fixed a bunch of subtitle typos and places where the text didn't match the final recorded voice lines.

• Fixed instances where a character's cards would sometimes pop or flicker when turning them over.

• Characters no longer harass you to stop taking too long when you're in a menu (this sounds funny writing it out here, but really felt like a bug in the game, because it was).

• Fixed hole card textures not updating when switching decks after a player has folded.

• Fixed multiple instances of missing sound effects when Heavy slams his hand down on the table.

• Fixed other missing sound effects on Max and Heavy "all in" animations.

• Fixed instances where cards could be attached to Tycho's hand even when they were way across the table, so they'd go flying around. Characters' hole cards also no longer occasionally float above the table if a line is skipped at the wrong moment. Cards just generally float less after this patch.

• Fixed NPC's chips sometimes disappearing while betting when there is a camera cut.

• When the player camera slides over to sit across the table from a character during heads-up play, your opponent now looks you in the eye, instead of looking at where you used to sit.

• When you win the Dangeresque, Too? shades, we show the updated model in the pop-up window congratulating you, instead of the old 2010 version.

• Max no longer says "Thanks, guys!" when he's the last NPC at the table.

• When Tycho is anxious about the next card in a showdown and covers his eyes in close-up shots, his finger no longer intersects his eyebrow. Finally we can all relax.

We received reports from some people who weren't having their progress saved. In almost all cases this was due to aggressive antivirus software (usually Windows Defender) silently blocking the game from writing to its own preferences files. We've since submitted Poker Night to be whitelisted. If you're someone still experiencing save issues after playing on version 1.3.0 please let us know in this thread or submit a support ticket with any details you can provide about your setup, including any antivirus or security software you're running.

We've also received some burning questions about how the game plays poker, how to unlock items, and a few other bits of Poker Night esoterica. Since we're already two dozen bullet points deep into Poker Night talk, this seems like as good a place as any to get into a few of them:

• How do tells work? Specifically, I'm seeing them behave differently than I remember from the original 2010 Poker Night. It wouldn't surprise us if the tell behavior changed a little between the original release and the new one, but maybe not for obvious reasons. While the underlying code powering the characters' tells is unchanged from the original release, a lot of other bugs were found and fixed around how characters evaluate their hands. Now they're better at evaluating their hands, so the "temperature" of tells is probably subtly different.

• Does the AI "cheat" and change out cards to give the other characters better hands than me? We are asked this a lot! And as fun as it is to imagine the game cheating in such a way, it doesn't. Cards are drawn from the deck randomly as they're dealt out. There's no code in the game to change cards or hands during play, and each character's decision-making AI is only aware of the cards in their individual hands and the community cards as they're dealt out. Honestly, making the game cheat on top of everything else would have been a lot harder and more annoying than simply dealing the cards, and there's no real benefit to doing so in a single-player poker game that's just for fun. Okay but what about hard mode, they must cheat there? Unfortunately for you, no, you are just losing at cards. Hard mode does change the AI skill and aggression levels, but doesn't change the cards dealt or any other game code.

• How are item rounds triggered? I keep restarting over and over, and nobody is buying in with an item. In the original release it was a little easier to game the system and trigger item rounds by abandoning tournaments and restarting. In the new release, the more tournaments you win, the more your odds of triggering an item round go up. And if you've just won an item, there's no chance of getting another in the next tournament. So if you want to increase the chances that the next tournament will include a character buying in with an item, win a tournament or two.

• I won an item off a character but I don’t see it in my Team Fortress 2 backpack. Where’d it go? You have to launch TF2 after winning the item for it to appear in your inventory. If you’ve won the item and earned the associated Poker Night Steam achievement, and when you open Team Fortress 2 you still aren’t awarded the item, that is irregular and you should email Valve support.

• How does the Down to the Green achievement work? There must be at least one other player left at the table when you win, you have to be all in, and you have to win two consecutive hands that way.

• This isn't a question, but "Chkdsk" isn't a typo. Thank you to everyone who wrote in about it all the same!

As always, thanks for letting us know when you find a bug. If you've got a bug that you've encountered but don't see it here, please let us know in the comments and we'll do our best to squash it.

In November 2010 Telltale released Poker Night at the Inventory, a comedy hangout poker game that was made in about three months and pays homage to the studio’s very first release, Telltale Texas Hold'em.

In May 2019, Poker Night at the Inventory disappeared from Steam after licensing deals expired. But never fear! Almost seven years later, the Citizen Kane of poker games is back, remastered by the same team of former Telltale developers who spruced up the Sam & Max trilogy—and it’s more fun than ever.

(Pro tip: Pick it up it before March 19 you’ll get the Reissued Dealer’s Visor to wear whenever you play Team Fortress 2!)

In Poker Night, the banter you hear around the table is as much a part of the game as the cards you play. Each opponent brings their own personality to the game, in the stories they tell and the plays they make.

“Okay, so what’s new in this remaster?” you’re probably wondering. Get comfortable, and we’ll tell you!

Recently Renovated

The Inventory looks better than it ever has before, with a top-to-bottom visual refresh featuring higher resolution models and materials, more detail throughout the space, and a complete lighting overhaul. Keep your eye out for new Easter eggs and crumbs of lore tucked into every corner of the place.

Plus, all four characters around the table are also sporting a visual refresh:

• Max has been updated to use his higher resolution model from our Sam & Max remasters, which includes a subtle colored outline that adapts to light and shadow.

• Strong Bad is way higher resolution to more closely match his vector-based origins. (He would be upset if he knew we used more polygons in the new release instead of fewer, but we did it anyway.) He’s also got slightly more shading that actually matches the direction of the environment lighting.

• The Heavy has around the same number of polygons he’s always used—we like to think he almost literally respawned in here after a game of TF2—but he’s got a new lighting model that is more evocative of how he’s lit when he’s back in the Badlands.

• Tycho also got uprezzed, plus he has a new shading model meant to evoke how he appeared in paintings, posters, and book covers around the time Poker Night first came out.

We also dug into every animation and cinematic in the game to remove as many pops and hitches as we could find. The whole game should look a lot smoother than the hastily-made original.

TF2 Items, Reissued

The big news here is that you can finally get Poker Night’s TF2 items without dealing with a scalper. When a player offers up their huge gun (the Heavy), swanky watch (Tycho), gun and badge (Max), or dangerous—err, sorry, we meant Dangeresque—sunglasses (Strong Bad) as collateral and you bust them out, you’ll win their beloved item… and then you can use those items in Team Fortress 2!

The only difference from the original release is that the items now have “Reissued” in their names. And don’t forget you can get the exclusive Reissued Dealer’s Visor if you buy the game on Steam before March 19! Read more about the TF2 items here.

New Content and Features

• The remaster has a bunch of new in-game unlockables. Just like in the original Poker Night, in the new release you can unlock new table felts and decks of cards by winning tournaments, and we’ve added a bunch more. And just like the original, some of the unlocks hold secrets that change how the game looks. We don’t want to spoil them all here, so keep an eye out as you play.

• Your gamepad works. Poker Night now supports gamepads as well as mouse input, so you can play it on your couch or handheld devices. Speaking of which: We’re Steam Deck Verified!

More Options

In the original Poker Night you could control the difficulty of the poker simulation (i.e., the skill level of your opponents), how frequently the NPCs break into stories around the table, and whether the profanity is flowing free or bleeped into oblivion. You can still do all that, plus we’ve added a few more settings for you to mess with:

• Customize the buy-in amount. The default buy-in is $10,000 per player, meaning the game starts with a $50,000 pot. In the settings menu, you can now adjust the buy-in amount between $1,000 to $200,000, literally raising or lowering the stakes of a tournament—but the blinds (the required bet amount at the start of a hand) *don't* change, which means games can get pretty interesting. Play with the huge buy-in for a long, drawn-out game where you have time to really feel out your opponents. Try a $1,000 buy-in and you’d better have a good hand or you’ll get booted pretty fast.

• Optional Motion Blur and Film Grain. If you want to feel like you’re in too deep in the third act of a nail-biting, hard-boiled poker movie, we’ve got the graphics settings for you. Motion Blur is character movement–based and pretty subtle (there isn’t any motion blur on the camera itself), adding a little taste of “animated movie” to the proceedings. Film grain is exactly what it sounds like: a little grit for that extra crunch. (Both options are defaulted to “off” in the settings.)

• Customize Brightness. A simple one, but a request we got a lot. The game’s dark and moody, maybe too much so for some displays. Now it doesn’t have to be.

Plays Better Poker

One casualty of the original game’s quick development cycle was that its poker logic was a little wonky. To address this, the team stripped Poker Night’s original poker code down to parts, scraped the gunk away, and rebuilt it better than new. Poker Night at the Inventory now plays a far more accurate game of poker, and your opponents will make more informed decisions that better fit their play style and personality.

We won’t bore you with ALL of the glitchy things we fixed (trust us, there were a lot), but here are three of the big ones:

• In the original game, the players often didn't evaluate their entire hand, just the high card. It meant they made most of their decisions using a fraction of the information available at the table. That’s a really bad Texas Hold’em strategy! Now that they evaluate their entire hand, they play more predictable poker as a baseline. And now that they’re capable of being predictable, it feels so much better when they start acting unpredictable (we’re looking at you, Max), or when someone makes a sudden rash decision out of nowhere (*cough* Strong Bad *cough*).

• So now that we’ve discussed “evaluating too few cards,” let us introduce you to “evaluating too many cards.” While digging through the code, we learned the original game would sometimes evaluate more than the five cards in your hand when determining the winner. Under certain conditions, the game would dive into your hole cards and community cards that weren’t part of your 5 card hand and consider them too, resulting in tie-breakers that should never happen. We don’t think this was deliberate, and instead a hand-evaluating loop that should have stopped after registering the top five cards just sort of kept going. It’s fixed now.

• Rules around re-raising were corrected. The original game allowed re-raising at a lower rate than the rules of Texas Hold'em specify—which means everyone at the table, including the player, was cheating. Now, no one is.

TL;DR: If you’re someone who loved the original game because it’s funny but also hated it because it played poker badly, we’ve done our best to balance out that equation. Now you can love it because it’s funny and hate it because the other players are better than you at poker. (Not our fault!)

The only unfortunate casualty of the remaster is we had to remove the yell after the Heavy flips over the table, for rights reasons.

If you have any burning questions about what's new in this release of Poker Night at the Inventory, fire away in the comments and we'll do our best to answer. In the meantime, have fun!

After a seven-year gap when any merc who wanted to sport the looks of Poker Night at the Inventory was forced to shop their local surplus store, we’re pleased to announce that the game’s original Team Fortress 2 items are being reissued in collaboration with Mann Co. These items will be available to anyone who can look their enemy in the eye from across the table, lay down a mean hand of cards, and drain them of their worldly goods.

A lot of you have already hit us up with questions about how the Poker Night TF2 items are coming back. This post will answer the biggest ones we’ve heard, starting with what you can win and how you do it:

First up is the Reissued Dealer’s Visor, which can be worn in TF2 by the Heavy. This will only be available to people who buy the remastered Poker Night at the Inventory on Steam during the first two weeks after launch (March 5–19, 2026).

Next up is the Reissued Crimestomper Combo, a two-item bundle that you can earn in Poker Night at the Inventory by eliminating Max from any tournament where he’s put up his gun and badge as collateral. You’ll earn the Reissued Lugermorph, an aesthetic replacement for both the Scout and the Engineer’s pistol in TF2, as well as the Reissued License to Maim, a Freelance Police badge that can be worn by any class.

The Reissued Enthusiast’s Timepiece is usually transferred from friend to friend by an act of… well, of murder. But you can earn it by busting Tycho out of any tournament where he’s bid the watch. The Timepiece is a replacement invisibility watch for the Spy, with timer effects unique to this watch’s design.

The Heavy will sometimes buy in with his original minigun: a beautiful iron and mahogany piece created to be the pride and joy of all people of the motherland. Bust him out and it’ll belong to just one person: You. The Reissued Iron Curtain is an aesthetic replacement for the Heavy’s standard minigun in TF2.

If he’s having a moth-flutters-out-of-your-wallet-type day, Strong Bad might reluctantly part with a screen-used prop from his critically lauded and definitely real action movie series Dangeresque. Bust Strong Bad out of the tournament and you’ll earn the Reissued Dangeresque, Too?, a pair of glistening white plastic sunglasses that can be worn by the Demoman in TF2.

These items are classified as “Reissued” to differentiate them from the original Poker Night's items, issued in 2010, and to further differentiate them from the Vintage Lugermorph, which was first given away as part of a Sam & Max promotion before Poker Night even came out. Are the reissued items otherwise identical to Poker Night’s original items? Yes. Does this mean you could earn a second set of Poker Night items if you already won them in the original game fifteen years ago? Also yes, go nuts. And, just like the original Poker Night items, the Reissued items are not tradable or marketable (with the exception of the preorder Visor, which will be tradable just like the original).

Poker Night at the Inventory returns to Steam on March 5 as a fully remastered release, featuring updated art and lighting, more in-game unlockables than the original, and a cleaned-up codebase for a far smoother play experience. We'll tell you more about the remastering process around launch, but you can read a bit about it now on the game's Steam store page:

ICYMI, our next game is a remastered version of Poker Night at the Inventory, which features four fan-favorite characters — Max (from Sam & Max), Strong Bad (from Homestar Runner), Tycho (from Penny Arcade), and The Heavy (from Team Fortress 2) — bantering over a game of Texas Hold’em. It'll be out on March 5!

To celebrate, we’re expanding the scope of our (more or less) annual arts & crafts contest, which has been Sam & Max themed in the past, to include all four of these guys. (And, if you feel like it, poker!)

What’s in it for me?

The joy of creating art for art’s sake. Just kidding. We’ll send each winner a Poker Night at the Inventory game key for your platform of choice. How many winners, exactly? We won’t know until we see the entries!

But that’s not all. For a few of our favorites, we’ll toss in a set of Poker Night themed chips that have been carefully stashed away in a team member’s closet for the past fifteen years. They might be, um, shedding a little. They just need someone to love them.

And the grand prize? That's where it gets really special. The creator of our #1 favorite entry will get a game key plus a prize bundle that includes one incredible item from each of the four franchises:

A pair of Max slippers from Uncute (currently sold out!)

A talking Strong Bad plush (also sold out!)

A portrait of Tycho painted by Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik (truly one of a kind!)

A Team Fortress 2 poster signed by Valve employees (the envy of all your friends!)

The Fine Print

• Your entry must include at least one of the four characters.

• Your entry doesn’t have to relate to poker… but we might like it more if it does. 👀

• Any creative endeavor is welcome, be it fan art, cosplay, sculpture, video, music, needle arts, food, etc. We love entries that surprise us.

• Too many ideas? Can’t decide which is best? No problem! Enter as many times as you want (but you can only win once).

• AI-generated assets and images will not be considered. We want to see stuff made entirely by you!

• US and international entries are allowed. Be prepared to give us your mailing address if you win one of the physical prizes. We'll cover shipping but can't be responsible for any import taxes or tariffs charged after the package leaves our care.

• Email your entry to [email protected] by 11:59pm Pacific time on Friday, February 27. Rather than sending big attachments, please host them somewhere like Google Drive and send a link. Your email should also include anything you want us to know about the entry, and your name / social media handles (for us to post on Bluesky/Twitter if you win).

Once the contest closes, the extended Skunkape family will argue about our favorite entries for a few days and reveal the winners on or around March 4.

So break out those crayons, scissors, and welding torches, and make something that will wow us!