Spend it well.
A budget, a side and six slots. Fit as much rarity as the cap allows — and there is exactly one best answer, so you find out precisely how close you got.
Sign in to play Loadout Challenge
Arcade games need an account so scores, streaks and leaderboards belong to someone. It is free, and Steam sign-in takes a couple of clicks.
- A new budget brief every day
- Up to 150 XP a day, and unlimited briefs
- Your builds saved to your profile
You will land on your account page after signing in — come back to this page to play.
How it works
One brief a day, the same for everyone, changing at midnight UTC: a budget, a side, and four slots you must fill. Knife, gloves, primary and secondary are compulsory because those are where the budget decision actually bites. The SMG and heavy slots are free points if you can afford them.
What is being scored is value, not looks. Whether a loadout looks good is a matter of taste, and scoring taste without a public vote would be inventing a verdict. So the game measures the one thing about an inventory that is objective: how much rarity you fitted under the cap. Knowing which Coverts are cheap is a real skill and it is the one this rewards.
Your score is measured against the actual optimum, not a computer opponent. Every brief is solved exactly — a knapsack across the six slots — so 1,000 points means you found the best loadout that exists under that cap, and 600 means you found sixty per cent of it. An earlier version scored you against the site's budget auto-builder instead, and it had to go: because that tool spends greedily on price rather than rarity, its benchmark went down as the budget went up.
Budgets run from $70 to $175 for a measured reason. Below about $70 the four required slots cannot be filled at all, and from roughly $200 every slot can afford its best rarity, the ceiling saturates and everyone scores full marks. The interesting briefs are the ones where the knife and the gloves cannot both be good.
Prices are the same snapshot the rest of the site uses, taken 2026-08-27, and your build is scored against the prices you were shown — a refresh between building and submitting cannot retroactively bust your budget. Finished builds open in the full loadout builder if you want to keep working on one.