About OpenBoss

A boss hangs on the front page with a public hit-point total. Every visitor sees the same number, falling in real time, because there is exactly one boss and one pool of health for the whole world. You knock a piece off it by spending a smack.

A smack is one swing. It does one damage. $1 buys five of them, and 3 are free to every visitor with no card and no sign-up — enough to feel what the button does. About one swing in ten crits and pays double. Nothing you can buy raises that: there is no multiplier for sale, no premium smack, no tier of customer who hits harder. The only thing that makes a smack worth more is other people.

That mechanic is called momentum, and it is the reason this is a website rather than a clicker. Your damage is multiplied by how many different people have swung in the last sixty seconds — up to ×3 — so ten swings of your own count once, and the only way the number goes up is more people showing up. Everyone in the arena gets the same multiplier at the same moment. Your smack makes theirs better and theirs makes yours better, which is a strange thing to build into a shop and is the best thing about this one.

The first boss had 1,500 hit points. Every one after it is sized from how quickly the last one actually died, aiming at roughly three days of life, with a floor that guarantees each is bigger than the one before. Kill one fast and you get a much larger successor, not a repeat. The rules page has the exact numbers, and it is generated from the same constants the server runs on, so it cannot drift from what the game does.

You get swings, and a chance at a name on a grave. That is the entire inventory of this store.

The engraving is a name rendered on a web page. It is not ownership, not property, not an asset, not a certificate and not a licence. It cannot be sold, transferred or redeemed, and no discount, credit or entitlement of any kind attaches to it, now or later. It is worth having for the same reason a high score is worth having, and for no other reason. The terms say it in full and they are the version that counts.

One rule is what keeps that worth anything: a free smack can never land the killing blow. If a free swing would take the boss to zero it stops at one hit point instead, enforced in the database rather than in the interface. The last hit is always a bought one. A graveyard anyone could write into for nothing is a guestbook.

Every boss — its silhouette, colours, paper, name, epithet, lore and modifiers — is generated from a single random number. Nothing was drawn by hand and no two are alike. The artwork is an SVG re-derived from that seed on every request, which is why a share card always shows the boss that was actually up when the link was made.

The front end is Next.js on Vercel. The game itself is a small Express API and a Redis instance on a rented server; the health bar you watch is a Lua script running inside Redis that decrements your smack and the boss’s health in one atomic step. That detail is not trivia: it is why the call that returns zero is the killing blow, exactly once, and why two people cannot both be told they landed it.

Payments are Stripe, on a page Stripe hosts. Card details never touch our servers and we never see your email. When a boss spawns we may ask an Anthropic model to pick the best of the names the generator produced and write its lore; the request contains the boss and nothing about any person. If it fails, the boss keeps its procedural name and the site carries on. The privacy page is the full inventory of what is stored and for how long.

This site is built and operated by Flisko — Informacijske storitve, Žiga Flis s.p., in Slovenia. It is a small independent operation, not a studio and not a platform — one product, run by the people who wrote it, reachable at the contact page.

It exists because a shared scoreboard is more interesting than a private one. The standard version of this idea gives every player their own boss, their own progress bar and their own tiny sense of achievement, which is a slot machine wearing a costume. Making the health bar public and singular changes what spending means: your dollar moves a number that a stranger is watching, and the person who finishes the job is named where everyone can see it.

It also exists as an argument that this kind of product can be honest. Most things that take a dollar for internet points are vague about what you get, imply that value might flow back to you, and hide the rules in a terms page nobody reads. This one states the rules on their own page in plain words, prints the crit odds on the buy button, refuses to sell a damage multiplier, and says on every screen that nothing is ever won. Whether anybody wants that is a separate question, and the graveyard is the running answer.

There is a sibling product, The Pixel: one pixel, sold at perpetual no-reserve auction, where each new buyer takes it from the last and picks its colour. Same operator, same rule about money going one way, linked at the top of every page here.

• The arena — the boss that is up right now, with its health falling live.
• The rules — damage, crits, momentum, the free-smack cap and how boss health is sized. The mechanics, without the legal text.
• The graveyard — every boss that has died, with the name of whoever finished it.
• The terms and the privacy policy — the whole deal, and everything that is stored about you.
• Contact — a person, an email address, and what to write about.