Rules
A piñata is strung up. Everyone hits the same one, at the same time, and you can all watch the health bar go down together. Whoever lands the last hit is carved into the graveyard with its name. Then a bigger one goes up.
The mechanics live here. The legal text lives in the terms.
Smacks
- One smack is one hit. A hit starts at one damage, and everything in the game that touches that number can only ever raise it. There is no multiplier you can buy.
- Packs: $1 for 5, $5 for 30, $20 for 140. The bigger packs are cheaper per smack; that is the entire pricing strategy.
- Smacks do not expire while you are using them, have no cash value, and cannot be sold, transferred or exchanged.
- Your wallet lives in this browser. Clear your site data and it is gone — we have no accounts and no way to identify you. Keep your receipt.
Momentum
- Every smack is multiplied by how many different people have hit the current boss in the last 60 seconds. One live number, the same for everybody in the arena.
- 1 person is ×1. 5 people is ×1.5. 15 people is ×2. 25 people is ×2.5. 40 people is ×3, and that is the cap. Whichever rung you have reached is the one you get, and one person short of a rung is the rung below it.
- It counts people, not hits. Swinging ten times in a row counts you once, so nobody can raise it on their own — the only way it goes up is more people showing up. That is deliberate: it is the one rule in the game where your smack makes everybody else’s smack better, and theirs makes yours better.
- The floor is ×1 and momentum can never take damage away. It is a bonus over a floor, never a penalty. A quiet arena is the baseline the whole game is balanced around, not a punishment, and no smack is ever worth less than one damage because of it.
- It decays. Sixty seconds after the last hit lands, the window is empty and it is back to ×1. Free smacks count towards it — they move the health bar, so they are people in the arena.
- Nothing is paid out for it, to anyone. It changes what a smack is worth in damage, and nothing else.
Crits
- Every boss crits. Every tier, every swing, free smacks exactly as much as bought ones. About 1 in 10 swings pays 2 damage instead of one.
- A boss with Golden Veins pays 5 instead, on about 1 in 4 swings. It replaces the ordinary crit rather than stacking on top of it — one roll, one chance, one payout. The modifier turns the dial up on something every boss already does; it is not where crits come from.
- What that means in practice, rather than as a percentage: your 3 free smacks are a 27% chance of seeing one, five swings is 41%, and thirty is 96%. Every swing is its own roll — missing four in a row is normal, and buying more smacks buys more rolls, never better ones.
- The roll is ours, on our side, once per swing. Nothing about you, your browser or your request moves it, and a bought smack crits exactly as often as a free one.
- A crit can never make a hit worth less. It takes the larger of itself and the hundredth-hit bonus, night doubles whatever survives that, and momentum multiplies last — so the biggest single hit this game can produce is 30.
- Nothing is paid out for a crit, to anyone. It changes what a smack is worth in damage, and nothing else.
Free smacks
- Every visitor gets three, free, no card. Enough to feel it.
- A free smack can never land the killing blow. If a free hit would drop the boss to zero, it stops at one hit point instead.
- Free hits are capped per boss, across everybody who ever swings at it: 10% of its hit points or 500 damage, whichever of the two is larger. Past that the boss stops taking them.
- The 500 is there because a percentage is the right rule for a big boss and the wrong one for a small one: 10% of the first boss’s 1,500 hit points is 150 damage, which is no more than 50 visitors’ worth of free smacks. The two meet at exactly 5,000 hit points — under that the 500 is the bigger number, over it the 10% is, and from there on the floor never applies again. It is a cold-start allowance for the first couple of bosses, not a change to the rule.
- Free hits are anonymous and do not score on the leaderboard. They still damage the boss, and they still count.
- This is not us being stingy, and raising the cap does not loosen it. The engraving is protected separately and absolutely, at any cap: a free smack cannot land the last hit, ever, full stop. The cap does the other job — bounding how much of a boss free play can take between everybody, so there is always something left to fight over.
The killing blow
- Whoever lands the hit that takes the boss to zero is engraved in the graveyard, under that boss, with the name they bought under. Permanently.
- It is one hit. Not the most damage, not the most money — the last one. The top damager gets their name floated over the boss while it lives, which is a different thing entirely and also not a prize.
- Because free smacks stop at one hit point, the last hit is always a bought one. That is deliberate, and it is what makes the engraving worth having.
- First blood. Whoever landed the killing blow on boss #1 — the first boss this world ever had — is marked as such on its grave, permanently, and nobody else ever will be. There is one of these in the history of the site and it has either already been cut or never will be.
- The engraving is a name on a web page, and so is the first-blood mark. Neither is a right, a title, an asset or a prize. Nothing is paid out for either, now or later.
Bosses
- Everything about a boss — its shape, colours, paper, name, lore and modifiers — is generated from one random number. No two are the same and none were drawn by hand.
- Tiers run Common, Elite, Champion, Mythic. Every tenth boss is Mythic no matter what.
- Modifiers can make a hit worth more — a doubled hit at night, every hundredth hit landing harder, Golden Veins turning the crit in 03 up from 2 to 5. None of them can make a hit worth less. Crits themselves are not a modifier and never were a reward for reaching a tier: every boss has them, including the first one you will ever see.
- The first boss has 1,500 hit points. After that, each one is sized from how fast the last one actually died, aiming at roughly three days. A boss nobody can kill is a dead site, so the number follows the crowd rather than a fixed multiplier.
- Every boss is strictly bigger than the one before it — that is a floor in the sizing rule, not a tendency. Kill one quickly and its successor is sized off that speed, so a fast first boss produces a much bigger second one rather than a repeat.
- When a boss dies it goes to the graveyard, and a bigger one is strung up.
Names
- You choose a display name when you pay. It is public, in the feed and on the wall.
- Names that impersonate the site or are abusive get removed. The damage and the engraving stay; the name becomes [removed].
- Pick something you are happy to see on a screenshot, because that is the point.
What this is not
- There are no prizes and no payouts of any kind, to anyone, ever. Nothing of value is ever won.
- It is not gambling, not a lottery and not a contest with a prize. You are buying an entertainment good, delivered immediately.
- All sales are final. The terms say it in full, and they are the ones that count.