---
title: "About OpenBoss"
description: "OpenBoss is one piñata with a single public health bar that everybody on the internet shares. $1 buys 5 swings, the last swing gets a name on the grave, and nothing is ever paid out. Here is how it is built and why it exists."
source_url: "https://openboss.lol/about"
markdown_url: "https://openboss.lol/about.md"
site: "OpenBoss"
mcp_endpoint: "https://api.openboss.lol/mcp"
---
# About OpenBoss

> One piñata. One health bar. Everyone on the internet is hitting the same one at
> the same time, and whoever lands the last hit gets their name cut into its
> grave, permanently. Then a bigger one goes up.

## 01 — What it actually is

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](/rules.md) 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.

## 02 — What you get, stated plainly

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

> **There are no prizes and no payouts of any kind.**
>
> Nothing of value is ever won, awarded, credited or paid out here — not money,
> not goods, not tokens, not anything. Money moves one way only: from you, to
> us, in exchange for smacks. This is not gambling, not a lottery and not a
> contest with a prize. If you are paying in the hope of getting something back,
> do not pay.

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](/terms.md) 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.

## 03 — How it is built

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](/privacy.md) is the full inventory of what is stored and for how
long.

## 04 — Who made it, and why

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](/contact.md).

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. It lives at
<https://thepixel.lol> and is linked at the top of every page here.

## 05 — Where to go next

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

This is entertainment. You are buying swings at a piñata and the chance to have
your name carved on its grave — nothing else. There are no prizes and no payouts
of any kind, ever.

---

## This document

This is the `text/markdown` representation of a page on https://openboss.lol. Every HTML
page here has one: append `.md` to its path, or send
`Accept: text/markdown`. The HTML page is the canonical one and says the same
things.

- [`/index.md`](https://openboss.lol/index.md) — the arena: the boss up right now, live
- [`/about.md`](https://openboss.lol/about.md) — what this is, how it is built, who runs it
- [`/rules.md`](https://openboss.lol/rules.md) — the mechanics, generated from the shipped constants
- [`/pricing.md`](https://openboss.lol/pricing.md) — every pack price, live from the API, and the free smacks
- [`/terms.md`](https://openboss.lol/terms.md) — what you are buying; the authoritative document
- [`/privacy.md`](https://openboss.lol/privacy.md) — everything stored, why, and for how long
- [`/contact.md`](https://openboss.lol/contact.md) — one email address, and what to put in it
- [`/graveyard.md`](https://openboss.lol/graveyard.md) — every boss that has died, and who killed it
- [`/llms.txt`](https://openboss.lol/llms.txt) — the site map written for agents, including the read-only public API.

**There are no prizes and no payouts of any kind, ever.** Nothing of value is
won on this site. Money moves in one direction only, in exchange for smacks. It
is an entertainment purchase, not gambling.