SEO Mantis Arcade

Six cells of power. Three systems that all want them. One hull, and no second life. A game runs about three minutes and then you lose, because that is what a coin‑operated machine is for.

The whole rulebook, which is short

You start with nothing assigned. Six cells sit unused and every system is dead: no shield, no gun, no dodge. Deciding where they go is the entire game — there is no ship to steer and nothing to aim.

The first wave waits until you have placed at least three cells. A coin-op machine is allowed to be merciless, but not before it has explained itself.

Shields

One cell, one layer. Each layer eats one hit and comes back after a few seconds. Cheap protection, slow to recover.

Weapons

More cells, faster reload. At zero cells you cannot shoot at all, so a wave never ends. At three or more, every shot hits twice as hard.

Engines

Each cell is a flat chance to dodge the next shot. It never blocks anything — it only sometimes means the shot was never there.

Every third level sends an armoured opponent. Your shots bounce off it unless at least three cells are on weapons — which means stripping the engines, or the shields, in the middle of a fight. That single rule is why the cells have to move. A player who sets six cells at the start and never touches them again will meet a wall on level three and stay there.

What we measured, because guessing is worse

The simulation is separate from the drawing, so it can be run without a browser. Before this page went up we ran the game 300 times with a scripted player and 300 more with a player that never touches the controls. Measured on 4 September 2026, with the balance this page is running:

The first row is the point. If sitting still scored anywhere near playing, the mechanic would be decoration. It scores zero, because with no cells on weapons you cannot finish the first wave, and something eventually shoots you.

Same seed, same game: the randomness is a seeded generator, so a run can be replayed exactly. That is also what lets the server sanity‑check a score.

Where the mantis comes from

photo tnx michele — the original credit line, kept as it was

This domain has been sitting still since 2016. What was on it: that photograph, a heading, and six links to pages with names like google‑tigro and positioning stuffed green beans — a private joke about search engines, from a time when the joke was funnier.

Two details are worth keeping, because they date the thing better than a timestamp. The stylesheet painted every paragraph and link #F0FFFF on a #F0FFFF background — white text on white, the oldest trick in the book, sitting there in plain sight. And the block of six links was inside an HTML comment that was never closed properly: it ended -> instead of -->. So for years nobody could see those links, and neither could any crawler. A decade of invisible mischief, undone by one missing hyphen.

The game keeps one thing from that page on purpose: it is drawn 480 by 360 pixels, the exact size of the photograph.

What this page does not do

• No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no advertising.
• No account, no sign‑up, no email address asked for.
• Nothing is loaded from anyone else's server — no fonts, no scripts, no images. The only network request the page ever makes is to its own leaderboard.
• No payment. The coin slot is a drawing.
• Nothing is stored about you beyond three characters you chose, your score, and the level you reached.

The artwork is drawn by the code, shape by shape, rather than bought or downloaded — which is also why the whole game weighs less than the photograph above it.