Move: arrow keys, or on a phone swipe / tap the cell you want to step into — one gesture, one turn. You will die on the spikes; your body sheathes them so the next you walks over it. Bridge the gap and jam the crusher with your dead, then reach the exit. Pips count the turns until a trap fires. Fewest bodies wins. Each body is ringed with what it bought: green = route open, red dashed = still kills, grey dotted = bought nothing. Fumbled a step? Z (or the Undo step button) takes back your last living step and its move — deaths stand, the corpse stays, and the clock never rewinds. The active clock counts play time only: a backgrounded tab accrues none. R fresh board · T theme · M sound.
The clock counts active play only: it starts on your first committed step and pauses while this tab is in the background, so a backgrounded tab accrues no time (nor does a page you loaded and never moved on). Undo takes back a move, never a death, and never rewinds the clock — moves drop by one, deaths do not move, and the seconds you already spent stay spent. Deaths and moves are re-derived by replaying your stored input tape through the sim, so a reload reproduces them exactly; moves counts every step the skeleton took, including the ones the post-death auto-resume replayed for you, and deaths is the same number as the bodies counter.
Dead Weight is a turn-based grid dungeon in which every death leaves a corpse exactly where you fell, and that corpse stays on the board for the rest of the attempt. A body dropped into a pit bridges it and a body dropped on a spike row sheathes it, both immediately and permanently, so the next skeleton walks straight over. A crusher is the slower trade: the corpse under the ram is not safe to stand on until the ram has slammed down on it twice, and only then does it jam open for good. So you are not trying to survive the room, you are spending bodies to open a route to the exit, and the page keeps your cheapest clear of that specific room as a stored best clear in bodies.
On a phone it is one thumb: swipe in a direction, or tap the cell you want to step into. One gesture is one turn, so there is no timing pressure and nothing on the board moves until you do — the pips under a trap count the turns left before it fires. On a desktop the arrow keys or WASD take a step, Z or Backspace takes back your last living step, R resets the room, T flips light and dark, M mutes the sound, and ? hides or shows the how-to line, which sits under the board on a phone and in a column beside it on a wide landscape screen.
There are twelve levels in one frozen order: the same twelve rooms, in the same order, for every player, forever, so that two people's times on level 4 are times on the same room. A bare URL is level 1, and ?level=N opens any of the twelve. They escalate on a stated mechanical measure rather than a measured difficulty curve — the solver-proven minimum body count first, then how badly a memoryless walker that just steps toward the exit does — so levels 1 to 6 can all be cleared with 2 bodies and levels 7 to 12 with 3, while that naive walker spends 5 bodies on level 1 and 11 on level 12. The rooms are generated from a seed rather than hand-built, and every room the generator ever produced is still addressable: ?day=YYYY-MM-DD rebuilds the room for any date from 2020-01-01 to 2099-12-31. That is a secondary mode — ?day= is only read when no ?level= is present, and because a date replay is not a rung on the ladder the share button is hidden there.
The clock counts active play only: it starts on your first committed step and pauses while the tab is in the background, so a backgrounded tab accrues no time, and neither does a page you loaded and never moved on. Undo takes back a move, never a death, and never rewinds the clock — moves drop by one, deaths do not move, and the seconds you already spent stay spent. Deaths and moves are never counted into a variable; they are re-derived by replaying your stored input tape through the sim, so a reload reproduces them exactly, and moves counts every step the skeleton took, including the ones the post-death auto-resume replayed for you. Each level you clear also goes into a cumulative ladder run shown above the board — one record per rung, kept on fewest deaths first and fastest time second, with the twelve-level totals added up from those twelve bests, which makes the total a best-segments figure rather than a time anyone necessarily played end to end. That run is stored in this browser under a single localStorage key and nowhere else: no account, no server, no leaderboard, and clearing your site data (or pressing Reset run and confirming) erases it.
Clear a ladder level, press Share this clear, and the page copies two lines: a result strip that reads DEAD WEIGHT lvl 4/12 · cleared · 1:12 · 💀💀💀 3 deaths · 27 moves, and an absolute link ending in ?r= followed by a code that carries your actual input tape. Whoever opens that link lands on the same level, and the page replays your tape through the same sim to re-derive the deaths and moves instead of trusting the numbers in the link; if the tape does not clear that room the result is refused and the page names the check that failed. The elapsed time is the one number that cannot be re-derived, so it travels as a self-reported claim, and there is no account, no server and no leaderboard — comparing two runs means sending someone the link.