Touch: drag across touching letters (any of the eight directions) to trace a word, release to play it; backtrack along your own path to undo the last letter; tap a pest to aim your next word at it; tap the speaker to mute · Keyboard: Arrow keys or WASD move the cursor; Space adds the cursor's letter to the path; Backspace removes the last; Enter plays the word; Tab cycles which pest you are aiming at; P or Esc pauses; M mutes. Mouse: drag to trace, release to play, click a pest to aim.
About:
A word-combat game in the spirit of the 2000s Flash classics, made in-house for Leetdom. A page of an old book has come alive, and ink pests are crawling across it. Each one shows exactly what it will do: a hit value and a little clock counting the beats until it tears into the page. You fight back by spelling words. Drag across touching letters, up, down, sideways or diagonally, to trace a path of three or more, and the letters you spend become the damage you deal to whichever pest you have aimed at.
The longer the word, the harder it lands, and a word of five letters or more leaves a charged tile glowing on the board; spend it and its letter counts double while half the blow splashes to a second pest. Fell a pest next to a smear of ink and the smear lifts. Let the ink pile too high and the page tears and you lose a little of it. Keep the page whole through five chapters of worsening pests, the smudges and blots, the heavy serifs and the ink-spitting scrawls, and the page is saved.
Everything is readable on purpose. The pests never hide their intent, the board always has a word in it (if it somehow does not, it reshuffles rather than trapping you), and the lexicon is a hand-built list of common words, so you are never asked for something obscure. Longer words and smarter targeting beat frantic three-letter spelling. Reaching only for the shortest words will carry you deep into the book but rarely all the way; a careful player who works in the odd five- or six-letter word can win about half the time.
The rules run on a fixed, seeded step, so a given page plays out the same way every time and the game can be tested by bots. All of the art, the parchment and ink creatures and charged-tile glow, and all of the sound are drawn and synthesised in code; there are no image or audio files. It runs offline with no network of any kind.
Drag across adjacent letters to spell a word and release to play it. Tap a pest to aim at it. Tap the speaker to mute.
Credits:
Made by Leetdom, 2026. Written for Leetdom, and it lives here.
Phone check: 2026-10-03: built and tested by the remake-63 build agent. Real headless-Chromium CDP run over a local http server: desktop 1280x800 boot and title, mouse drag-trace of a solver-chosen word (beats advanced), a word traced purely by keyboard (cursor + Space + Enter, spelled EMPEROR), P pause, a greedy playthrough to a terminal result followed by one-click retry into a fresh game, a 1000x700 viewport at devicePixelRatio 2 with a matching 2000x1400 canvas backing store, a 390x844 phone portrait touch trace, an 844x390 phone landscape layout, and a localStorage-blocked reload that still boots and plays. Every synthesised sound effect was rendered through an OfflineAudioContext and measured non-silent (peak 0.11 to 0.30). Zero console errors and no outside network requests in any scenario. Node tests: 59 assertions across path/word validation, scoring, gravity and refill, determinism (same seed replays bit-for-bit), a solvability net over 120 seeds plus all-same-letter recovery, ink-pest mechanics, and win/loss reachability with one-action retry. A greedy best-word bot wins 100% of runs (about 14 beats); a casual bot that only reaches for medium words wins 49% (about 26 beats); full-board best-word search averages 2.3 ms. Curated offline lexicon of 13,680 common words, length 3 to 8. Published 3 Oct 2026 (pi-fleet) after server2 independent QA PASS-WITH-FIXES: production smoke on https://www.leetdom.com/games/marginwick returned 200 with zero console errors and no external requests; real CDP touch on a 390x844 phone played start to a win (15 words) and one-tap retry; landscape 844x390 touch trace; Full screen refits the frame (phone 332x590 -> 390x844, desktop -> 1280x800) and tracing still works; maxWidth cut from 1280 to 420 so the 9 / 16 frame fits a desktop screen; the test hook is read-only in production (live state only with ?debug=1).
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