Three games have been lost on this site so far, across two different modes, by two different players. All three died in the same hallway.
The final act of Deck One ends with a gauntlet: a run of cards whose first-reveal Compass values are almost uniformly hostile — the Living Labyrinth twisting, the deep hazards, the Endless Echo. Walked in sequence, they can strip ten points of Compass in six or seven turns. Below zero you are LOST: hazards bite twice as hard, wagers lock, and — decisively — if the Heart itself turns over while you are LOST, you cannot find the door. The gauntlet is the game's final exam, and its question is simple: did you arrive with margin?
The engine replays of all three losses show the same shape with different details. One run entered the gauntlet at 3 Health after donating 9 HP to blind wagers in the midgame and had no blood left for the tolls. One entered rich in everything except Compass and died LOST at the literal door. One (a shuffled Chaos run) took a doubled hazard bite while LOST early, spent twenty turns on a 1-Health tightrope, and was finally caught four cards from the Heart. In every case the deciding wound traced back a dozen turns or more — the gauntlet doesn't kill you; it audits you.
Is it too hard? The data says: hard and fair, so far. Each death had a live, printed counterfactual — a Hold-fast lane declined, a wager made blind, a Thread spent on sight that was needed for the door. The gauntlet punishes deficits created earlier, which is exactly what a final exam is for. But three deaths in one hallway is a pattern worth watching, and this is precisely why the browser version exists: every run adds a row to the ledger. If strangers keep dying in that corridor with the door in sight, the act's compass arithmetic gets another look in the next revision. The beauty of a server-verified beta is that the argument will be settled by evidence.