Because every game on this site is server-verified, a finished game is a complete record: we can replay any run through the engine, move for move, and watch exactly where it bled. This is the autopsy of our first Deep Dark loss — 76 turns, ending in the engine's cruelest loss reason: wandered to death at the door.
The headline is that the run did not die of poverty, though it finished with zero Thread. It died of geography. The player reached the Heart carrying five Seals (three required), two Relics (two required), the Maze fed, and — thanks to the Heartglass relic — the door's 3-Thread toll already waived. Every requirement of the final door was met. But the last corridors of the deck strip Compass in bulk, and he arrived at the reveal two points below zero: LOST. The rule we call the wander fired — reveal the Heart while LOST and you cannot find the door; you lose 1 Health and it sinks away — and 1 Health was exactly what he had.
The replay shows the winning line existed four turns earlier, and it was almost insultingly cheap. Two cards in the endgame — the Living Labyrinth's halls — offer a lane whose printed text is Hold fast: gain +1 Compass, at the same 1-Health price as the lanes he chose instead. Take it twice and he reaches the feeder with compass zero, not LOST, with Thread enough to feed the maze unbitten, and the door opens. Two quiet lanes, passed over for a peek and a fold, were the entire margin between a loss and a win at 3 Health.
Here is what makes this loss a design success rather than a design failure: the counterplay was printed, affordable, and repeated. The player saw the danger coming — his last three Thread went on a lane that buys +3 Compass, which was exactly right — but the arithmetic of his earlier spending had already decided the ending. A game whose losses can be traced to specific, legal, visible alternatives is a game that is being honest with its players. The maze gives nothing free. Not even to its maker — this was the designer's own run.
Play Deep Dark, if you think you'd have held fast.