The Dungeon Door Is Free — Pricing Tanubi’s Six Minigames

The door only ever appears on the first stage, and always in the same place: on the ground about two tiles, 57 pixels, to the right of where you spawn. You run past it inside the first second, so the decision has to be made immediately. Entering requires you to press up while overlapping it. Running into it does nothing, which makes skipping it an explicit choice rather than an accident.

Whether a door appears at all is a one-in-two draw derived from the run’s seed. Since the seed is built from the calendar date, it is fixed for the day. Averaged across all 365 days of 2026, the door shows up on 181 of them — almost exactly half. If it did not appear today, restarting will not conjure it; if it did, it will be there all day.

And here is the part that matters most. While the minigame is open, the game loop freezes entirely and the platformer’s update function is never called. Nothing advances the run timer, so the clock simply stops. Spend 24 seconds inside Pot Smash and your run loses precisely zero points of time bonus. The earlier article priced a five-second detour at 50 points; time spent behind the door sits outside that arithmetic altogether.

When the minigame ends you are put back in front of the door, in the identical position you occupied on the way in, and the door itself is consumed, so there is no re-entering it on the same stage. If you lose a life and the stage gets rebuilt from scratch, the door comes back with it — but trading a life for an extra door lowers your clear rate, which makes it a clearly losing deal. It is not something to go looking for.

Put all of that together and the decision at the door collapses to a single answer. Even on a day when you are chasing the leaderboard, if you see the door, go in. The opportunity cost against your run score is zero; all you spend is real-world time and attention. The decisions that actually matter start after you are inside.

Nothing you earn in a minigame is added to your run score. It goes into your cumulative total instead — the currency that unlocks characters. Your daily ranking, the score attached to a challenge link, and the ghost replay are all completely unaffected by whether you went through the door. That separation is deliberate.

Each visit is capped. The game takes the minigame’s converted value, rounds it, and clamps it between 0 and 400. Four hundred is not a token amount. Your run score also flows into the same cumulative total when the run ends, which means the two are directly comparable in one currency. Converted at ten points per second, 400 is worth forty seconds of time bonus — roughly what you would earn for clearing a stage in five seconds flat.

It helps to look at the receiving end too. Characters unlock at cumulative totals of 500, 2,000 and 5,500. Since the first gate is 500, a single capped dungeon visit covers eighty per cent of it. The flip side is that by the time you are grinding toward 5,500, one door matters much less and your actual run scores start doing the heavy lifting. The numbers say plainly that the door is at its most valuable when you are new.

The achievement counter behaves slightly differently: the dungeon tally increments the moment you enter, not when you finish. Achievements land at 1, 5 and 15 visits, entirely independently of how many points you scored inside. You could walk in and walk straight back out and still get credit — though having gone in, you may as well take what is there.

The campaign has no doors at all. The one exception is the hundredth stage, where beating the boss and reaching the goal forces a single round of Pot Smash. That fight is the only place where the minigame is fixed in advance, so time spent practising Pot Smash is time spent preparing for the campaign’s final stage.

Which minigame you get is decided by the seed, exactly like the door itself. There are seven candidates: the six minigames plus the original climb game holding one slot. The draw is uniform, so your odds of getting a particular game are one in seven, not one in six. You cannot pick what shows up today. All you can pick is how you close it out.

The conversions are wildly different from each other. Dokkaebi’s Memory pays 35 per completed round. Memory Match pays 45 per matched pair. Maze Escape multiplies its raw score by six. Dokkaebi’s Club multiplies by three. Pot Smash and Catch multiply by 1.5. The climb game multiplies by 0.5. Since "raw score" means something different in each game, comparing the multipliers on their own tells you nothing. What you want is the ceiling.

Laid out by ceiling: Pot Smash, Dokkaebi’s Club and Dokkaebi’s Memory can all reach the 400 cap if you play them well. Maze Escape tops out at 312 even on a flawless run and structurally cannot reach the cap. Memory Match pays exactly 270 for all six pairs and not one point more. Catch has its ceiling set by the day’s seed, and in practice that lands anywhere between 195 and 405.

That difference should change how you sit up. Memory Match is "finish it and you have maxed it", so there is no reward for speed and no reward for care — just complete the board. In Catch you cannot raise the ceiling with skill at all; your only job is to drop nothing. Pot Smash, the Club and Memory, by contrast, convert competence directly into hundreds of points. Some of these are worth concentrating on and some genuinely are not.

Since you cannot choose what appears, the first thing to do when the door opens is identify which category you are in. Fixed-ceiling games get processed briskly. Cap-reaching games get your full attention. Maze Escape needs care for a different reason entirely, which the last section covers.

Pot Smash puts pots up across a three-by-three grid of nine slots on a 24-second timer. Each pot stays up for only 1.05 seconds, and a new one surfaces every 0.34 to 0.56 seconds. Roughly seven in ten hold treasure and the rest hold bugs. Hitting treasure scores 10; hitting a bug takes 8 away.

The streak bonus is what drives the numbers here. Every consecutive treasure hit makes the next one worth more: two extra points per step of streak, capping out after five steps. With the streak maxed, each hit is worth 20. The first hit adds nothing and the bonus pins to its ceiling from the sixth hit on, so past six in a row the total settles into 20n − 30, where n is the streak length. Fifteen in a row is 270, and 270 times 1.5 is 405, which clamps to the 400 cap. Running actual seeds, a clean streak reaches the cap between 7.5 and 14.2 seconds in, averaging 9.7. You never need the full 24 seconds.

The important detail is what breaks a streak. It is not just mistakenly hitting a bug — a treasure pot that sinks back down untouched resets the streak too. One pot missed at the edge of the grid can cost more than smacking a bug, because rebuilding from zero back to a five-step streak takes another five hits. The right instruction for Pot Smash is therefore not "hit fast" but "let nothing go by". Keep your eyes soft across the whole grid rather than locked to one slot.

Catch runs 22 seconds with treasures falling down three lanes into your basket. Each item takes 1.6 seconds to fall and they spawn 0.5 to 0.9 seconds apart. Catching treasure scores 10 and catching a bug removes 6. The basket starts in the middle lane and moves one lane per input.

There is no streak bonus in Catch. Your score is purely the number of treasures you caught, which means the ceiling is set by the day’s seed rather than by your skill. Measured across seeds, a round contains between 13 and 27 treasures, with a median of 20. The landing check only looks at which lane the basket occupies at that instant, and consecutive landings are always at least half a second apart, so in principle you can catch every treasure and dodge every bug. The correct framing is therefore not "avoid the bugs" but "already be standing in the next treasure’s lane". A bug only hurts you when it happens to land where you were going to be anyway.

Memory Match is twelve cards in a three-by-four grid, six pairs. The score is simply the number of pairs you matched; how many flips it took has no effect whatsoever. A streak indicator sometimes appears on screen, but it is pure presentation and never touches the score. There is nothing there to feel rushed about.

That reduces the whole game to one line of advice: finish the board for 270, which is the ceiling. There is no timer either, so if you are unsure about a card, flip it again to confirm. Spending an extra move costs you literally nothing. Conversely, leaving early still banks 45 for every pair you already matched, so clearing three pairs for 135 and walking out is a perfectly coherent way to close it on a day when you are short on time.

Dokkaebi’s Memory is the classic repeat-the-sequence format, built on the four directions. Each successful round extends the sequence by one, and a single wrong input ends it immediately. Your score is the number of rounds you completed, at 35 apiece, so the 400 cap arrives at round twelve — twelve times 35 is 420, which clamps down.

Twelve rounds is further away than it sounds, though. Each step of the sequence lights for 0.44 seconds with a 0.2-second gap, and there is additional waiting on either side of every round. Adding up nothing but the presentation time and the between-round waits through round twelve gives about 65 seconds, and with your own input on top it approaches a minute and a half. The run clock is frozen so none of that costs you score, but in wall-clock terms this is the longest of the six.

The practical trick is to memorise the sequence as a path your finger traces around the four pads rather than as the words up, left, right, down. Verbal encoding tends to jam somewhere past seven items. And remember that leaving early keeps every round you already cleared, so deciding "this is far enough for today" and stepping out is a legitimate way to play this one.

Maze Escape is an eight-by-eight grid, starting top-left and exiting bottom-right. Its scoring runs backwards compared to the others: you begin at 42 and lose three points for every step beyond the shortest path. Only an exit walked in exactly the minimum number of moves earns the flawless bonus of 10, for 52 points, which multiplies by six to 312. That is this game’s ceiling.

What deserves attention is the price of the very first mistake. A flawless 52 drops to 39 the instant you take one surplus step, because the flawless bonus of 10 and the three-point penalty land at the same time. In loot terms that is 312 falling to 234 — 78 gone in one step. Every step after that costs 18. The first misstep is more than four times as expensive as the ones that follow it. And remember that walking into a dead end and back out adds two steps, not one.

So in the maze you read the walls before you move. Shortest-path lengths vary enormously between boards, from 14 steps to 54, averaging around 32. The longer the board you draw, the more it pays to trace the route all the way to the exit with your eyes before committing. Note also that once you are 13 or more steps over, the score pins to its floor of 5 and no amount of further wandering changes the 30 you will collect. If the run is already unrecoverable, just get to the exit.

This game also carries the one genuine trap among the six: you get nothing unless you reach the exit. Choosing to leave partway through pays zero as well. The other five all bank whatever you had scored at the moment you left; the maze is strictly all or nothing, and the confirmation dialog says as much — leave now and you get nothing. Once you start it, finish it.

Dokkaebi’s Club is six rounds of single-strike timing. A marker sweeps back and forth along a bar, and striking inside the glowing zone scores between 8 and 20 points while missing it scores zero. As the rounds progress the zone narrows from 0.28 of the bar down to 0.15 and the marker accelerates from 0.85 to 1.65 bars per second, so the time the marker spends crossing the zone falls from 329 milliseconds in round one to 91 in round six.

Sixteen points or more counts as a perfect strike, and that is what the streak bonus attaches to. A perfect requires landing within 37.5 per cent of a half-width of the zone’s centre, which makes the perfect windows 124, 94, 73, 57, 44 and 34 milliseconds — the last of those is close to the floor of human reaction. The streak pays three points per step and caps after five. Six perfects in a row totals 141 even if every one of them is a bare-minimum 16, and 141 times three is 423, so it clamps at the 400 cap. Land all six inside the zone but perfect none of them and you get 90 points, or 270. Perfect five and miss the last one entirely and you get 110, or 330. Since the cap only needs 134, banking reliable perfects in the wide early windows means missing that final 34-millisecond window will not sink the run. This escalating-streak structure exists in exactly two of the six games: Pot Smash and the Club.