A blocked arrow press in Addition Maze costs zero points and changes nothing on the board. Walls, closed edges, visited cells, and off-board edges all return a harmless no-op, so you can hammer the arrow keys without fear of bleeding your 1,000-point starting score. Only a successful move onto a new connected numbered cell counts as an accepted move, and each accepted move subtracts exactly 50 points from your total. Because the score formula is "max(0, 1000 minus 50 times accepted moves)," a press that the game refuses to honor simply does not enter that count.
What Counts as a Blocked Press
Addition Maze treats every arrow key as a request rather than a command. The game accepts a press only when four conditions are met at the same time: the neighboring square must share a declared passage with the current cell, that square must contain a number, it must not already be on your visited path, and the destination must lie inside the grid. If any of those four checks fails, the press is silently dropped. The cursor stays where it was, the running sum stays where it was, and the move counter does not advance, which is precisely why blocked presses cannot subtract points.
This design matters because keyboard puzzles can punish accidental keypresses. In Addition Maze the rules are forgiving on purpose. Pressing Up against a ceiling wall, Right against a closed edge, Down into the cell you just came from, or any direction off the board leaves the state completely unchanged. You will not see a red flash, a buzz, or a score penalty; the press is simply absorbed.
Score Formula and What It Touches
The scoring engine watches one variable: the number of accepted moves. Each time the cursor leaves a cell and lands on a new connected numbered cell, the move counter goes up by one and the score drops by 50. The formula is written explicitly as max(0, 1000 minus 50 times accepted moves). Because blocked presses never increment the accepted-move counter, they cannot lower the 800 ceiling you are aiming for. The cap of zero means the formula can never produce a negative score, so even an unlikely run of bookkeeping errors would not push you below zero.
| Key Press | Effect on Cursor | Effect on Running Sum | Effect on Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accepted move onto unvisited connected number | Cursor advances | Destination number added | Minus 50 points |
| Arrow into a wall or closed edge | No change | No change | No change |
| Arrow toward an already visited cell | No change | No change | No change |
| Arrow off the board | No change | No change | No change |
| Arrow into a numbered cell with no declared passage | No change | No change | No change |
Read across any row except the first and you will see the same triple: nothing moves, nothing is added, and nothing is subtracted. The first row is the only one that touches the score, and it does so in a predictable, evenly spaced way. Four accepted moves, for example, always bring you from 1,000 to 800.
How to Play Addition Maze Without Losing Points to Bad Presses
- Place your fingers on the arrow keys and start on the 2 in the top-left corner of the three by three grid.
- Before each press, look at the running sum displayed beside the cursor and the number in the cell you intend to enter.
- Confirm the destination is connected by a visible passage, contains a number, has not been visited, and keeps the running sum at or below the target of 19.
- Press the arrow key once; if the cursor advances, the press was accepted and the score drops by 50.
- If nothing happens, the press was blocked and you can try a different direction without any score penalty.
- Repeat until you stand on the bottom-right goal cell with an exact running sum of 19.
Why the Down-First Trap Is Safe to Test
The board exposes a deliberate trap on the very first move: pressing Down from the start enters the cell holding 8 and pushes the running sum to 10. From there the only declared passage leads back to the start, which is already visited, so the next legal-move search returns zero options and the engine flags a deadlock. None of that costs points, because every arrow press along the trap path was either an accepted move (Down to 8) or a no-op (Right, Left, Up against walls or the visited start). You can press Down first purely to see the trap, restart, and your score will return to 1,000.
This trap is one reason the scoring system relies on accepted moves rather than total presses. A learning player who wants to feel out the walls will press many keys, and the game rewards exploration by treating every blocked press as free. The same forgiving rule also applies after a deadlock: the cursor, running sum, and accepted-move counter all hold their last valid values until you restart, and even then the restart returns you to a clean 1,000-point slate.
Reading the Running Sum as You Move
The running sum is the only number that decides whether a path is still legal, and it is also a quick way to estimate your score. Start at 2. Press Right to step onto 4, and the running sum becomes 6. Press Down to step onto 6, and the sum climbs to 12. Press Right to step onto 2, and the sum becomes 14. Press Down to step onto 5, and the sum reaches the target of 19 on the bottom-right goal cell. Four accepted moves were used, so the score is exactly 1000 minus 50 times 4, which equals 800.
If you ever overshoot 19, the validator rejects the path even if you later reach the goal; the engine reports a deadlock rather than a completion. If you reach the goal with any sum other than 19, completion is denied for the same reason. Those two failure modes do not subtract additional points beyond the 50 per accepted move that produced them, because failure is detected at validation time rather than treated as a penalty.
Keyboard Controls at a Glance
All navigation uses the four arrow keys. There is no pointer-only gesture, no drag requirement, and no need to aim at a specific pixel. Mouse and touch input are intentionally unnecessary because the whole game is designed for a quick keyboard break. The interface is a semantic CSS grid, which means every cell can announce its number, its wall state, its visit state, and the current cursor position to assistive technology without losing the visual layout. Path, surface, border, warning, and focus colors all come from the site's shared CSS variables, so the contrast profile is consistent with the rest of the Lizely games.
Restart returns the cursor to the starting 2, clears the visited path, restores 1,000 points, and removes any completion or deadlock flag. A completed best score is held only in this browser's localStorage, so clearing site data resets your personal best but does not affect what the game considers a perfect run. The shared Boss Key is a double press of Escape that swaps the screen for a simulated spreadsheet; pressing Escape twice again returns you to the same maze with your score intact.
Putting the Scoring Rule to Work
Knowing that blocked presses are free changes how you can practice. If you are not sure whether a cell is connected, press toward it and watch the cursor; if it does not move, no points were lost and you can try a different direction immediately. If you are tempted to test the Down-first trap to feel the deadlock message, do so without hesitation. If you want to teach a younger learner the difference between a wall and a passage, set them loose on the board and let them press every key; their score will still end at 800 after the four winning presses.
The same rule also means that the score you see is a pure function of how many accepted moves you have made. You can predict your total at any point by counting the visited cells beyond the start and multiplying by 50, then subtracting from 1,000. The formula is consistent in both directions: a shorter accepted path leaves more points on the table, while any number of blocked presses leaves the score untouched. That predictability is the entire reason the game can reward a clean four-move run with exactly 800 points and treat every wrong press as a free lesson.
Limits Worth Remembering
A few practical boundaries shape the experience. The board is fixed, so the disclosed values, the five passages, the target sum, the winning route, and the deliberate trap are the same on every visit; there is no random generator and no hidden daily board. Network calls, accounts, downloaded assets, audio cues, timers, and hardware requirements are all absent, which keeps the game self-contained. The compact layout also remains readable without zoom, drag gestures, or precision pointer targeting, so the keyboard-only design is deliberate rather than an oversight. For readers who want to compare this blocked-press rule with a similar keyboard maze, the guide on whether blocked arrow presses reduce the score in Math Maze walks through a closely related mechanic.