Punching was mostly deck arithmetic — nineteen castable damage cards
in a 196-card deck — but three leaks made it worse. The march was
burning the biggest NUMBER card on long walks, starving waterbolts
and lightning; the biggest number is now reserved whenever an attack
in hand wants it. Heave-Ho, priced for defense, was being cast
without a treasure to throw (refused, turn stumbled) — now never
cast. Illusionary Attack was cast without naming a spell to fake —
now it fakes a fireball, the best-selling lie. And STONE DEAD joins
the arsenal against anyone flashing displayed stones: number times
the visible count, cast when the arithmetic beats the alternatives.
Measured across thirty berserker mirrors: attack casts up a quarter,
the tier handicap sharper (25-5), no stalls.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two archmages idled turn after turn: hands clogged with situational
neutrals, and doEndTurn caps the draw by the room left, so a full
hand never refreshed. Nothing to cast, nothing to draw, nothing done.
The brain now sheds dead weight before ending the turn — only cards
it has no play for; good counters and attacks stay hoarded — so the
draw always has room. The trick is repertoire, so it is tier-gated:
adepts and archmages churn, the apprentice hoards like the novice it
is. Measured across forty berserker mirrors that sharpened the
handicap from two-to-one to three-to-one with zero stalled games.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An automaton answered DROP OBJECT with an Absorb, then a Blunt —
two counters drained against a spell that carries no points. The
brain's price table listed only the classic damage spells; anything
unknown was guessed at 2 points, which tripped every damage-counter
rung. Utility attacks (dropping, dragging, swapping, peeking) now
route past those rungs entirely: the bot passes, or spends a full
stop when the effect actually threatens something — a shield for the
treasure it carries, a worrier's refusal to be dragged. Stone Dead,
Butt Head, Heave-Ho, and Illusionary Attack join the price table
while the hood is up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"The creature shares your square — there is nowhere to hide" appeared
on no card and in no rulebook. Neither did the convention beneath it:
the engine skipped INVISIBLE and SHRINK miss rolls for creature blows
on the theory that a monster in your square has nothing to aim. The
cards say otherwise — SHRINK reduces the chance to hit "in any
attack", and INVISIBLE's D4 carves out no exception for monsters.
From rev 13, creature blows roll the same dice as every other attack
(1 finds the unseen; 1-2 find the tiny), INVISIBLE may be counter-
cast against a creature's blow, and the automatons will do so. The
rolls consume RNG, so earlier games keep their certainty and replay
without them — the refusal survives only there, reworded to blame the
revision instead of inventing a rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
INVISIBLE's corner reads NEUTRAL/COUNTERACTION, and ANTI-ANTI's own
face names it an escape — yet the engine refused it at the door. Now
it counters: the vanishing goes up mid-stack (duration from a NUMBER
card riding the counteract command), the attacker's 1-in-4 hit roll
happens at resolution, the spell lingers after the exchange, and
ANTI-ANTI cannot pin it. WATERWALL — "Acts as counteraction to
FIREBALL" — now mirrors WALL OF FIRE's waterbolt-stopping role and
counts as a total stop. WALL OF FIRE itself joins the total-stop set
at rev 12 only: stored rev-10/11 games bounced after it and replay so.
While responding, tapping a number card holds it to ride the next
counter (unless a displayed Shieldstone makes the number itself the
counteraction, as before). The automatons learn the trick too: vanish
when the blow is heavy and the shields are spent, and never waste
ANTI-ANTI against an escape.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Scoped to everything since the last pass (695307d). The residue of
fast iteration, removed: a reduced-motion media query that had
swallowed a full copy of the .faq-seal rules; doc comments orphaned
from their functions by inserted methods; the FAQ scrape's seams
(section headings run into ruling bodies under the wrong topics, a
next-page heading shipped as a ruling, an amputated "h", and rulings
filed under alphabetically-nearest strangers — Large Rock/Dagger now
lives on those cards; Book of Spells and Torquemada describe no card
in this set and are gone); the write-only aisle flag left behind by
the reverted rev 7; a linter-silenced dead destructure; a duplicated
median lookup; dead casts; and the fallback path that ignored the
apprentice's one-card draw.
Tests now typecheck (tsconfig includes test/), which surfaced the
missing type imports and a drifted creature literal hiding under an
as-cast. Also: a no-op self-assignment, mid-file imports hoisted, a
dynamic-import habit made static, a hedge comment replaced with a
loud setup failure, the fallback-retries-itself dead rung removed
from both bot drivers, and the twin peek scrims merged.
Deliberately kept: the TIERS lookup guard (ledger JSON is untrusted),
the wand-cost stanzas (they differ on the power-attack trade — a
rules question, not a dedup), and rollDie's coexistence with rollD4
(migrating changes visible logs; future work).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tiers degrade resources and repertoire, never judgment — the design
constraint was that no tier may ever look dumb. The APPRENTICE draws
one card a turn instead of two (a poorer wizard, not a worse one),
spends counters only on heavy hits (thrift, not blindness), and
carries a modest spellbook: damage, summons, stones, keys, and
treasure play, with no afflictions, amplifies, ambushes, guarding
tricks, or deja-vu. The ADEPT draws fully and knows everything except
ambushes and amplify. The ARCHMAGE is the full curriculum. Every card
any tier plays, it plays correctly.
The lobby workshop gains a tier picker beside the temperaments
(default adept); the tier persists with the seat, shows in roster and
scoresheet ("⚙ apprentice mystery"), and rides the drive loop.
Measured where it should matter: in berserker combat mirrors the
archmage beats the apprentice two to one, while pure treasure races
stay honest — the handicap lives in the card exchanges a human
actually feels, pinned deterministically in the tournament suite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every playable card now has a place in the automaton's mind. The
damage table completes: lightning blast, wizardblade, and power drain
scale with numbers (and are skipped without one), disease bites in
the shared square, the dagger's true three points corrected. A new
affliction book casts the miseries — blind, slow, medusa, no-spell,
lock-in-place, walking dead, slow death, idiot, thought steal,
go-away — with a number for the duration, and WEAKNESS is saved for
whoever carries stolen gold. AMPLIFY doubles the heavy spells.
The counteraction ladder runs the full rack: REVERSE eats the big
blasts, ABSORB SPELL steals the good ones, FULL SHIELD, FULL
REFLECTION, REMOVE CURSE refuses afflictions at the door, REFLECTION
halves, ABSORB soaks the mid-range, BLUNT, EMPATHY out of berserker
spite, teleport escapes, shieldstone numbers.
Housekeeping: every stone hits the table the turn it is drawn, GIFT
FROM ABOVE is cashed instantly, curses get scrubbed with REMOVE
CURSE, LIFESAVER goes up at three players, a SAFE or GLUE guards
floor gold with enemies near, and DEJA-VU pulls the best attack back
from the discard when the hand runs dry of violence.
Table talk verified live ("ACQUISITION COMPLETE." mid-probe) — the
silence was timing, not plumbing — and the remark odds rise to half.
Three-way tournaments tell true stories now: the hunter wins on
gold, the worrier survives to win by attrition, and the berserker
learns that aggression in a three-way gets you buried first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every play-strength item, in one education. DOORS: the pathfinder
walks through doors it can open — already-opened ones freely, locked
ones when holding Master Key or Pick Lock, casting the key at the
door on the path before stepping through (and a loop where the
clockwork re-keyed an already-open door forever is fixed: opened
doors read as open). TREASURE DEFENSE: a wizard carrying the
automaton's gold becomes the priority — chased over all objectives,
shaken down with DROP OBJECT when held, and attacked first. WIDER
SPELLCRAFT: blaster wands charged by number and fired; teleport as
escape when wounded and hunted, and as a counteraction clear of big
incoming spells; SPEED cast on sight; WARD armed to guard the gold;
shieldstone displayed so spare numbers soak small hits; ANTI-ANTI
pressed against counters (never against escapes); the berserker grows
BIG with an enemy near, the worrier fades invisible or slams a
CREATE WALL in its pursuer's face; ambushes armed from held
interrupts — the worrier trapping its doorstep, the others trapping
the treasure. Tournament suite green across all temperaments.
And the clockwork speaks: sparing, temperament-voiced table talk on
its own deeds — "ACQUISITION COMPLETE.", "SCHEDULED DEMISE:
DELIVERED.", "good wall. safe wall." — through the same chat ledger
as everyone else. The tally gains "games fought against the
clockwork", and automatons no longer pollute the count of wizards
seated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The automaton now plays number cards where they matter: attached to
value-scaled attacks (waterbolt, powerthrust) choosing the biggest
for damage, and played for movement when the goal is just out of
stride. It raises its monsters when no wizard is in spell range and
commands them every turn — creatures march at enemies by the same
hazard-shy BFS and maul whoever shares their square. Targets are
picked by lowest life.
And it has moods. The HUNTER plays the classic game: gold first,
violence when convenient. The BERSERKER hunts wizards over treasure
and finishes games by last-wizard-standing. The WORRIER paths around
enemies, counters at a lower threshold, shields against chaos, and
never brawls. Hosts pick the temperament when seating one (or the
workshop assigns at random); it persists with the seat, shows in the
roster, and the tournament harness proves every pairing finishes.
Across ten seeds of berserker versus hunter: six treasure wins to
four kills — the moods play genuinely different games.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 4 begins. The automaton is a pure function in the engine —
automatonCommand(view) — playing from its own redacted GameView, the
same information a human seat receives: hidden hands stay hidden from
the clockwork. It ranks simple damage spells, counters what hurts
(full shield at 3+, reflection at 4+, blunt at 2+), discards its
worst cards by a value order, BFS-pathfinds to enemy treasures and
home again, refuses to path through hazards, brawls when there is
nothing to steal, and always has a safe fallback; the server's drive
loop steps any bot-held seat through the same runCommand path as
humans, so bot commands log, persist, replay, and broadcast like
anyone's.
Hosts seat them pre-start with "⚙ seat an automaton" (Automaton,
Automaton II, ... V); bot seats persist as tokenless join lines and
restore on boot. Proven three ways: bot-vs-bot engine games conclude
across seeds in 8-14 rounds (~100 commands — human-scale), a full
four-automaton table finishes, and a live websocket game of human
vs. automaton ended with the clockwork carrying two treasures home
through a do-nothing opponent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5