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>
A lock removed, a lock jammed, and a door picked open for the turn
all looked exactly like a locked door. Now the door itself tells:
pale wood for a lock gone for good, near-black for one jammed shut,
pale with a dashed jamb for a door standing open until end of turn —
each with a hover title saying so in words.
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>
"Doubles the existing life-points OR movement rate" — the engine
always took the OR's left side because the client never asked. With
Mega-Monster selected, the hint bar now offers the choice (hit points
lit by default), and the pick rides the cast as params.boost — its
own field, freeing params.cardId for the name-a-card spells it
belongs to. Both halves of the OR are pinned in the creature suite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The lobby's automaton row was a no-wrap inline-flex: at card width the
"seat a" label collapsed to a vertical sliver and the MYSTERY button
ran clean off the paper. The row now wraps centered within the card
and the label holds one line.
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>
Relocate Sector could never land a sector west or north of the origin
— placements the physical game allows by simply sliding the whole map
across the table. The coordinate grid still cannot go negative, but
now it does not need to: a sector may land at negative coordinates
and the whole maze renormalizes, zero-anchoring on both axes (which
also pulls the maze snug when the origin corner is vacated, instead
of leaving a blank band). The client offers the new landings as ghost
slots on every side, verified slot-for-slot against engine truth.
The move also closes a real gap: remapState never carried creatures,
boobytrap tokens, glue, open safes, or dimensional warp tokens when a
sector relocated or rotated — they were left hovering at their old
coordinates. Sectors now carry everything standing on them. Both
changes ride rules rev 11; older ledgers replay their flaws intact,
as replay determinism demands.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The card asked for a destination click that did not exist: a sector
relocates onto an EMPTY 5x5 slot, and empty slots have no floor to
click — the board only rendered cells that are part of the maze. Now
lifting a sector outlines the whole 5x5 (not one square) and dashed
green landings appear beyond the maze edge, one per legal slot; the
svg canvas grows to hold them. Clicking a landing completes the cast.
The landings mirror the engine's own relocateSector law — on the
5-grid, non-negative, vacant, every sector still adjacent to at least
one other — verified slot-for-slot against engine ground truth across
2p and 4p boards. Clicking the maze again re-picks the sector, and a
sector with nowhere legal to go says so in the hint bar.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Slow Death, countered with Force Field — and the battle modal popped
right back up as if nothing had happened, goading a second counter
out of a hand that had already won the exchange. The engine was
bouncing every attacker's pass back to the defender so counters could
stack; correct for partial stops (Blunt, Absorb, Reflection numbers),
senseless past a total one. Under rules rev 10, when a Full Shield,
Force Field, Teleport escape, Full Reflection, or Reverse stands
unnullified, the attacker's declined answer resolves the stack on the
spot. Older ledgers keep the bounce and replay unchanged.
And when the exchange legitimately returns — a partial counter
standing, or a shield broken by Anti-Anti — the modal now says so:
"Your Blunt stands — only what slips past it will land," or "Your
Full Shield was nullified — the attack comes on unchecked," instead
of replaying the fanfare of a fresh, unanswered attack.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three cards sat wrongly in the creation bucket of eligibleCellsFor,
so the targeting dim demanded sighted empty squares the engine never
asks for. Boobytrap tokens go anywhere on the board but solid stone —
no sight required; a trap you can see coming is a poor trap. Glue and
the safe were worse than restricted: inverted. Both seize a square
that HOLDS a loose object or treasure, exactly the squares the empty-
square rule dimmed out. Each now has its own branch mirroring the
engine's actual checks, pinned by tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Safari collapsed the replay board to nothing: an svg with only a
viewBox has no intrinsic size there, and inside the replay's
max-height flex column WebKit sized it 0x0 while Chrome inferred the
ratio and filled the frame. Explicit width/height attributes (doubled,
so the CSS max-* caps still govern the display size) give every engine
the same answer — verified 560x560 in both WebKit and Chromium, with
the main board-zone rendering unchanged.
Commanding your own creature no longer opens the centered card peek —
a modal squarely blocks the squares you are about to march it across.
The card now docks in the paper rail with its live stats, the one
place a card enlarges outside the center of the table. Enemy creatures
and idle peeks keep the modal; they ask nothing of the board.
And once an object is pocketed, the hand goes visibly quiet: cards dim
and refuse selection instead of walking you through target-picking
toward an engine refusal, with a rail slip saying what remains (draw
and end the turn). Counters, chaos shields, and discards still play —
an ambush sprung by the very pickup must be answerable.
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>
Playtesting read the card right and the engine had it wrong. "Placing
the A tokens on one set of exits & the B tokens on the other" means
the two exits you mark BECOME a pair — and their former partners pair
with each other — not that the two exits trade destinations. Under
rev 9, click the exit and then the exit you want it to connect TO
(the hint now says so); already-connected exits are refused. Earlier
games keep the swap their logs were validated against. Test pins the
full four-way rewiring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtesting read the card right and the engine had it wrong. "Placing
the A tokens on one set of exits & the B tokens on the other" means
the two exits you mark BECOME a pair — and their former partners pair
with each other — not that the two exits trade destinations. Under
rev 9, click the exit and then the exit you want it to connect TO
(the hint now says so); already-connected exits are refused. Earlier
games keep the swap their logs were validated against. Test pins the
full four-way rewiring.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"Random" read as random ACTIONS, and a revealed random pick is barely
a mystery anyway. The fourth workshop button is now "mystery": the
server rolls the temperament and keeps it — the join line records it
for replay, the drive loop plays it, but the room tells the table
only "mystery". Roster and scoresheet show ⚙ mystery; the machine's
behavior is the only tell.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The lobby's automaton row gains "random" (the server already rolled
when no style was named — now the choice is offered). And each
automaton's temperament shows beside its name on the in-game
scoresheet in the handwritten face, so you always know whether the
machine across the maze wants your gold or your blood.
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>
The edge-click dispatch attached the tapped number card only for
wall attacks, so the warp wand's first use could never receive its
charges ("a wand's first use needs a number card" no matter what),
and wall of fire silently burned one turn instead of its NUMBER.
Cell-target casts had the same gap for duration terrain. The attached
number now rides every edge and cell cast.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The edge-click dispatch attached the tapped number card only for
wall attacks, so the warp wand's first use could never receive its
charges ("a wand's first use needs a number card" no matter what),
and wall of fire silently burned one turn instead of its NUMBER.
Cell-target casts had the same gap for duration terrain. The attached
number now rides every edge and cell cast.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One command per beat — 1.5 seconds, the replay's 1x cadence — each
broadcast with its board state as it lands, starting a beat after
the human's own action settles. The pump is per-room, re-entrancy
guarded, and stops the moment the maze wants a human (or the game
ends). Watching an automaton stalk your treasure across the maze is
now a spectacle instead of a teleport.
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>
Live chat interleaved correctly, but a reload sank every past message
to the bottom: the rejoin sent the whole game history first and the
chat history after. Talk is now a tableTalk event in the room's event
stream at the moment it was said — the room file already preserved
the interleaving, since chat lines append between command lines — so
rejoining players read the banter between the battle lines where it
happened. The separate chatHistory message retires; unread counting
rides the event stream instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every player-facing D4 roll now lands in the chronicle as pips with
its purpose: "🎲 alice rolls a 3 — aiming at the unseen — only a 1
finds them." A shared rollD4 helper threads the generic dieRolled
event through blind staggers and swings, pit leaps, ooze and pit
struggles, and the invisible/shrink miss rolls — the table sees the
die land, exactly as it would in person. Rolls whose numbers already
showed (the troll's swing, the misdirection direction, the opening
roll-off) keep their lines.
And the physical die's other job — "any 50-50 call" — gets its
button: 🎲 beside the say-box in online games (server-rolled,
published through the chat ledger so it persists, replays, and counts
toward unread badges) and under the chronicle in hotseat, rolled on
the device. Chronicle only; no game state touched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rules rev 8 closes the last two fidelity threads. A SPEED bonus turn
burns a turn of duration spells on the hastened wizard — recipient-
counted, per the FAQ's most obscure ruling — with self-cast durations
already burning through the normal turn-start sweep (expiry extracted
into expireEffect so both paths share the cleanup). And nothing can
be created on a DIMENSIONAL WARP token, as the card face always said.
The general-topic FAQ sections (Combat, Line of Sight, Monsters,
Treasures, and five more) join the rules tab verbatim under a double-
ruled divider, completing the FAQ's absorption: card rulings on the
cards, general rulings in the rules.
The four promoted UX items: cell-target spells now dim ineligible
squares (creations mirror emptySquareTarget from the viewer's
knowledge, summons want clear sighted squares, teleport BFSes its
four spaces exactly as the engine does, stone-to-water lights only
stone, dispel lights only creations); hotseat games get the full
replay reel, each step seen from its actor's own seat; a "stop
announcing attacks on this device" link in the fanfare modal (undo
lives beside the notification toggle in the lobby); the corner
inspector now serves only the selected casting card, with every
examine-a-card peek unified on the centered treatment; and the dev
socket URL keys on vite's port instead of hijacking every localhost.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tapping a discarded card summoned the corner inspector beneath the
pile's own overlay — same layering trap the card library had. The
pile now enlarges its card centered above itself, FAQ seal included,
dismissed with a tap anywhere.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The FAQ affordance moves onto the card itself: a small dark seal in
the corner of any card with official rulings, everywhere cards render
— hand, inspector, peek, final reveal, discard pile, card library —
opening the rulings modal on tap (the link, never the text: card
faces stay verbatim card text). The separate inspector buttons and
library chips retire in its favor.
And clicking a library card mid-game no longer summons the App-level
inspector beneath the help modal, greyed out and useless — the
library enlarges its card in its own overlay, centered above the
booklet, seal included.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
An hour of rules archaeology, summarized: DIMENSIONAL WARP denies
LOS explicitly (its tokens stay sightless); the AUTO WARP describes
how to trace sight across a join; and on the lettered wraparounds
the texts are silent — no grant, no denial. The FAQ's Permawarp
rulings even have area effects counting distance through warps. Where
the texts are silent, the edition's own table breaks the tie, and the
table says the open sides see. Board openings carry sight in every
revision (a permissive change: every stored game's log replays
clean); the brief rev-7 restriction and its legacy flag are gone,
along with the sophistry that justified them. The adjacency geometry
stands. The friend's sticky-wand shot through the C opening was legal
after all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cards settle what the morning's feature got wrong. DIMENSIONAL
WARP: "There is no L.O.S. through the warp." The AUTO WARP: "for all
purposes, treat the connected board edges as though they are
adjacent" — an explicit grant, for edges that physically meet at a
corner. The lettered wraparounds get no grant at all: their rule is
about walking. So the pattern is that warps carry movement, not
sight, unless the text says otherwise — and only the aisle corners
say otherwise.
Warps now carry an aisle flag (the 3-player AUTO WARP and the
5-player corner arcs); hasWarpLineOfSight honors only those, with
the adjacency geometry — diagonals through the corner mouth —
unchanged from this morning where it rightfully applies. Games begun
before rev 7 keep the wider sight their logged commands were
validated against, via a legacy flag boardView stamps from the
game's rules revision. Tests pin all three states: lettered mouths
see nothing, aisle mouths see the corner fan, legacy games see
everything they used to.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtesting caught the gap with a sticky wand: a target visible
through the opening but one square off the corridor axis was refused.
The colinear-only model was stricter than the rulebook, whose actual
instruction is to treat the connected edges as adjacent boards with a
straight center-to-center line — and a straight line through a
one-cell opening may run diagonally, exactly as through a doorway.
hasWarpLineOfSight now abuts the far side virtually at the mouth
(rotating when the pairing turns a corner, as aisle warps do), finds
where the center-to-center line crosses the rim, requires that
crossing to fall strictly within the open mouth (corner-grazing stays
blocked — the strict reading), and checks the two legs against real
walls on each side of the seam. hasLineOfSight's core became a shared
segmentClear to serve both legs. The colinear corridor cases remain
as the special case they always were; a new test pins that off-axis
squares are visible through mouths.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"Opportunity Fire isn't letting me use a wand" — the window and the
wand both worked (verified headless); what refused him was the wand's
own first-use rule, which players from wandless editions have never
met: charges are set by a NUMBER card on first use. Selecting an
uncharged wand now says exactly that in the hint strip, before the
engine has to say no.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The home-base star polygon had no pointer-events rule, so clicking
the middle of a home square hit the star instead of the floor — you
had to aim around its points to move or target there. The star and
every other decorative vector (terrain fallbacks, treasure circles,
dim warp rings) are now click-transparent; the floor rect beneath
owns every tap, as the token-art images always did.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tom Jolly's 2002 Rules FAQ settled three table disputes this week
from a text file only I could read. Now it lives in the game: 95
cards gained their FAQ sections (extracted verbatim from the official
document, alias-matched — Slime, Mistbody, Buck and friends resolved
to their proper cards), joining the handful already present for 102
cards with rulings in all. The card faces stay pure card text; an
"Official FAQ" button appears under any enlarged card that has
rulings — the hand inspector, the peek overlay, and as an FAQ chip in
the card library — opening a booklet modal with the rulings and their
provenance: "the cards overrule the rules, and the designer overrules
the table."
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Long card texts were clamped at nine lines and cut off mid-rule,
which is how the Speed argument started: the deciding sentence was
in the hidden part. The type now sizes itself to the text length in
six steps (0.6rem down to 0.375rem for the 550-char Firefly Stick),
and the line clamp is gone. Verified against Fear, the longest card
in play at 482 characters: every word on the face.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"It's not letting me cast Absorb Spell on your Full Shield" — and
Jolly's FAQ says exactly why: "ABSORB SPELL will work on FULL
REFLECTION or REFLECTION, but not FULL SHIELD, as that is not used
against you, but cast upon the player using it." The refusal stands,
now with that reason in the error — and the neighboring case the
engine wrongly refused is fixed: an attacker may answer a reflection
with ABSORB SPELL, nullifying it and taking the reflection card into
their hand, with the original spell then landing unturned.
And the card face corrects my own hours-old work: ANTI-ANTI "does not
work against escape, such as SHRINK, TELEPORT, or INVISIBLE" — so
under rules rev 6 it can no longer pin a teleport escape. Earlier
games keep their stored chains.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"When I cast Speed, it doesn't seem to do anything" — the engine had
refused correctly (actions end when you pick up an object) and said
so in a toast, but a toast fades in five seconds and leaves no trace.
Refusals now also land in the chronicle as "— reason —" lines, the
way hotseat games always recorded them, so the answer to "why did
nothing happen" survives long enough to be read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A say-box under the chronicle sends table talk to the room; messages
land in the event log itself, styled as parchment asides — banter
between the battle lines, the way it happens at a real table. Talk is
seat-authenticated, stripped and capped at 300 chars, rate-limited by
the existing bucket, persisted as chat lines in the room file (the
game replay ignores them; the room keeps its last 500), and replayed
to anyone joining. Async games get unread badges in the lobby ledger
(💬3), cleared by watching the table, and catch-up replays speak the
lines at the step where they were said. Public to the whole room, no
whispers — and no chat in hotseat, where the table talks for itself.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
moves like a giant, and the boards are diagram-verified
TELEPORT as a counteraction (official FAQ: "the attack has no chance
of hitting you"): the defender names an escape square within four
spaces, the escape resolves before anything lands, and an ANTI-ANTI
pins their boots to the floor. Additive — no revision gate needed.
FILL SQUARE WITH SLIME holds spells now: an attack cast at the slime
sticks in the gel (leaving the discard pile), springs once at whoever
is inside or next enters, and counteractions against the trapped
blast cannot touch its caster — reflections vanish into the ooze. A
five-point waterbolt washes the slime and its cargo away, and the
waterwall waves clear slime from their path.
BIG MAN, under rules rev 5, finally moves like the card says: he
pushes players and monsters down the corridor ahead of him (stuck or
unpushable occupants block his advance), steps over a pit, tacks, or
killer ooze for two movement points without ever entering the square
(click two cells beyond the hazard), and monsters may not enter his
square. All gated so stored games replay under their own rules.
The boards were never wrong — the rulebook's Set-Up Diagram photo
confirms every pairing the code already had: 2p crossed, 3p stair
with the Aisle Warp arc, 4p/6p straight-across, 5p plus with all four
corner arcs. The stale TODOs are gone, replaced by tests pinning each
letter pair, and relocation's "only opposite board edges connect"
(which discards the aisle warp) is pinned too. Wall of Fire vs
Waterbolt turned out to be implemented and tested all along — its
TODO comment was the only thing wrong.
Also: hotseat saves now request durable storage (iOS evicts
unprotected origins under pressure).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
makeRoomCode checked only the in-memory map, which covers every live
and restored room — but a file that failed to restore stays on disk
with no map entry, and a new room taking its code would append a
second game into the orphaned file, corrupting both. The generator
now rerolls on disk presence too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The static server sent no Cache-Control at all, so browsers
heuristically cached index.html — and a stale index.html pins its
user to last deploy's hashed assets no matter how often they reload.
That is how "watch the whole game" could show someone an app without
the feature minutes after it shipped. Hashed assets now cache forever
(immutable); everything else revalidates.
And per playtesting: a finished game offers no actions — isYourTurn
now requires the playing phase, which retires the pick-up/drop/punch/
discard/end-turn row the moment the trophy drops.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The seed + command log has been the whole game all along; now it can
be watched. Finished games offer "⟲ Watch the whole game" beside the
face-up hands: the server replays every command from seq 0 through
the same redacted catch-up pipeline (the 200-step window remains a
live-game courtesy; full replays wait for the game to finish), and
the reel plays it titled "The whole tale, from the deal" with new
1×/2×/4× speed controls for the long tellings. Each viewer rewatches
from their own seat — hidden information stays hidden in the retelling
exactly as it was at the table.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
142 "moves" was really 142 logged commands — steps, spells, passes,
end-turns alike. The line now says so.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"The creature-1 takes 2 damage" — the creature events carried only
internal ids, so the log printed them. creatureAttacked, Touched, and
Damaged now carry the creature's kind, and the lines read like a
table: "The Wraith strikes!", "The Troll swings (rolled 3)!", "The
Skeleton takes 2 damage."
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
At the table the discards sit face-up for anyone to leaf through. The
view now carries the pile (deck order stays secret), the "discards N"
count in the rail became a link, and it opens a booklet-styled reader:
every cast-away card newest first, tap any to enlarge. And the
chronicle stops mumbling "discards 1 card(s)" — it names names, so a
wraith's theft reads "bob discards Fireball," exactly what a table
would see as the card hits the pile.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The WRAITH card assumes the window exists — "REFLECTIONs used on the
wraith's touch will damage the wraith" — but creature damage applied
instantly, so BLUNT had nothing to catch, as playtesting found. Under
revision 4 every creature blow against a wizard opens the same
counteraction stack a spell does: the wraith's entry touch, the
democratic monster's claw, and commanded troll/skeleton/shadow
attacks. The blow's damage rides the stack; BLUNT halves it (round
up); reflections work by name against creatures — half back for
REFLECTION, the whole blow for FULL REFLECTION — landing on the
creature, not its controller; FULL SHIELD correctly does nothing
("does not stop any physical attack"); the wraith's card theft is a
secondary effect that lands only if damage does. No aim-miss rolls
against invisible or shrunk defenders — the creature is already in
the square. The attack fanfare shows the creature's own card.
Earlier revisions keep the instant touch so every stored game — and
the live one that found this — replays unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Sticky Wand attaches its webs as a sustained effect with the
engine-internal id "sticky-web", which is not a printed card — and
cardDef throws on unknown ids. The scoresheet's new spell chips and
the chronicle's settles-over/wears-off lines both called it on
sustained ids, so the first webbing killed every render: mid-game the
actions bar died, and after a reload the whole table came up blank.
A spellName lookup now names synthetic effects properly ("Sticky
Wand webs") and falls back to the raw id rather than ever throwing,
and the chip peek only opens ids the card library can actually show.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Interrupt and Opportunity Fire were fully playable out of turn — tap
the card while another wizard acts — but nothing said so, and cards
are otherwise inert out of turn, so playtesters never tried. Now,
whenever the moment is live (someone else's turn, no attack or chaos
pending, past round one, not hotseat), those cards wear a pulsing
golden glow in your hand and the rail says to tap one. The glow
respects prefers-reduced-motion.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
DROP OBJECT resolved correctly — the treasure fell — but the
chronicle announced "The attack is completely stopped," because the
attackResolved event branded any attack that dealt zero damage as
stopped. Utility attacks deal zero by design; only an attack that was
TRYING to wound counts as stopped when nothing lands. Tests pin both
sides: uncountered DROP OBJECT reports unstopped and drops the
treasure; FULL SHIELD reports stopped and the treasure stays carried.
Not deployed — a live game is in progress.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
WARD's text says "you may play at that time" — under rules revision 3
the choice is made by setting the trap: an armWard command toggles it
on your own turn (your secret; a private wardSet event and a rail
note), and the spring fires only while set, consuming the card and
the arming together. Async games keep their agency without an
interrupt window, exactly as the ambush system solved this before.
CHAOS gains its printed interactions: "FULL SHIELD removes a player
from participation" — a defender's shield sits them out instead of
stopping the spell, and after the counter chain every bystander gets
a shield window in seat order (chaosPending; queue head owes a
response in lobby summaries, the rail says whose hand hangs in the
balance) before the pile forms among the unshielded. "REFLECTIONS
have no effect" — both reflections are refused as counters. ABSORB
SPELL still eats the whole thing through the existing absorb path.
Both changes are frozen behind deckRev 3 so every stored game — and
the live one — replays byte-for-byte under its own rules. Five new
tests cover armed/unarmed wards, shielded defenders and bystanders,
the reflection refusal, and the legacy auto-ward.
Not deployed — a live game is in progress.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"It is possible, though time-consuming, to punch a wall down. A wall
takes 20 points of damage to destroy; a door takes 15. Any attack
against an inanimate object counts as your one attack for the turn."
Damage accumulates per edge in wallDamage (remapped through sector
rotations, public in the view), fed two ways: a punchWall command for
the bare-fisted (1 point, from a square touching the edge) and attack
spells cast at an edge target — LOS to the wall for L.O.S. cards,
touching it for same-square cards, amplify and power-attack honored,
wand charges spent, no counteractions since stonework plays none.
Thrown daggers and rocks clatter to the floor at the foot of the
wall. At the threshold the edge opens through the same override path
destroy-wall uses.
On the table: damaged walls wear spreading cracks, an attack card's
hint offers "or a wall line to batter it" with the edge layer live,
and a "Punch a wall…" stamp arms a click-the-wall mode. The chronicle
counts the blows: "alice batters the wall with bare fists — 3/20."
Not deployed — a live game is in progress.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"If casting a spell, or checking line of sight through the AUTO WARP,
treat it as a straight line, and the two connected boards as though
they were adjacent" — and the lettered openings reconnect edges the
same way. hasWarpLineOfSight models it: the line must run straight
down the corridor, out one mouth, and in through the paired mouth,
with both corridor legs clear and neither mouth filled solid. The new
sightBetween (direct or through-a-warp) is now the game's LOS check
everywhere — spells, ambush triggers, Around The Corner, the
visionstone sweep, and the targeting dim on the client.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A "Send word" section with the keeper's addresses: email, Bluesky,
Mastodon, and the home roost at kestrelsnest.social — for feedback,
bug reports, and faint praise alike.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"Not applicable in a 2-player game." — the card face. New games deal
from deck revision 2, which removes it when exactly two wizards sit
down; three or more keep it. The revision travels in GameConfig and
the persisted start line, and stored games without one replay against
the original build — changing an existing game's deck composition
would scramble its deterministic replay. Test pins all three cases:
removed at two, present at three, present in legacy two-player games.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Hover A record resolves, so og:image and twitter:image move from
the sslip.io fallback to wizwar.kestrelsnest.social.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A three-reviewer sweep for tells of piecemeal machine generation,
every finding verified against the code before touching it. No
behavior changes; the full suite passes unchanged (plus two
strengthened pins).
Engine: removed four void-silenced fossils (a parseEdgeKey call
voided where it stood, stoneEffect's ignored cardId parameter, the
actualTarget remnant in doCast, a voided loop variable in shadow
upkeep); fixed the initialize-then-overwrite narration in
spawnCreature; replaced a filter(() => false) no-op; waterwall now
rides waveFromEdge instead of carrying its own verbatim copy (and the
single-caller washBack wrapper went with it); blind wall-bumps and
LOS blockers each collapsed to one implementation; the wand-id list
and the "permanent" duration sentinel became named constants; the
ambush number local no longer shadows the imported numberValue
function; assorted reviewer-aimed phrasings rewritten as the
constraints they guard.
Server/deploy: the protocol header now documents all eleven message
types; dropped an eslint pragma with no eslint, a test script with no
tests, and an rsync exclude anchored at a path that never existed
(the real data/ dir now excluded); the Caddy vhost has one source of
truth; stale "pending DNS" note removed — the record resolves.
Web: ~90 lines of CSS swallowed verbatim into a mobile media query
deduplicated; the reduced-motion guard on the board now actually
stops the marked-cell pulse; one shared color module replaces two
drifted palettes; an orphaned doc comment rejoined its function.
Tests: the ten-times-pasted helper block became test/helpers.ts;
wave-numbered files renamed for the behaviors they pin; deliberation
comments and void-ed corpses of unwritten assertions deleted; silent
seed-dependent early-returns now fail loudly; one assertion that
compared a value to itself now pins the home-translation it meant to;
the stored-log single-number command form gained the explicit
compatibility test it deserved.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Security review of the accumulator commit found three holes, all in
the unauthenticated hotseat ping. Worst: Number(undefined) is NaN,
and NaN survives Math.min/max — one malformed report would have
poisoned commandsPlayed and friends permanently (NaN serializes to
null). All numeric fields now pass through a NaN-proof clamp with a
fallback. The dedupe ledger caps at 50k hotseat entries so spammed
random ids cannot grow stats.json without bound, and each connection
may deliver at most 20 reports — a real device finishes a handful of
games; a firehose is abuse.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The rulebook tab had it, but the quick how-to never stated the most
basic number in the game. The movement section now opens with it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Instead of re-scanning every room's log on demand, stats.json now
accumulates beside the room files: each room is remembered at its
highest counted stage (created → started → finished), so boots and
replays reconcile without double-counting, and the tally will survive
any future pruning of old rooms. Finished games contribute their
moves, table-time, and manner of victory exactly once, at the moment
of victory.
And with an accumulator to receive them, hotseat games finally count:
each local game mints an anonymous id, pings "started" with its
player count, tracks its own between-moves clock, and on the final
move reports counts only — commands, minutes, players, win reason.
No names, no moves leave the device. The server dedupes by id, clamps
everything to sane ranges, and the booklet's tally now shows how many
of the games were hotseat tables.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A new tab in the help booklet answers "how much is this getting
played?" from the ledgers themselves: games chronicled (begun and
fought to a finish), distinct wizards seated, every spell, step, and
punch recorded, time at the table estimated by the clock between
moves (gaps over ten minutes don't count — async games tell the
truth), victories split by treasure-theft versus last standing, the
longest game, the fullest table, and the date the first game was
dealt. Computed server-side over the in-memory rooms with a 60-second
cache, fetched over the socket when the tab opens.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sharing the game's URL now unfurls a proper card: Open Graph and
Twitter meta tags with a 1200x630 preview composed from the physical
set's own counter art — WIZ-WAR in tall caps over the parchment, the
tagline in script, a row of wizard, troll, and treasure tokens, and
the fan-project line beneath. The favicon becomes the purple wizard
in his black hat, cropped from the counter sheet; the your-turn
variant wears a red badge, replacing the old lettered SVGs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Elimination destroys the evidence: a killed wizard's cards pass to
the killer, a treasure-lost wizard's go to the discard — so the
post-game reveal showed "empty-handed" for exactly the player whose
hand everyone wants to see. Both elimination paths now snapshot the
hand at the moment of death (finalHand), the finished view serves it,
and the gallery marks those rows "as they fell" in script. Because
rooms replay from the command log, already-finished games show their
fallen hands too. Test kills a wizard holding a Fireball and a 6 and
finds them in the reveal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Once the game is won, the view stops keeping secrets: revealedHands
carries every player's cards, and the table replaces your hand row
with a face-up gallery — each wizard's name (trophy on the winner)
beside their final hand, tap any card to enlarge, "empty-handed"
written in script for those who died with nothing. In hotseat this is
the thing the winner passes around after dismissing the fanfare; in
async games it greets each player when they open the finished game.
Redaction still guards every phase before "finished."
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Winning showed only as a small slip in the rail — anticlimactic, as
playtesting put it. The engine now records HOW the game was won
(winReason: treasures carried home, or last wizard standing) alongside
the winner, the view carries it, and the finish opens a gold-ringed
modal: trophy, the winner's name in tall caps, and the manner of
victory in a handwritten line. "Behold the final board" dismisses it
to the finished table. In hotseat the one screen proclaims to the
whole table at once; in async games each player is greeted by it when
they next open the game.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Illusionary Attack, Deja-Vu, Card Erasure, and the other name-a-card
spells asked for exact spell names from memory. The field is now a
native datalist: type a few letters and matching card names appear,
tuned per card — Illusionary Attack offers only attack spells (it can
only pretend to be one), Drop Object offers only the movable objects
plus Treasure, and the rest offer the whole playable pool.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The engine has always accepted it — edge target, line of sight to the
edge, open corridor only — but the client's EDGE_CARDS list never
included illusion-wall, so selecting it offered no clickable wall
lines and the card was simply uncastable. The LOS dimming that
appears alongside is correct and stays: placement requires sight of
the wall line, so the lit squares show where the shimmering can go.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
view.sustained was never rendered — every duration spell in play was
invisible, Big Man included, as playtesting found. Now each player's
scoresheet row lists the spells on them as violet chips (name and
turns remaining, tap to read the card), beside their displayed cards.
And on the board itself, Big Man makes the wizard token tower half
again as large, Shrink dwindles it — the exact at-a-glance "I have
become big" the table owes you.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tapping a creature you command now does both things at once: selects
it for orders AND opens its card in the inspector corner, with a
stats line pinned beneath — hits left, moves left, attack ready or
spent (or barred on the turn it appears; the shadow reports itself
unharmed by ordinary damage). The same stats ride along on any
hold-to-peek of a creature, and they are derived live, so marching
the monster updates the numbers as you spend its moves. While
commanding, the hint strip carries the same line beside the hand,
with a "done" to dismiss. Deselecting closes the card.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The press-and-hold card peek lived only on the floor rects, and any
creature or wizard token sitting there swallowed the pointer events —
so the democratic monster, whose plain tap selects it for commands,
had no path to its card at all. The hold gesture now lives on the
tokens too (a fired hold swallows the tap so nothing double-fires),
and the board suppresses the mobile long-press callout so the gesture
stays clean on phones.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The engine always warped a creature marched off a lettered opening —
verified headless — but the table offered no way to ask for it: cell
clicks for a selected creature matched only geometric neighbors, and
the warp arrows moved only your wizard. Now a selected creature
standing on an opening lights the arrow (and, per the existing cue,
its destination), the arrow marches the creature through, and
clicking the far mouth directly does the same.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Summoned monsters act during their controller's turn, but nothing
reminded you — a democratic monster in play was invisibly waiting on
every single player. Now each creature you may command this turn gets
a moss-green slip in the paper rail: name, moves remaining, whether
its attack is ready (respecting no-attack-on-creation and the
democratic monster's one-attack-per-round), and the tap-to-command
hint. The democratic monster reminds every player on their turn,
since all players get to move it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"What does a rosebush do again?" now has an in-game answer: press and
hold any square (450ms) to open the card behind whatever occupies it —
creature, terrain, dropped object, warp token, or boobytrap marker —
in the view-only inspector corner. A plain click that claims no game
action peeks too: out of turn, every tap reads; on your turn, taps
beyond your reach read instead of doing nothing, and clicking an
opponent's creature with nothing selected reads its card. Priority
when a square holds several stories: creature, then terrain, then the
topmost dropped object.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
At the table, a displayed card sits in front of its wizard for all to
see — Master Key, Wizardblade, the stones, wands. The view always
carried every player's displayed cards, but only your own hand marked
them. Now each scoresheet row lists that player's face-up cards as
parchment chips, wands with their remaining charges as pips, and
tapping a chip enlarges the card in the inspector corner, view-only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Selecting an L.O.S. card now drops every square you cannot see into
shadow, leaving eligible targets lit — computed by the engine's own
hasLineOfSight over the player's VIEW, so illusion walls you still
believe in block your aim, stone and bushes and the Big Man block
everyone's, and Around The Corner widens the light one bend when
attached. ADJACENT cards light just your square and its four
neighbors. The shade paints over tokens and wizards alike, and
switches off while arming an ambush, since ambushes aim at the
future. A new sightedCellsFor lives in the engine view module so the
client can never disagree with the rules.
Speedstone, meanwhile, only took effect at next turn's allowance
recompute — displaying it mid-turn granted nothing, as playtesting
found. It now bumps the current allowance by one on display (a delta,
so number-card movement already played survives), unless SLOW or a
zeroed allowance says otherwise. Test covers the immediate grant and
the persistence into later turns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Being attacked was announced only by a slip in the paper rail, easy
to miss mid-turn — the playtest complaint was real. Now an attack on
you (or a counter to your spell) opens a modal: the attacker's name
in red Oswald caps, the actual card face enlarged, the number backing
it if any, a bare 👊 for a punch, and a single "To arms!" stamp.
Dismissing it leaves the actionable prompt in the hint strip beside
your hand — where the counteraction cards you would tap actually
live — with the "let it resolve" escape. The rail keeps a one-line
reminder. Each new decision point in a counter-chain re-announces.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Placing the two tokens worked, but using them asked too much: the
only affordance was a "Step through the warp" button in the actions
row, easy to miss and far from the board. Now standing on a warp
token pulses its twin with the same green dashed ring the lettered
edge openings use, and clicking the twin steps you through — one
gesture, learned once, working for both kinds of warp. The button
stays for those who found it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Dimensional Warp, Trader, Redirection, and Relocate Sector all take
two clicks, but only the hint bar acknowledged the first — the board
itself sat unchanged until the second click landed. The first chosen
square now wears a pulsing amber dashed ring (same rhythm as the warp
destination ring, still under prefers-reduced-motion) until the spell
completes or is cancelled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The server code learns to distrust strangers: a 64KB WebSocket payload
cap (the ws default is 100MB — an easy OOM on a 1GB droplet), a
per-connection token-bucket rate limit, caps on concurrent sockets,
total rooms, rooms per connection, pending transfer codes, and seats
per myGames query. Player names are stripped of control characters
and bounded at 24 chars, room codes at 8, serialized commands at
16KB before they touch the append-only log. Catch-up replays — a
full game rebuild per request — get a 3-second cooldown. Unexpected
exceptions now log server-side and send strangers a bare "internal
error" instead of the exception text.
One real bug found by the sweep: myGames compared the client's raw
seat token against the stored hash, so the lobby ledger silently
matched nothing since tokens were hashed at rest — and the comparison
wasn't timing-safe either. It now goes through the same timingSafeEqual
path as every other seat check, via a new exported seatTokenValid.
The droplet tightens too: the game server binds loopback (HOST env)
so port 8787 no longer answers the internet — it was reachable
directly, plaintext, bypassing Caddy — and ufw now allows only ssh,
80, and 443. The systemd unit gains a sandbox (ProtectSystem=strict,
ProtectHome, NoNewPrivileges, PrivateTmp, MemoryMax=700M so a runaway
process is killed and restarted before it takes the box down) and
execs tsx directly instead of through npx. Caddy adds HSTS, nosniff,
frame-denial, and no-referrer headers; setup-droplet.sh records all
of it for future rebuilds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The rulebook's movable-object list is wider than the stones: "magic
stones, treasure chests, the dagger, the large rock, and the
wizardblade" — and the expansion expects wands to change hands, since
"its remaining charges go with it." A new isMovableObject helper in
the engine names that full set, doDropObject honors it, and the hint
bar's "Drop it here" button follows suit. Charges are keyed by card
instance, so a dropped wand carries them to whoever picks it up —
covered by new tests, along with the refusal to drop spell cards.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The engine always knew how — dropObject and pickUpObject were in the
command set from the start — but the table never offered a hand for
it. Now selecting a magic stone (or any object card) on your turn
shows a "Drop it here" button in the hint bar, and standing on a
square with objects lying on it offers a "Pick up <name>" stamp per
object, disabled once your actions have ended (picking anything up
ends them, per the rulebook). The chronicle narrates both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A handwritten "about this game — a labor of love" link on the box lid
opens a new About tab in the booklet: what Wiz-War is, that Tom Jolly
created it in 1983, that this is a faithful reproduction of the
out-of-print Chessex sixth edition (with its one expansion) that Eric
and his friends played for countless hours in the early nineties —
rebuilt from that very copy, card by photographed card, wall by
verified wall, with the original hand-inked token art. It names Steve
Jackson Games as the current rightsholder, states plainly that this
is an unofficial, non-commercial fan work made with love and
admiration, and closes by pointing anyone the game delights toward
the edition currently in print and a real table.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Caddy on the droplet now answers for both the sslip.io hostname and
wizwar.kestrelsnest.social, fetching the latter's certificate
automatically the moment DNS resolves. The domain's authoritative
nameservers are Hover's, so the required A record must be added there;
a matching record was also placed in the (currently inert)
DigitalOcean zone for future-proofing. README updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eric's diagnosis: "in the moment" interruption cards are worthless in
correspondence play — there is no moment. The answer was already in
the game: WARD is a contingency card, and ambushes generalize it. On
your turn, playing Interrupt or Opportunity Fire now arms an ambush:
commit it with an attack from your hand (plus an optional number
card) and a trigger — an opponent entering your line of sight, coming
beside you, or grabbing a treasure — and it springs automatically
when the condition occurs, whether you are watching or asleep. The
sprung attack opens the normal counteraction stack, so the victim
gets their defense (asynchronously, like any attack). Committed cards
leave your hand until the trap springs or you disarm it; ambushes are
invisible to everyone but their owner (view-level redaction), die
with their owner, stay armed if the shot is momentarily illegal, and
honor the no-combat first round. Live play in the moment still works
too — and the client now actually offers it (the old UI never let
you click those cards out of turn). The rail shows your armed traps
with a disarm control; the chronicle announces AMBUSH! when one
springs. 124 tests passing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
"While you were away": returning to a game with unseen moves shows a
banner — "You missed N moves. Watch what happened" — that opens a
replay reel. The server rebuilds the game and captures a redacted
per-move view for the viewer (own hand only, capped at the last 200
moves); the client plays the reel on a full board with the actor and
humanized events captioned per step, auto-advancing with pause,
step-back/forward, arrow-key control, and skip-to-now. Seen progress
is tracked per room in the browser (every state broadcast now carries
the log sequence), so the banner only appears when there is genuinely
something to watch.
Attention between turns is now named, not just signaled: game
summaries carry WHY a game waits on you — your turn, counteract
(you're being attacked mid-someone-else's-turn), forced discard, or a
pending interruption — the ledger prints it ("UNDER ATTACK —
respond!"), and browser notifications say "you are under attack in
GNSK!" rather than a generic your-turn.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Waiting rooms now show the six wizard standees: tap to claim yours,
claimed ones gray out with the claimant named for screen readers, the
roster shows each player's chosen standee (or "choosing..."), and
conflicts are refused first-come. Choices sync live to everyone in
the room, resolve to first-free defaults for the undecided when the
host flips the boards, persist in the start line of the room log (so
restored games keep their colors), and flow through the same engine
config field the hotseat picker uses. Also fixed: the static-serving
realpath guard crashed the dev server when no client build exists —
it now 404s static requests instead. Verified end to end: claim,
conflict refusal, second pick, start, and in-game colorIndex 5/2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The naming round now shows the six real wizard standees; each player
taps theirs before typing their name, claimed standees gray out, and
the next player defaults to the first free one. The choice travels as
an optional colors array in the engine config, the view exposes each
player's colorIndex, and the board, score sheet, treasure chests, and
wizard art all follow the chosen color instead of seat order —
persisting through hotseat saves. Verified: Alice claimed the yellow
standee and marched onto the board as the yellow wizard with yellow
treasure chests. (Online rooms still assign by seat order; a lobby
color picker can reuse the same config field later.)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The comma-separated name field is gone. Hotseat now starts with a
2-6 count picker and "Gather N wizards", which opens a naming round
in the pass-the-device style: "Wizard 1 of 3 — what is your name?",
type it, pass the device on; the last wizard's button reads "Flip the
boards" and starts the game. Duplicate and empty names are refused
in place, the roster-so-far shows beneath, and "never mind" backs
out. Verified end to end: three names entered, game started, opening
handoff went to the die-roll winner.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The box lid combined width:100% with 2.6rem side padding and no
box-sizing reset, so the card ran off the right edge of real phones
(Join, Play Here, and Claim all clipped). A global border-box reset
fixes the class of bug; the hotseat and claim rows now wrap, their
inputs go full-width on narrow screens, and the lid tightens its
padding and title below 900px.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Selecting any card in hand now also shows a 1.55x (1.3x on phones)
enlarged rendering floating at the corner — full card text readable
without pinch-zooming — with a dismiss button, auto-reset when the
selection changes, and the board left clear for choosing a target.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
At phone width the layout now flows board -> actions -> your hand ->
turn slip -> score sheet -> chronicle, instead of burying the cards
beneath the paperwork below the fold. The board caps at 56dvh (dvh
throughout, for iOS's shifting address bar), the chronicle stops
hogging height, and the masthead holds one line. The hand is a
thumb-swipeable card row; pinch-zoom stays enabled for reading fine
card text.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The internet-facing static handler now decodes the URL (rejecting bad
encodings and null bytes), anchors the containment check with a
trailing separator so sibling-prefix directories cannot slip past,
and realpath-resolves the final file to defeat symlink escapes —
serving only what provably lives inside the built client directory.
Deployed and probed live: normal requests 200, literal and
percent-encoded traversal attempts both 403.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Production shape: one Node process serves the built client and the
websocket on a single port (SPA fallback, same-origin wss in the
client), with Caddy terminating auto-TLS in front. The droplet
(nyc3, $6/mo) runs it under systemd as an unprivileged user with room
files on the persistent disk at /var/lib/wizwar/rooms — deploys and
reboots cannot eat a game. deploy/ carries the one-time droplet setup
script, the systemd unit, the Caddyfile, an everyday deploy script
(build locally, rsync, install, restart), and a README. Live at
https://wizwar.104.236.96.198.sslip.io via sslip.io, so TLS needed no
DNS setup at all. Verified over the real internet: room created,
second player joined, expansion game started, hands dealt, room file
persisted. Fixed en route: rsync's unanchored "data" exclude was
stripping the engine's card database, and tsx must ship (it is the
runtime).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A square can legally hold terrain, a wizard or three, two treasures
(the win condition itself), floor objects, creatures, a warp token,
and a boobytrap disc all at once. The cell is now zoned: terrain
underlays the whole square, wizards fan across the top, treasures fan
across the bottom, floor objects stack bottom-left, creatures fan in
from the right, the dimensional warp shrinks into the top-left
corner, and boobytrap discs sit top-right. Two treasures on a home
base — the winning tableau — now reads as two treasures.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
All 45 tokens cropped from Eric's photos of the physical counter
sheets by connected-component segmentation (with cable/reflection
filtering, merged-blob rescue, and one hand-tuned crop for the red
treasure the charging cable was hugging). Terrain squares, monsters,
wizards, treasures, floor objects, and dimensional warps now render
the genuine hand-inked art: solid stone, thornbush, rosebush, killer
ooze, dustcloud, slime, tacks, pit, safe, skeleton, troll, wraith,
fire imp, democratic monster, shadow, alter ego, dagger, rock,
master key, magic stones and wands, the six wizard standees, and the
six color-keyed treasure chests. Wizards and creatures wear a thin
controller-color ring; art tokens cast a soft cardboard shadow;
terrain art passes clicks through to the floor while wizards and
creatures stay clickable. Every vector rendering remains in place as
automatic fallback (USE_TOKEN_ART flag plus per-kind mapping), per
Eric's request. Sprites live in packages/web/public/tokens at 144px.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Hotseat runs the engine entirely client-side; no server is involved.
The lobby takes comma-separated names (2-6 wizards), and the game
plays through the same table UI, with one addition: a full-screen
hand-off card between actors — "pass the device to Morgana, tap when
only they can see the screen" — shown whenever the needed input moves
to another wizard (turns, counteractions, forced discards,
interrupts). Each player sees only their own hand while seated. The
game saves itself to localStorage after every command (config +
command log, replayed on resume — the server's own determinism
trick), so "set the game aside" keeps it and "abandon game" forgets
it; a Resume Hotseat button appears whenever a save exists. Fixed en
route: the engine's structuredClone cannot digest Svelte's reactive
proxies, so hotseat snapshots state before every engine call.
Verified live: 3-player game started, reloaded, resumed, turn ended,
device handed to the next wizard.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
