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>
"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 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>
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>
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>
"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>
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>
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>
Raw seat tokens no longer touch disk or long-lived memory: rooms store
sha-256 hashes, joins compare timing-safely, sessions keep the raw
token they authenticated with only for minting transfer phrases, and
legacy plaintext room files still load (hashed on read). Verified:
rejoin and transfer both work, and the room file contains only
hostTokenHash — no raw token anywhere.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every room is now an append-only JSONL file (data/rooms/CODE.jsonl):
a birth-certificate meta line, then every join, start, and command.
Because the engine is deterministic, seed + log IS the game — on boot
the server replays each file and reconstructs the exact state, hands,
deck order, and chronicle. Verified live: create, join, play, KILL
the server, restart ("restored 1 room(s) from disk"), rejoin with the
seat token — identical positions, deck count, and hand, with the
chronicle history redelivered redacted per player. The client
remembers its seat (name, room, token) in localStorage and walks back
to the table automatically on connect, clearing the memory if the
seat is stale; a quiet "leave table" control forgets it on purpose.
This is the foundation phase 2 (play-by-turn) sits on: games now wait
indefinitely for their players — and debugging restarts cost nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5