Commit Graph
66 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 55c76cf20e Game over unmasks the mystery machines
Hands already go face-up when the maze is won; now the roster does
too — a secret automaton's row reads 'archmage berserker (was a
mystery)' once the game finishes, broadcast with the final command
from either a human or the bot pump. Mid-game, the mood stays its
own business.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-18 00:38:42 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 1d7407cb20 A reflected Lightning Blast ends the caster's turn on the spot (rev 28)
FAQ: 'If this gets FULLY REFLECTED, you lose the rest of your turn and
cannot draw cards (in addition to damage).' When the returned bolt
stuns its own caster mid-turn, their remaining actions end at once and
the end-of-turn draw comes up empty (new turn.drawForbidden flag); the
normal stun still costs them the next turn. The affected player sees
'Your own bolt has left you reeling' in place of the usual spent-turn
slip. Older revisions played on and stored games replay so.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 23:47:25 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 2bb2ca62d8 Reflected Swap Meet: the reflector chooses the trade (rev 27)
'FULL REFLECTION lets the other player decide which objects, if any,
will be swapped' — the reflector's choice now rides their counteract
(params.cardId, reflector's item first), resolved with the roles
swapped when the reflection settles; 'none' or no choice trades
nothing. The client walks the reflector through the same give-and-take
picker, with a 'swap nothing' refusal.

Also from room XRT7: the trade picker now honors each room's own rules
revision (older rooms trade only object-typed cards), so it can no
longer offer a wizardblade a rev-25 engine will quietly refuse — and a
fizzled swap finally says so in the log instead of vanishing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 22:36:00 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 00517e08b1 Pacts are honored; Swap Meet trades items, not card names (rev 26)
The pact fix: a clockwork no longer attacks a wizard it holds a BUDDY
pact on — Eric watched one sign the pact and punch him the next turn.
A pact is torn up for exactly one thing: a kill. And the post-attack
pact is signed only by a wizard who wants OUT of the fight (hauling
gold, bleeding, or with other enemies left) — a healthy duelist keeps
its options, and mutual-pact stalemates stay out of bot wars.

Swap Meet drops the 'name a card' prompt for a real trade picker:
click the other trader, choose one of your carried items, then claim
one of their displayed items. Rules rev 26 widens the engine's match
from object-typed cards to every movable object (daggers, rocks,
wands, stones); older games matched narrowly and replay so.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 22:14:57 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 06faea0c79 The reflected-attack window (rules rev 25)
A FULL REFLECTION's returned spell is a fresh attack on its own caster —
who, per the owner's ruling, gets a defender's counteraction window
against it (absorb the blast, shield it, or FULL REFLECTION again: the
ping-pong war ends when the cards run out). The reflection now settles
into a new stack with the roles swapped and the damage pre-priced
(numbers, amplifies, and surviving counters already applied); the blow
returns to its sender unerringly, with no fresh hit rolls. onResolved
effects run with the swapped roles, so a reflected IDIOT now afflicts
its own caster. Earlier revisions land the blow instantly and stored
games replay unchanged.

Automatons price the incoming reflected damage off the stack; the attack
modal announces 'Your own spell comes screaming back!' with the inbound
total.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 22:02:16 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 2d53ba4bc0 Waves spend their force as they travel (rev 24); bots wield Destroy Wall
Rules rev 24: a waterwall wave that finds a victim dist cells from its
source has only range-dist spaces of push left — a range-2 wave throws its
adjacent victim two spaces but a victim at its far edge only one, and
spent force never converts into crush damage. Applies to WATERWALL and
both STONE TO WATER waves; older revisions keep the flat full-range wash
so stored games replay unchanged.

Automatons now use DESTROY WALL on the march: two BFS distance maps (from
the bot, from its objectives) price every visible wall by the shortcut its
removal opens; the bot blasts when it saves 4+ steps of walking — or when
no road exists at all — never standing beside the blast unless trapped
and healthy. The card also leaves the shed pile: discardValue 2 -> 6.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 19:40:41 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 cdeb3d5103 Idiot enforces its card (rev 23) + attack sight-line tracing
Rules rev 23 — IDIOT, per the card and FAQ:
- No handling items: pick up / drop of treasures and objects refused
  (dropping was the exploit: capturing a stolen treasure on your own home,
  or dropping your own treasure underfoot for an instant cure)
- No punching, no thrown dagger / large rock (attacks on players)
- No effect on a victim already carrying one of their own treasures
Ungated (permissive): counteractions are now castable while idiotized (the
one thing the card expressly allows — the gate wrongly blocked them), and
goal-aiding spells (IDIOT_AIDS: destroy-wall, teleport, mad-dash, ...) per
the FAQ's 'you could, however, destroy a wall'.

Sight tracing: while an LOS attack sits on the stack, the board draws the
line it traveled — straight when direct, leg by leg through both warp
mouths (with pulsing rings) when the maze's wraparound carried it. Engine
traceSight/traceSightFor/stackSightTrace; overlay in Board.svelte; shown
live and in replays. Verified against H3PC's cross-board Idiot cast.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 19:03:09 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 7372bfc5e8 Rev 22: the self-stack resolves — one wizard cannot bounce to himself
A democratic monster touching its own creator opens a stack where one
player wears both hats, and doPass matched the attacker first: every
pass "bounced the exchange to the defender" — the same wizard —
forever. Room 928D livelocked there at seq 83; once the boot kick
revived its pump, the automaton politely passed 389 times. At rev 22
a self-stack pass RESOLVES (the claw lands, the game moves on);
older ledgers hold their recorded bounces and replay so. 928D itself
was repaired by truncating the no-op run and lifting it to rev 22,
verified clean and unstuck on a copy before installation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 18:14:18 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 4a75370de5 Restored rooms wake their automatons
The bot pump only ran when a command or join arrived, so a server
restart landing mid-bot-turn left the restored room waiting forever
for a human to poke it — room 928D sat exactly there, its automaton
holding a perfectly answerable stack. Boot now kicks the pump for
every restored still-running room, two seconds after restore.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 18:07:33 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 7df58d29fa Rev 21: collapsing walls crush anyone — monsters included
DESTROY WALL's "anyone in either square next to the wall takes 4
points" swept only wizards; a troll leaned on the falling masonry
untouched. The expansion sheet is explicit — "if a card specifies
'Opponent' or 'Anyone' as a target, this includes Monsters" — so the
collapse now crushes creatures in both squares, at the rim breach's
far side too. Earlier ledgers keep their charmed monsters.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 17:47:14 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 8d308bc606 Rev 20: the junction wall rolls for its allegiance
The rulebook (Cards And Actions That Change The Map): a CREATE WALL
or DESTROY WALL alteration on a junction between sectors rolls a
50-50 when "some other moron" rotates one of them — 1-2 stays with
the standing sector, 3-4 travels with the moving one, per the book's
own low/high convention. Both rotation and relocation roll (the same
seam tears either way), demolished holes roll alongside conjured
walls, the pips land loud in the chronicle, and a traveling edge
rides anchored to its in-sector cell. Rev-gated: the roll consumes
dice that stored games never spent.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 17:34:33 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 a17b5238f0 Rev 19: breaching the rim opens a new warp across the maze
Destroying a wall on the board's outer edge used to leave a one-sided
hole into nothing. The table's physics prevail: the outer rim wraps,
so the breach goes clean through — the opposite perimeter wall in the
same row or column crumbles too (collapse damage and all), and a new
warp pair opens between the two edges, shimmering at both mouths.
Rev-gated: stored games hold one-sided breaches and replay so. Sector
moves recompute the wraparounds and forget improvised openings, as
the maze's own reshaping always has.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 17:25:25 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 3b0aa01867 Rev 18: the democratic monster's claw outlives the first wizard
Its one-attack-per-round refreshed inside beginTurnFor when the turn
index matched the roll-off winner's seat — and only the living begin
turns, so once that wizard fell the claw never refreshed again: one
attack, then a lifetime of harmless bumping. The refresh now lives at
the true round boundary in the turn-advance loop, which passes dead
seats without skipping the count. Earlier ledgers keep their gummed
monster and replay so.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 16:51:44 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 e57307efbe Rev 17: the wave carries monsters as it carries wizards
Stone to Water's wave (and every waterwall collapse) washed wizards
back and crushed them against the maze — while a skeleton in the
same water stood dry. The wave only knew creatures well enough to
drown fire imps. From rev 17 it carries them all: washed back along
the surge, one point of crush per space the maze refuses, fire imps
still destroyed outright. Earlier ledgers keep their dry monsters
and replay so.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 15:07:34 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 94ec714e35 Rev 16: empathy mirrors the blows that resolve by their own hand
A believed ILLUSIONARY ATTACK, the goat's ram, and the hurled
treasure all deal their damage inside the attack's own resolution
hook — past the pipeline where the empathy mirror lived, so a linked
caster walked away unbloodied. One resolvedBlow helper now carries
the mirror to all three: "any attack done in ANY form" means these
too. Rev-gated: proactive empathy predates this, so stored ledgers
may hold unmirrored blows and replay them as struck.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 13:37:37 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 adf463effa Rev 15: the held doorway carries sight — the whole point of holding it
The table holds doors open to cast back through them at pursuers;
our held door opened for feet but not for eyes. From rev 15 a held
door is an open doorway to sight — casting at players, creatures,
and squares sees through it, the client's dimming aid and the
automatons alike (they share sightedCellsFor). REMOVE LOCK's "still
considered to block L.O.S." stands: that speaks of a CLOSED door,
and an unheld unlocked door still blocks. Rev-gated because rev-14
ledgers may already contain holds and must replay blind.

Pinned three ways: the holder blasts a pursuer through the held
doorway; an unheld unlocked door still blocks; rev 14 stays blind.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 13:20:45 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 d2b40ec6f8 Credibility pass: the seams get sanded
Scoped to everything since the last pass (3308850). Three blind
reviews, every finding verified before touching anything.

Confirmed and fixed: two identical comment-splitting insertions left
doc comments orphaned from their fields (net and local alike); a
51-line CSS fossil of the pre-extraction inline effects survived in
Board.svelte; the rev-13 miss-roll test asserted tautologies while
its comment claimed a check the code never made — it now proves the
die was consumed, and the skeleton is no longer returned as trollId;
the sprite registry's `as never` silently disabled the completeness
its annotation advertised (now a mapped type, one cast at the
dispatch seam); a dead ternary guarded a union that doesn't exist;
Bolt carried a duplicate .fork rule from a color iteration; fxTtl
contradicted three sprites' real animation lengths; the permanence
sentinel was reinvented as a magic 9000 (the engine now exports
isPermanentDuration); CELL was declared thrice (fx.ts now imports
it); App and Replay ran two divergent fx schedulers (one scheduleFx
now, cancellable — stale flourishes can no longer fire after leaving
a game); TokenArt retried missing files forever; the anti-anti
escape guards merge with the gate asymmetry explained; wall-of-fire's
rev-12 carve-out is marked; overLimit ignored a displayed BRAINSTONE
(bots over-discarded by two); botRemark's header mis-stated its own
branches; deliverGold fired on any drop, not a home-base delivery;
escape and win banter never fired from the steps that carry them.

Rejected: "as a human would" (house voice); FxGallery's dev-harness
framing (trimmed one plea, kept the facts).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 12:12:03 -04:00
Eric Wagoner fe0318b99b The clockwork quickens its step
Bot pacing from 1500ms to 1000ms per command — the table's preferred
tempo after living with both.
2026-08-17 09:43:48 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 b01e27c644 The banter moves to its own book, and learns new verses
BOT_LINES leaves the server internals for banter.ts, keyed by
semantic trigger instead of raw event type, so editing the clockwork's
voice takes no knowledge of the event stream. The repertoire grows
from fourteen lines to fifty across twelve occasions — grabbing and
delivering gold, dealing and taking pain, killing and dying,
summoning, walling, escaping, springing traps, dodging, and winning.

Bots also now speak when things happen TO them: the actor remarks on
its deeds, bystanders on their suffering — a berserker taking a hit
answers "I FELT THAT. DO IT AGAIN." even on your turn. Still at most
one voice per step, still half the time, menace over chatter.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 22:38:45 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 d4565006bc Rev 14: elimination sweeps the board by either door
Two ways out of the game, one cleanup. A wizard killed by damage took
their monsters, sustained spells, and armed ambushes with them; a
wizard eliminated by treasure loss left everything standing — a fire
imp scorching for a dead master, a Medusa still gazing at a corpse.
Both paths now share one sweep, gated at rev 14 so stored games keep
their orphans acting as recorded.

Also: Lifesaver lasts until used, carried as a near-billion-turn
sentinel — which the scoresheet printed. Durations that mean forever
no longer show a number.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 22:27:14 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 4a4e164e88 The dice roll once
Rejoining a room replays the whole chronicle through the same events
channel that carries live play, so the opening roll-off modal fired
on every return. The replayed chronicle is now flagged, and one-time
fanfare stays quiet on it — the log still rebuilds in full.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 22:15:12 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 e0da97627b Rev 13: monsters roll to hit the hidden — the invented exception dies
"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>
2026-08-16 21:11:30 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 4d8584ae44 Rev 12: vanishing and water answer the call to arms
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>
2026-08-16 21:07:47 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 3308850bb6 Credibility pass: sweep the workshop floor
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>
2026-08-16 20:20:37 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 73150a89b5 Rev 11: the maze has no wall at zero, and moving sectors carry everything
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>
2026-08-16 20:07:01 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 18d3142f95 Rev 10: a total stop ends the exchange, and the modal stops goading
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>
2026-08-16 19:53:38 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 b9c784a10c Difficulty without stupidity: apprentice, adept, archmage
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>
2026-08-16 17:59:11 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 a6ede6ca1e The clockwork reads the whole deck
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>
2026-08-16 17:41:12 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 3eda686e29 The full clockwork curriculum: keys, vengeance, spellcraft, and voice
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>
2026-08-16 17:10:47 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 ca16faac73 Rev 9: REDIRECTION connects the exits you choose
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>
2026-08-16 16:40:22 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 1aafb9e837 The mystery machine keeps its mood to itself
"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>
2026-08-16 16:36:21 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 5a407a1e4c The clockwork learns numbers, summons, creatures — and temperament
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>
2026-08-16 16:29:36 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 3842307bf0 The clockwork plays at a watchable pace
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>
2026-08-16 16:17:28 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 ab52628d2f The automatons awaken (branch only — not for the public droplet yet)
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>
2026-08-16 16:11:54 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 5802e1df05 Table talk keeps its place in the chronicle
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>
2026-08-16 16:00:51 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 ef661c79ad The die rolls in the open
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>
2026-08-16 15:57:28 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 d6d34887e3 The whole punch list: rev 8, general FAQ, and four promoted UX items
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>
2026-08-16 15:45:59 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 493f3bc567 Rev 7: sight passes only through the aisle warps
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>
2026-08-16 15:25:00 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 de446c2ad5 Counteraction answers follow the FAQ: absorb reflections, not shields
"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>
2026-08-16 14:51:14 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 df52e9b53a Table talk: chat woven into the chronicle
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>
2026-08-16 14:24:22 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 ed9585aa59 Five fidelity gaps closed: teleport escapes, slime traps, the Big Man
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>
2026-08-16 14:17:37 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 28bc91c3ac Room codes also dodge orphaned files on disk
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>
2026-08-16 14:02:04 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 bed29c4992 Cache headers end the stale-bundle era; finished games rest their buttons
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>
2026-08-16 13:57:10 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 cdcd1de71a Watch the whole game from the deal
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>
2026-08-16 13:38:24 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 d1eace9530 Rules rev 4: a creature's blow can be counteracted
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>
2026-08-16 13:25:45 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 7e3e00bf97 Rules rev 3: Ward is a choice, Chaos honors the shield
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>
2026-08-16 12:55:58 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 efec82e88d Two-player decks shed LIFESAVER, as the card itself instructs
"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>
2026-08-16 12:07:28 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 695307daa8 Credibility pass: one voice, no scars
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>
2026-08-16 11:56:55 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 f62fcf2510 Harden the hotseat tally endpoint
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>
2026-08-16 11:41:20 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 4114386ed8 The tally becomes a ledger of its own — and hotseat tables count
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>
2026-08-16 11:38:05 -04:00