Commit Graph
107 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 e412463aae Thumb of God gets its ceremony: prompt, sighted dimming, and the die
The cast always worked (click a square), but nothing guided it and
nothing marked its arrival. Now: a targeting prompt, eligibility
dimming to the caster's sighted squares (the engine demands LOS to the
aim point), and a flourish — the aiming mark, a shadow gathering, the
die crashing down out of a clear sky with a bounce and flung grit, a
drift line when fate moves it, and every scattered token streaking to
where it lands. In the /?fx gallery as die-drop.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 23:09:40 -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 3aef6694f3 Swap Meet trades treasures — a carried treasure is a carried item
The trade grammar gains a 'treasure' token (never present in stored
ledgers, so no gate needed): a dagger can buy back the treasure in a
thief's arms, or two armfuls of gold can change hands outright. The
one-treasure carry limit and WEAKNESS both hold in a trade as at a
grab — a one-way treasure needs an open slot and an able back. The
picker offers each side's carried treasure alongside displayed items,
withholding theirs when your own arms are already full.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0138A8CjeQRpvzKxuMfz1Bqc
2026-08-17 22:19:29 -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 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 2ac046611d ADD explains itself instead of dead-ending
Two numbers for movement work by playing them one after another, the
Add spending itself on the second — but clicking the ADD card itself,
the natural first instinct, showed nothing but a cancel button. It
now says how the ride works; a second number without an Add in hand
says what is missing instead of offering a doomed button; and the
button's label says "spends your Add" at the moment it does.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 17:59:39 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 bed7d849eb The cruel draw gets its modal, and its own words
GIFT FROM BELOW bit for three in the middle of end-of-turn noise and
nobody saw it — not live, not in the replay, where its log line even
claimed "lose a turn" (the other trap's fate). The trapSprung event
now names its card; drawing a trap YOURSELF raises the full modal —
the card, what it did, "Curse the deck" — and the chronicle tells
each trap's true consequence. The amplify narration was already
fixed; replays re-derive events, so both now show in old games'
reels too.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 17:13:36 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 028ff813f3 Amplify announces itself
Room 9BBV's "impossible" 14-point powerthrust was an archmage playing
correctly: 2 + 5, AMPLIFIED. The engine's math was honest and its
narration was not — neither the log line nor the attack modal
mentioned the amplify, so a legal kill read as a bug. The spellCast
event now carries its amplify count, the chronicle says "casts
Powerthrust with a 5, AMPLIFIED, at Kestrel", and the modal's power
line shows "powered by a 5 — AMPLIFIED ×2" while there is still time
to respect it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 17:10:06 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 aef88d892a Two treasures, one square: the taker names their prize
pickUpTreasure grabbed whichever treasure the list offered first —
with two on a square, no choice and sometimes the wrong one. The
command now takes an optional treasureId (absent in every stored
ledger, so old replays keep their old grab), and when the square
holds more than one, the button asks "whose?" before dispatching.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 15:03:34 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 e7c8ddc0b3 Creatures walk open doorways, and the interruption gets its fanfare
Player movement asked the full question of a door — removed, keyed
this turn, or held — while creature movement only saw "door" and
refused, so a skeleton balked at a doorway its master had unlocked
for good. One doorIsOpen() now answers for both, and an open doorway
costs a wraith none of its wall passes.

And the interruption window earns the modal it deserved: "The maze
holds its breath" — the card shown, the instruction plain, dismissed
with "Seize it". No more hunting the rail for a slip while time
stands parted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 13:50:38 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 44c14f5ce1 The interruption window opens for actual casting
OPPORTUNITY FIRE and INTERRUPT bought a moment the client would not
honor: every selection and targeting gate asked "is it your turn?",
and mid-interruption it is not — so the window's holder could click
attack cards into silence while the engine sat ready to accept the
cast. A window is now yourMoment: hand selection, player/creature/
cell/edge targeting, and the dimming aid all open exactly as on your
own turn, and the slip says what to do with it ("pick an attack card
and a target") instead of the cryptic "cast now".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 13:45:52 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 89ba225fe5 Illusions show their face, and empathy answers the call
An automaton's ILLUSIONARY ATTACK arrived as a mystery: the modal
showed only the illusion card, never the spell being faked — though
the stack has always carried it face-up. The defender now sees both
cards side by side, the caption names the fake ("an ILLUSIONARY
Fireball — it bites only if believed"), and the hint bar says which
spell to weigh a counter against.

And EMPATHY — corner: COUNTERACTION — was refused at the door like
INVISIBLE before it, while the automatons' own counter ladder had
been reaching for it and silently failing into the fallback all
along. It now raises mid-stack: the blow lands on both wizards, the
link lingers for its NUMBER card's turns, and ANTI-ANTI severs it
cleanly (empathy is no escape). The number-riding-a-counter idiom is
one shared helper now. Permissive both ways: no stored ledger
contains either play, so no rev gate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 13:33:24 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 a0c65413ef The door can be held open, as both key cards always promised
MASTER KEY and PICK LOCK each read: "You may 'hold the door open' for
others, if you wish" — and the engine always slammed it at end of
turn. Now the cast takes a hold param: the door stays unlocked past
the turn, for anyone, as long as its holder stands adjacent and
alive. A step away, a shove, a teleport, or a killing blow lets it
swing shut — swept after every command, since anything can move a
wizard. New state, new param: no old ledger contains either, so no
rev gate is needed.

The client offers a "hold the door open" checkbox when either card is
selected; a held door shows pale with a green jamb ("held open by a
standing wizard"), and the chronicle records the holding and the
shutting. Pinned: a held door outlives the turn and admits the other
wizard; walking away releases it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 13:15:57 -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 WagonerandClaude Fable 5 4528c66057 The peeked token joins its card — and stops hiding behind it
Clicking a board token now shows the thing itself, enlarged, above
its card in the peek modal — whichever art is active, photograph or
SVG. The art tables move to art.ts so the board renderer and the
modal share one source.

First cut overlapped: the card scales 2.1x out of its layout box, so
flow neighbors sat underneath its visual footprint (the note had been
compensating with a 6.8rem margin hack). A card-stage now reserves
the card's TRUE visual size; token above, note below, nothing buried.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 11:58:25 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 e0e96ca5ca The art workshop's side door
The hand-drawn SVG token set wires in behind deliberately
undocumented query params — svgPlayers, svgCreatures, svgTerrain,
svgObjects, each =true — swapping that category's art everywhere it
draws: board tokens, lobby standees, roster. public/tokens-svg
symlinks research/tokens-svg, so under the dev server an edit to the
source art shows on the next refresh, and the production build copies
real files through the link. Nobody finds the door unless handed the
key; the photographed set remains the face of the game.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 11:27:28 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 ca55f7d00b The fireworks get the stage before the victory modal takes it
Winning raised the modal on the same frame the fireworks lit,
covering them. The modal now waits behind the curtain for 2.4
seconds — three volleys over the winner's home, seen — then takes
the stage.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 10:40:11 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 a59ecfa615 Every flourish gets its own file, and a workshop to watch them in
The effects move out of Board.svelte into src/fx-sprites/ — one
component per flourish, markup and animation CSS together, so editing
the fireball means opening Fireball.svelte and nothing else. A
registry (index.ts) maps kind to sprite; Board renders through it.
The event mapping stays in fx.ts.

And a viewer: /?fx opens the Flourish Workshop — every sprite on a
labeled parchment tile, replaying on a 2.2-second beat. Under the dev
server, editing any sprite file hot-reloads the gallery mid-loop.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-17 09:27:32 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 bca34ae9e4 Flourishes: the spells become visible (branch only — not for the droplet yet)
A cosmetic effects layer on the board svg, fed by the same event
stream that writes the log. Fireballs streak and burst; waterbolts
arc and splash; lightning jags and flickers; teleports shimmer at
both ends; walls rise and fall in dust; stopped attacks flash a
golden shield; hits ring red; misses whiff; other attack spells
sparkle at the caster. Successive visuals from one command stagger by
a beat, everything self-expires, reduced-motion hides the layer
whole, and nothing here touches game state — the effects are mapped
from events in fx.ts and drawn in Board.svelte, online and hotseat
alike.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 23:43:16 -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 9493873b64 Dispel Creation reaches every creation, and edge hints tell the truth
An opponent's wraith refused to be dispelled — the engine was willing
all along (any controller's creature, sight required), but creature
clicks never routed cell-target spells, so the cast never left the
client. Clicking a creature with a cell spell selected now lands on
its square. The dimming aid told the same lie twice over: it lit
every created square including ones out of sight (a caster's own
thornbush beyond the walls) and never lit creatures at all. It now
mirrors the engine — anything created, whoever made it, in sight.

And "click a wall line" stops standing in for every edge card: each
now says what the click actually is — a locked door for the keys, a
corridor line for the fire, the creation itself for the dispel — and
attacks no longer show two hints for one wall.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 21:59:18 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 ee6a08f25c Boobytrap tokens land where you can see them
The four placements accumulated invisibly until the last click cast
the spell. Each token now marks its square as it is placed, numbered
in click order — the 1 is the real trap — and tapping a placed token
lifts it again, since the four must be distinct squares.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 21:56:29 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 04dc9bc750 Teleport waits for a second tap
One tap cast the jump, and a player reaching for click-per-square
movement spent their teleport on the adjacent floor. Now the first
tap only marks the destination (the familiar pulsing square), and the
jump commits on a second tap of the same square or the hint-bar
button — with the hint spelling out the four-square, walls-ignored
range. The escape teleport gets the same two-tap arming; a counter
wasted on a misclick is a counter wasted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 21:49:27 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 22153b1e1b The opening roll-off steps into the light
First wizard was never random: createGame has always rolled a die
per player from the seed, re-rolling ties, and the gameStarted event
carried every pip — straight into a log line that said only "X goes
first." Now the table sees the ceremony: a dice modal as the boards
flip, one row per wizard, the trophy on the high roll, a note when
tied wizards rolled again — in online games and hotseat alike. The
chronicle line keeps the full roll-off too. Pure presentation; the
dice were always honest.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-16 21:47:31 -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 fb2266b401 Mega-Monster offers its choice
"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>
2026-08-16 20:56:49 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 4e365c168f The workshop row learns to wrap
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>
2026-08-16 20:49:52 -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 53c84ec6cb Relocate Sector gets ground to land on
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>
2026-08-16 20:00:43 -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 1275ac9287 Three table manners: Safari replays, docked creature cards, a quiet hand
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>
2026-08-16 18:59:16 -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 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 af75a024ff A random pull from the workshop, and temperaments on the scoresheet
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>
2026-08-16 16:32:06 -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 75313154ad Number cards ride along on edge and cell casts
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>
2026-08-16 16:21:12 -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 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 f657144127 Discard-pile cards enlarge above the pile, like the library's
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>
2026-08-16 15:37:18 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 5375941ed3 Every card wears its FAQ seal; library cards enlarge above the booklet
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>
2026-08-16 15:34:43 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 53edf9734e Uncharged wands say what they need
"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>
2026-08-16 15:14:15 -04:00
Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5 bc0c69de11 The designer's rulings, one tap from the card
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>
2026-08-16 15:05:27 -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 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