Three things, and the first one was a bug.
Your own hand didn't move until the lap ended. bump() keeps the bots'
fans honest and has always refused seat zero, and nothing else touched
yours — so a +4 landing on you at the top of a lap put four backs into
your hand and then nothing, and the cards themselves turned up seconds
later when the script finished and paint() finally ran. You spent the
whole lap looking at a hand you no longer held. The engine now stamps
your hand onto every event that changes it (Event.Hand, seat zero only,
which is the one hand the browser is already entitled to see) and the
table redraws as the cards land. Measured in the running app: 2 -> 3
cards at 414ms into a 1791ms lap.
You couldn't call UNO, and not because the button was missing: going
down to one card *was* the call. discard() fired the uno event by
itself, which made it a thing that happened to you rather than a thing
you did, and a rule nobody can fail is not a rule. So now you say it or
you don't (Move.Uno), and if you don't, every bot still in the game gets
one look at you before any of them plays — because a bot that has moved
on is a bot that has stopped watching your hand. It runs the other way
too, and that half is the fun one: a bot forgets often enough to be
worth watching for, and when it does it says *nothing*. No event, no
badge, no tell on the felt except the count beside its fan reading
"1 card". Catch it and it takes two; call a seat that had nothing to
hide and you take two yourself, which is what stops the catch button
from being a thing you simply mash.
Which cards owe the call is the engine's answer, not a count of your
hand: No Mercy's "discard all" takes every card of its colour with it,
so a six-card hand can land on one, and a browser subtracting one from
six walks you into a catch it never warned you about.
And the room was silent. Every sound in here is *made* — an oscillator,
a burst of filtered noise, an envelope — the same bargain the weather
engine takes with its clouds. A card is a slap of noise through a
bandpass, a chip is two detuned sines with a knock on the front, a win
is four notes going up. No asset files, no round trips, and a sound can
be pitched and detuned per call instead of being the same wav three
hundred times. Hooked into the FX layer rather than into the games, so
every table that throws a chip or turns a card got it at once.
The multiples moved, and the test that exists to catch that caught it.
The naive strategy now calls UNO, because calling is a button and not a
strategy — what these tiers price is bad card play, not a player who
ignores the felt shouting at them — and on that footing the normal
tables come back to where they were (40.1 / 28.5 / 23.1). No Mercy Full
House did not: it was paying a *negative* house edge, which is the house
paying you to sit down. Re-priced 3.8 -> 3.5.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
The engine has been able to play No Mercy since aca523e. Now a browser can.
The switch is a switch, not a fourth table: the tier is still the table size,
because that is what you are paid for, and the deck is the other dial. Six faces
the normal box does not print, sized by the card's own vars and never by the box
they sit in. The stack says what the bill is on the felt, in the turn line and on
the button, and under it the deck is dead — you cannot draw your way out of a
bill somebody has run up and pointed at you.
The wild draws glow. That started as decoration and turned out to be doing work:
No Mercy prints a coloured +4 right beside the wild one, and in a hand of twenty
the glow is what tells them apart.
A buried seat is not an empty one, which is the whole trap here — a seat killed
at twenty-five holds no cards, and neither does a seat that just went out and
won. The view asks the engine which it is instead of counting to zero, so the
winner is never the corpse.
Two bugs, both found in a browser and neither findable anywhere else:
The felt's stack bill was writing into the chip bar. It was [data-pending], and
so is the bar's "your chips are still coming" readout — and the bar lives inside
the table's own root and comes first in the document. A stack quietly overwrote
the escrow message and never appeared on the felt at all. A table's attributes
are not a private namespace.
And hold'em, re-driven on the 20M-hand policy (six hands, got up 61 ahead of a
100 buy-in, money conserved to the chip — Phase 4 closed), let you click a button
that did nothing: Deal, Leave and Top up stayed alive through the whole deal
animation, where send() drops the click on purpose. The lock is on the buttons
now, not only in the variable.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
No Mercy UNO as a rules dial on the existing tier, not a fourth table: 168 cards,
draw-until-playable, draw-stacking, and the twenty-five card mercy kill. Six
tiers now; a normal game never runs a line of the new code.
The engine is the whole of it so far — the felt hasn't been touched, so there is
no way to play this in a browser yet.
Two things worth knowing.
The normal tiers were mispriced, and had been for a while. They were set against
a naive win rate of 43/32/27%; it now measures 40.3/29.2/23.3%. The bots got
better at some point after the multiples were written down and nobody re-ran the
measurement — which the plan explicitly warns about, because the bots and the
tiers are a pair. Table and Full House had been charging an 18–19% house edge
instead of the 8% they were meant to. All six tiers are repriced off a fresh
measurement, and TestTheMultiplesAreStillPriced now fails the build if they
drift again. It is the test the normal tiers never had, which is how they drifted.
And No Mercy is *easier* than UNO, at every table size, so it pays less. The
mercy rule does not care whose hand hits twenty-five: it kills bots too, and
every bot it buries is one fewer seat that can beat you to the last card. A deck
built to be merciless turns out to be merciless mostly to the table.
The rake test used to assert a payout of 214, which was the 2.2x duel written
down as a number. It failed on a rake that was entirely correct. It derives the
arithmetic from the tier now: the rule is that the house takes its cut of the
profit and never touches the stake, and that holds at any multiple.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_013M5nD7PgUboJXoDcYHzpuJ
