Hangman, and it plays for chips — which the plan had down as a free game, on
the grounds that trivia has no euro coupling in gogobee. But a free game in a
casino reads as a demo, so it stakes like everything else.
The idea that makes it a casino game rather than hangman with a wager stapled
on: the gallows is the payout meter. A wrong guess draws a limb *and* takes a
tenth off what a win is worth, because those are the same event and showing
them as one is the entire reason to bet on this. Short phrases pay 2.6x (fewer
letters, less to go on), long ones 1.6x — the floor is 1x, so a win never hands
back less than the stake, and the rake still comes out of winnings only.
State.Pays() is the number the felt quotes and the number settle() lands on.
They were briefly two sums, and the table spent an afternoon advertising a
pre-rake payout it didn't honour.
Two things the storage layer had already decided for us, and one it hadn't:
game_live_hands is keyed on the player, so "one game at a time" holds across
games for free (a live hangman 409s a blackjack deal, stake intact). But
table() unmarshalled every live row as a blackjack hand, which does not fail on
a hangman row — it quietly yields an empty hand. It dispatches on the game now.
commit() is the settle path both games share, and casinoRoutes() the one route
list, since the dev rig wires its own mux and a second copy is a copy that stops
including the newest game.
Driven in a browser, win and loss: 200 at 2.34x paid 455 and the bar landed on
it; six wrong took the stake and no more; a reload mid-phrase brought back the
board, the limbs, the multiple, the spent keys and the chips on the spot. The
browser found the two bugs a Go test can't — a lives counter under the house
rack, and a word wrapping early because the rack's clearance was on the whole
column instead of the one row beside it.
Every dispatch Pete publishes is an accomplishment — a death, a clear, a
milestone — and an accomplishment is a newspaper clipping the moment it lands.
No refresh interval fixes that. So the page never felt alive, and it never was
going to.
The board is the other kind of thing: state that is currently true. gogobee
pushes the whole roster, we replace ours with it, and it renders above the
clippings. An open tab re-polls so it keeps telling the truth.
Replace, never merge: anyone gogobee omits (opted out, no character) drops off
the public page. That omission IS the opt-out — a standing row showing class,
level and zone names the player anyway, so "an adventurer" would have been a fig
leaf.
The snapshot time lives in its own row, because an empty board is ambiguous:
nobody playing, or gogobee stopped talking to us. The page has to tell those
apart — one is a quiet realm, the other is a board that lies confidently, which
is worse than one that admits it lost the wire.
Also teaches Pete "departure", so a bored adventurer letting itself out is news.
