Karim's Taste — how he decides, so you can decide like him

One screen at a time. Perfect it, mark it done, move on.

Seen when: 1,500 screenshots across 13 artifact pages overwhelmed him — "stop, keep them as reference, go back to one screen at a time. Start with the Lobby, then Tambola." He then reviewed the lobby in five rounds and Tambola in six.

Apply: mass capture is the agent's bug-finding tool, never his review surface. Bring him one screen, on phone AND desktop, with the variants that matter (1/3/6 tickets, 2/30 players, long names). Only he marks a screen done.

He tests on a real phone and two browsers, and finds the corner cases you didn't.

Seen when: he played Tambola to 90 numbers without claiming and found the match ended on points; he let a clock run out in host mode and found it auto-revealed; he removed a player with two left and found the sheet closed itself; he opened the caller as a guest and saw no pause state.

Apply: before handing over, play the boring path too — nobody claims, nobody answers, the last person leaves, the numbers run out, the host pauses. Say plainly what you did NOT see in the browser (he trusts an honest gap more than a claimed pass).

He reviews motion from a slowed-down recording, and names the frame he likes.

Seen when: Snakes & Ladders, 2026-09-13. The drifting chips, the die turning back into a flat square and the pill flickering for watchers were each invisible to tests and to single screenshots; he found every one from a recording, and settled a five-round back-and-forth on the die by pointing at one mid-roll frame: "keep it exactly like this, also as the final state".

Apply: for any screen that moves, ask for a short recording before the first change and review from frames, not from a still. When he likes a frame, that frame is the spec: build to it and touch nothing he already approved. When he approves the animation but not a detail, change only the detail.

He wants options when the answer is taste, and one recommendation with them.

Seen when: the QR card (options A–E, he merged A+B into E), the ready card (A/B/C, he took A), the drag hint (three wordings, he took one and renamed "Spares" to "Extras"), the play header (four layouts, he took A — two rows).

Apply: 3–4 real mockups, side by side, phone-shaped, with pros/cons and a pick. Never a wall of prose; never a first draft presented as final.

He corrects copy and layout by feel, in one line. Take it literally, then generalise.

Seen when: "call it Difficulty, not How hard?"; "Host mode needs at least 3 players, not Host needs at least three people"; "Not claimed, not Keep daubing"; "Working… doesn't sound right, it should be Leaving…" — and then "see if you have something similar elsewhere; fix those as well."

Apply: make the exact change he asked for, then grep for the same pattern everywhere and fix it once (the busy label became a helper used by every confirm).

A redesign keeps what he already loves, and is drawn as an artifact before any code.

Seen when: 2026-10-17, the new home. Three concepts were built as dev pages in the app, each with a new top. "I didn't like any of these designs. The current design was so good... I wanted it at that level. This lacks any creativity and taste. Keep the main hero section of the current one as it is. The concept of the couch and the mascot jumping looks so cool... After this, whatever we have, those sections need to be changed. Don't build it in the code. Build an artifact."

Apply: before redesigning a screen, name the part he already loves and keep it exactly; the new work goes around it. The bar is the screen he loves, so a section of plain cards in a row is not a design: each section needs one drawn idea of its own (a ticket, postcards on a line, posters pinned up). A design round is an artifact he can open and read the code of, built from the product's real drawings; it becomes code only after he finalises it there.

No control that looks like protection but is not.

Seen when: the host's Ban (2026-09-14). A banned guest could knock again from a private window, because a guest has no identity to ban. "Fix it if quick, otherwise later — and remove the Ban option."

Apply: if the server cannot keep a promise, the button that makes it goes. Keep what it can keep: Keep out stops the same session knocking on that room again (a new browser can still knock — "that was okay for me"). Remove stays: out now, may knock again, the host answers again.

A quick answer gets an Undo, not a confirmation.

Seen when: Keep out at the door (2026-09-14), and taking a name off the one-phone set-up (2026-10-09), which asked "Remove Sam?" first. "I don't like the concept of asking for confirmation to remove a player. Removing a player is just removing a name. You can re-add it... You can directly remove it... or maybe we can just show a toast message with an undo option. When you delete a player, show 'player removed' and an undo option."

Apply: Keep out stays one tap. A toast says "Kept Asha out" for about five seconds with Undo, and Undo puts things back exactly: same person, same place in the line, their screen back to waiting without knocking again. A name on the one-phone set-up goes the same way: one tap, no question, "Removed Sam" with Undo, and Undo puts Sam back in the same place and the same colour, under the same name. If the table has filled up since, or somebody else has taken the name, Undo says so instead of doing nothing, and the toast leaves with the screen. Ask what the tap costs if it was a slip. A name costs a second to type again, so it gets an Undo. A question is kept for what cannot be put back: a friend taken out of a game that is on, a room ended.

Ask why it exists before asking whether it is built right.

Seen when: a Trending rail no screen rendered; a hotspot room code nothing looked up; the "Read numbers aloud" toggle inside the caller when the header already had a sound switch ("we don't need that option now").

Apply: one switch per meaning. If a control duplicates one that exists (sound, appearance, players), delete the duplicate rather than styling it.

Play the game as it is really played, then encode that as the rule.

Seen when: Tambola tickets must be a strip (six tickets = 1–90 once, so two tickets never share a number); Early Five is always the first claim and Full House the last; numbers running out does not end the match — a Full House does. "Refer to online sources if you doubt it."

Apply: when a rule feels off to him, check the real-world game, quote the source, and make the reducer AND the button agree through one selector.

Everyone is in the game all the time. No silent seat.

Seen when: 2026-10-27, asking for new games and team games. Spy Grid is parked because its clue-giver sits silent the whole match and only gives hints: "There is no fun in it. My goal is to have maximum fun and have everyone involved in the game."

Apply: before proposing a game, name what every player is doing at every moment. A role that only watches, waits or stays quiet for long is a flaw, not a flavour. Spy Grid is not a model for team games.

The host runs the room; the room should never be stuck.

Seen when: host mode for Trivia (host sits out, shows question → options → answer → next); the host's Remove is greyed on the last two players, but a guest may always leave, and if that breaks the game everyone sees "Not enough players to continue" with Back to room / Leave room.

Apply: every dead end needs a way out that is the host's (End game, Back to room) and a guest's (Leave). Leaving is a right; removing is a host's call. And a host's slip must be undoable: "Undo" beside "Leanne takes the point".

Once you are in a room, only its own Leave takes you out. No swipe goes home.

Seen when: 2026-10-17, playing on two iPhones: dragging his mascot round the room and drawing on Quick Draw took him home. "When you are in a room, the back action should be disabled. No amount of swiping should take you back. Unless you leave the room, you should not go back to the home page." On the web he accepted that a browser's Back still works, because Home shows the room again.

Apply: a room, a running game on one phone and a hosted hotspot are left only by their own Leave, End game or Stop hosting. A gesture that happens by accident during play must never be a way out. Screens before you are in (the knock, "room not found") keep their Back.

On one phone, anyone can be dropped when they walk away from the table.

Seen when: same-device, 2026-09-13 — "if a player leaves the table mid-match the others cannot continue without them."

Apply: the Players sheet offers Remove on one phone exactly as it does to the online host — the same sheet, the same rows, the same "Remove Aafreen?" with Keep them in — and only the line under Remove changes, because there is no room code to come back with. Nobody is the host at a table, so every seat may go. The control appears only while more than the game's own minimum are still playing, which is also why a duel never shows it.

A confirmation reads top to bottom: the question, one line, then two equal buttons.

Seen when: 2026-09-14, "Remove Sam?" had a full-width Remove, the note under it and Keep them in below that. Then the same day, for every confirmation in the app.

Apply: the title is a short question ("Sure you want to end the game?" became "End the game?"). Straight under it, always one line saying what happens, in a friend's voice, and it must be true of the code: "End the room?" says "Everyone's sent home and the code stops working." Then one row of two half-width buttons: the way out on the LEFT, the action on the RIGHT, same height, same lift, same solid rim. Pink when something is lost (ending, leaving, removing, closing, stopping hosting, a switch that clears the board), yellow only when nothing is. This is the only shape the shared confirmation has, so no screen can build another.

Rejected: "Are you sure you want to end the room." as the note. It repeats the title and tells nobody anything. The line under a question answers the question people actually have: what happens to us if I tap it?

Also seen (dark, iPhone): a footer strip darker than the sheet behind the buttons, and Remove on a thick red rim beside a near-invisible one. A question is one surface, and two buttons side by side lift the same.

A button's rim keeps its own contrasting colour: orange under yellow, red under pink.

Seen when: 2026-09-14. The orange and red rims looked off beside the deeper neutral rim, so seven edge styles were drawn side by side, and then every rim was re-coloured a darker shade of its own button's colour.

Apply: leave the per-colour rims as they are. Deepening a rim is fine; changing its colour is not.

Rejected: a darker shade of the same colour ("I didn't like it. The previous one was better"), one dark ink rim for every button, a see-through dark shadow, a thicker bottom outline, and a same-colour band inside the outline.

An answer to a question opens over what asked it, and leaves it standing.

Seen when: 2026-09-13 — "after removing a player the Players sheet should stay open with one player less."

Apply: the remove confirmation sits on top of the Players sheet rather than in its place, in both same-device and online. Answer it and the roster is still there, one row shorter, so the host sees what he just did instead of reopening the list to check. Keep them in returns to the same roster, unchanged. On a phone that is a sheet stacked over a sheet; on a tablet or a desktop it is the centred dialog over the dialog.

One control for one thing, and never a modal opened from a modal. "Read rules · Watch video" sits beside How to play, and the video plays in the card.

Seen when: 2026-10-13 to 2026-10-14, where a game's how-to video goes on its rules sheet and its page. Of three live options he first liked a "Watch how to play" pill on the game's picture, but there the video played inside the sheet beside the sheet's own close: "I like option A, but the problem is the close buttons… It is looking like there are two close buttons." So he chose the pill plus a "Watch Video" button after the steps, both opening the video in its own layer over the sheet. He tried that build and rejected it, 2026-10-14: "I don't like to show two buttons for the same thing, like 'Watch the video' and 'Watch how to play'… I also didn't like the way we are opening the video in another modal because we are already showing it in a modal, and opening that in another modal is not looking good." His call: "Next to 'How to play', we can show 'Watch video' and 'Read rules'… If 'Read rules' is selected, you see the instructions. If 'Watch video' is selected, you see the video inside that modal only, not another modal." And for the game page: "for the big screens we don't have to show the toggle. We can show the written instructions and the video next to each other because we have space there. For smaller screens, the same approach as the rules sheet."

Apply: one way to do one thing on a screen: two buttons that do the same thing are clutter, however differently they look. Something shown from inside a sheet or a dialog is shown IN it, never in a second layer over it. A choice of how to take something in (read or watch) is small and quiet (he then picked underline tabs, the next card), never the bright chips that choose how to play. It opens on the richer view when there is one (the video), and is not shown at all when there is nothing to choose. Where the screen has room for both (a big screen's page), show both side by side and drop the switch.

Not this: a pill on the picture plus a button after the steps for the same video; a video opened in a layer over the sheet that offered it; a switch that looks like the mode chips under it.

Use the room you have: split on a big screen, tabs on a phone. Nothing on a page repeats another part. A start button carries the game it was pressed on, all the way into the room.

Seen when: 2026-10-14, three live layouts for the rules sheet and the game page. He picked a split dialog on a big screen (the video on the game's own colour beside the words and steps, both at once) and a slim header with quiet Read / Watch tabs on a phone, and the tabs on the page too. On the page he cut "About this game" because it repeated the rules, cut the line under the start buttons, and wanted the more games shown as the home's own cards. The buttons "should convey the meaning that you can play this in an online room or on one phone." And, while playing: "Suppose I was on the Undercover game and I clicked on 'Host an online room'. The user's intention is to host an online room and play the game. What it does is it hosts the online room, and it doesn't select the game. It would be better if, after creating the room, the game gets auto-selected."

Apply: where a big screen has the room to show two things at once, show both and drop the control that chooses between them; a phone gets the control. A section that says again what another section says goes. A game is shown the same way everywhere (the home's card is the card). A button is named for what the person will do ("Play online with friends", "Pass one phone around"), and it CARRIES the person's choice with it through every screen in between (a sign-in, a room being made) until it is in place, picked and waiting. Picked, never started: a room still waits for friends and the host's Start.

Not this: a start button that drops the game on the way; "About this game" under the rules; a list of more games drawn differently from the home's.

Everyone in the room should know what just happened, without scrolling.

Seen when: "when someone claims, other players aren't notified"; "when the host pauses, players don't know"; "everyone went to the winner screen without knowing Full House was claimed."

Apply: a shared event gets a moment every screen shows (today the player's own mascot saying it, as Tambola's claimer does beside the caller), a visible state on the shared object (pause mark on the caller, badge on the sheet), a spoken line when sound is on, and a beat (5s hold) before the screen changes.

When 99 tables in 100 would answer the same way, it is a default with a row beside it — not a door.

Seen when: Charades, 2026-09-18. Setting it up asked "where do the prompts come from?" on a screen of its own before the options. "99% will take the built-in ones" — so the screen went, ours became the default, and Prompts: Built-in · Write our own is now one choice row among Way to play, Acting time and Rounds each. Picking "write our own" leads to the writing screen on the way to the whistle, and its rematch offers Play again or Write our own prompts — never "pick a new topic" for a game that has no topics.

Apply: a screen earns its place by the number of people who change what is on it. A rare-but-real choice is a row on a screen that already exists. Keep the door only where the question is genuinely open — the quiz and the word hunt still ask about topics, because there the answer differs every party.

Cost is a design input: make the free path a first-class door.

Seen when: "generation will cost credits and manual entry is not feasible — add random questions from our bank, no preview, straight to options."

Apply: whenever a feature meters credits, the no-cost alternative sits beside it as an equal, not a fallback.

No cheating, with any tool. A secret stays on a server until its moment.

Seen when: the backend cost work, 2026-10-08. One saving proposed dealing Tambola's whole order of numbers to every phone at the start, so each phone could call them on its own clock. It came with a footnote that someone with developer tools could read what was coming. "That is the biggest problem for me. If a player can see what the upcoming number is, what is the fun in it? This is a must-have rule for any game: no cheating is allowed. No one should be able to know anything using any tools." The idea was withdrawn. The game already kept this promise: a phone is sent only the numbers called so far, and never the seed a match is dealt from.

Apply: a phone never holds anything before the table is meant to know it: not the value, not a scrambled copy a script could unscramble against the lists that ship in the app, and not the seed it was made from. A saving that moves a secret onto a phone is not a saving, however small the leak or rare the cheat. A "they could peek, but it would not help them" footnote is the sign the design is wrong. Cost work moves who delivers a reveal, never who holds the secret.

How far it goes: the same day, with the leaks in the code closed, the next step on offer was to write every online list again so that no old copy of the app held an answer. "Aren't you thinking too much for a simple casual gaming site? It isn't banking security. It's just an online casual game. There is nothing at stake here except for people cheating and winning it. We should avoid them cheating, but not to an extent that we should implement something like a banking security system." So: close a hole a curious player could use, then stop, and do not ask him to decide on the rest.

That limit is for cheating INSIDE a game only. He drew the line himself the same day: "There are two types. One is cheating in the game: a curious player trying to cheat and win. We should be doing it. Another is some hackers trying to attack from outside, take it down, spam it, or do brute-force attacks. These kinds of things, we should take utmost care. No negligence should be there." Winning a party game by cheating costs nobody anything. The service being taken down, flooded or run up a bill costs him the product. Size the first to a casual game. Never size the second down.

The host is in the room, or nothing starts. Only the host pays, so only the host runs it.

Seen when: the design of rooms that stay, 2026-10-08. I flagged that on a Friday when the host is late, fifteen people sit in a room nobody can start, and offered co-hosts. "I always stand by that. The host should always be there in the room to run it. That's how we charge, because we charge only the host, not the players. If the host is not there, the other players are playing on the bill. One of the players should create another room, buy the premium, and then join that room to play. A room host must be in the room to play a game." Asked what happens when the host's battery dies in the middle of a game, he chose: that game finishes, and no new game starts until the host is back.

Apply: never design a co-host, a stand-in, or a way to hand a room over. Every start is the host's own tap. A night made of several games waits between games while the host is away, and carries on when they return. A game already being played is never cut short because the host dropped. If a group needs the room without its host, the answer is a second host with a room of their own.

A Party Pass perk is said where the host reaches for it. Everything else stays as it is.

Seen when: switching on what the Party Pass unlocks, 2026-10-20. Asked what happens when a ninth friend knocks on a free room: "The host should not be able to create a room whose size is greater than 8. When they click on + after 8, it should show a toast message or some kind of an inline message saying that you need to upgrade to Party Pass." And at the door: "the room full message will show, so nothing needs to be changed there."

Apply: a perk the host does not have stays on the screen and answers the tap with one plain line, in place, never a silent stop and never a hidden option. The door, the guests and the rest of the room do not change because the host is on the free plan.

The room is a place to play in, and the games stay out of its way.

Seen when: the room redesign, 2026-10-09. He rejected four directions I had drawn, then asked other tools to redesign the room with no direction from me and picked the ones that turned it into a playground: "They are the extension of our room lobby, but they feel good and fun to be there." On the games: "we don't need to necessarily show the games things on the screen. We can utilize 80% to 90% of the screen... for the mascots to roam around, play." On the TV: "I don't think TV is needed anymore." Playing the pool party built with our own mascots, he corrected three things that each came from treating a thing as its picture: twenty people as faces with a letter "is not looking good"; "Someone can't be sitting on the slide. If they jump onto the slide, they should slide down"; and the cheer came after the landing, when "When you're sliding down the slide, you scream."

Apply: on a phone the scene gets the screen. One small bar carries the picked game and, for the host, Start beside it. Everything about choosing lives in a sheet with Game, Tournament and Party, and on a laptop or desktop in a side panel a third wide (a tablet gets the sheet, 2026-10-14). In a scene, a thing does what the real thing does: a slide is ridden, never sat on, a new arrival comes in down it, and a sound plays at the moment a person would make it. Everyone stays a whole mascot at every head count: a rule made for a tight game table does not follow people into a place with room. An effect that reads as something else (a splash that looked like horns and teeth) is redrawn or removed, never left. When he has not picked a direction, let him see several from outside before drawing one of my own.

An entrance belongs to joining, never to everyone at once. 2026-10-12, after playing a change of scene in which every friend came through the door, or down the slide, one after another: "Now everyone will come through the door and sit in. I think that won't look good when you have a bigger group, like you have 10 players and you just switch the scene… directly place everyone on the seating or pool and switch between the scenes. Thus, entry, sliding, or jumping onto the sofa should be for the new place or joining the room… If we do this for every player when it's in the scene, it will not look good." Apply: the door and the slide are played for one person, once, on every phone: somebody who was not in the room and now is. When the scene changes, when everyone comes back from a game, on a reload, and for the people already there when somebody opens the room, people are simply there. A moment that is charming for one arrival is a queue when it is played for a whole group.

A scene that is not good enough goes, the one thing he liked in it moves to a scene that is, and the bar is a professional studio.

Seen when: 13 October 2026, the morning after three new scenes were drawn for the room overnight (a backyard, a dome hall, a dance floor). His words: "It looks good, but the dome is not looking good. The backyard and dance floor are good. Maybe we can remove the dome and have only four options: living room, party pool, backyard, and dance floor. What I like in the dome hall is the sliding with the wire, like a zip line. Can we have that zip line in the backyard as well, if it suits?" And, in the same message, on how the scenes look: "these are looking good, but not looking professional. These are looking like they were designed by some noob or amateur. I wanted it to feel like this was designed by a professional studio or a big company."

Apply: he would rather have four scenes he likes than five. A scene he calls not good is removed whole, the same day, and not rescued or hidden behind a switch. What he liked in it is kept exactly as he liked it (the trolley waiting at the top, riding down with the rider, arms up, the cheer on the way down) and its drawings are moved, never drawn again from memory. "As well" means added beside what he already approved: the slide stayed, and stayed the way in. "If it suits" is a real condition: the new piece is fitted to the scene it joins (it starts in the garden's own tree and ends in its own bouncy castle), and if it makes a phone look crowded, say so plainly with the picture, and do not force it.

What "a professional studio" asks of a drawing (my reading of it, to be corrected by him): a stranger names every object in a second; one hand across the whole scene, with one outline, a small set of colours, and nothing coloured so that it reads as something else (the platform's posts wore coral knobs and looked like the tree's apples: they are wood now); nothing hangs in the air without a reason (a cable is tied to something at both ends, a platform stands on something); and a movement is finished at both ends (the trolley goes back up, the castle gives under whoever lands in it). Good is not the bar. Finished is.

Not this: keeping a scene because it was a night's work; replacing an approved thing with the new one he asked for beside it; a new piece that only fits on the big screen.

A place needs a studio finish: light, shadow, quiet walls, and details. A hidden delight keeps an obvious twin.

Seen when: 13 October 2026, the living room redrawn. On the scenes as first built: "these are looking good, but not looking professional. These are looking like they were designed by some noob or amateur. I wanted it to feel like this was designed by a professional studio or a big company." On a sketch with light, shadow, quiet walls and small things on the shelves: "This is the perfect direction you are going. The details are what we're missing... push even further." On the header over it: "The top part, which says the room name and the count, is not looking good... integrate these elements into the room itself. The room name can also be a wall poster." After playing it: "I liked the living room design. The details were spot on."

Apply: a place is not a card. The bold dark line is for mascots and things you use, and the background is thin lines of its own colour. One light, with a shadow under everything. One viewpoint: the floor from above, every object showing its top and its front. Walls and floor stay calm so the mascots are the brightest things. Add the details that say who lives here, and let nothing be fully still. When he says "push even further", the answer is more details and more finish, never more colour. The room's own facts (its name, its count, its code) are drawn as things in the room when the scene has walls for them. The full rules: decisions, 2026-10-13.

A hidden delight keeps an obvious twin. The wall light switch and the radio did real jobs (light or dark, sound) and he found them only by accident: "kind of a hidden Easter egg... there should be obvious buttons for the users to toggle those." Apply: a thing that is only a joy may stay unmarked (the clock that swings, a paper plane across the window, the owl in the garden's tree). A thing that changes a setting a player needs always has the app's ordinary button in plain sight beside it, the same face it wears on every other screen. Both stay: the button for whoever needs it, the switch for whoever finds it.

He trims what says a thing twice, and what reads as something else. The count's own tag was "an unnecessary field. Maybe just a number on the board somewhere is enough." The share tile beside the code "is not looking like a share icon. It looks like part of the code." The lamp's light was "too sharp on the floor... we need a soft glow there... The shadow above the lamp is not looking good." Apply: a fact gets the smallest thing that says it. A button looks like the button it is everywhere else and never sits where it reads as part of something else. Light is soft-edged, objects stay crisp, and a shadow he calls wrong is taken out, not tuned.

Not this: an AI-painted picture as the background (it blurs on a big screen and nothing in it can react). A room that is flat colour with no shadows. A setting that can only be changed by finding the thing in the room.

A prop goes where it belongs or not at all. A thing that will not come right is removed. A creature you keep answers a tap.

Seen when: 14 October 2026, playing the rooms. At the pool: "there are unwanted items... Just for the sake of adding items, they were added", the slippers, the beach bag and the duck. The juice glass "is looking good, but it's placed at the wrong place... generally, the juice glass is placed next to the lounge chairs." The slide was "not looking good. It kind of looks like a hot dog... make it look like an actual slide." In the garden he circled the gnome, the wheelbarrow and the watering can. The cat "is not looking good on the beanbag". The bird by day "was looking very odd"; the owl at night "is looking good", and "if you decide to keep the bird or the owl, maybe you can have some kind of petting option for them... it should make some sound." Then, on the fixes: the cat moved to the windowsill "is looking like it's floating in the air. Let's remove the cat and stop trying to fix it." And the slide redrawn as an open chute: "I didn't like the slide redesign for the pool. It is looking odd. Let's revert it."

Apply: before a small thing goes into a place, say where it would really be. A drink is by the lounger, an owl is in the tree at night. If the honest answer is "to fill that corner", leave the corner empty. When he says a thing is not right twice, take it out or put back what was there; do not try a third drawing of it. A redraw of something he already lives with goes to him as options to pick from, not as a finished swap. A creature that stays answers a tap with a small reaction and a sound, on the phone that tapped it.

Not this: props spread out so a scene looks full; a cat placed on furniture people sit on; fixing a thing he has asked to remove; a creature that is only scenery.

A thing that says what the room is doing is simply there. It does not fly in. A friend let in walks straight through the door they knocked at.

Seen when: 27 October 2026, watching a recording of three phones in one room. The picked game's box left the shelf, arced over the sofa and landed on the coffee table: he wanted the flight removed. And a friend let in at the half-open door saw it shut, then open a second later: he wanted them to walk in from where they already stood.

Apply: what is picked shows up in its place in the same moment. An entrance carries on from where the person already is, with no step in between that undoes what the screen just showed.

Not this: a thing travelling across the room to announce a choice; a door that closes and reopens around one arrival.

The room is for before and after. A party never goes back to it between its games.

Seen when: 2026-10-12. Between two games of a party the app went back to the living room for a "next up" moment, and I had redrawn that moment on the new room: the scene, the bar as what is up next, the mascots free to roam. He ruled on the premise, not the drawing: "Why are the between-previews needed? Is it for the party? If it is for the party, when the party started, why will they come back to the lobby again and see the screen? If the party's first game is over, they might see a standing screen after the game, and that game should have a timer. They should not come back to the lobby. They should come back to the lobby only after the party is over, or after the tournament is over, or after a single game is over."

Apply: the room is where friends gather before something is played and where they land when it is over. Once a party (or a tournament) has started, everybody stays inside the night: a game, then a screen that says who won it and where the night stands, with a timer that starts the next game by itself, and so on to the awards. Only then the room. Whatever a night still needs between games (answering a knock, taking somebody out, a latecomer's name on one phone) is a small thing on that screen, never a reason to bring the room back.

The rule under it: ask why a screen is shown at all before making it good. A well-drawn screen in the wrong place is still the wrong screen.

Not this: the room between two games, in any drawing; a scene to roam while a countdown runs; the room's code and Share in the middle of a night.

After a party game: only the winner on the podium, nothing added up, and a break in place of a skip.

Seen when: 2026-10-13, playing the screen a party shows after each game. It had a podium of three, a "Wins so far" heading over the crowd with each friend's wins as their eyes, and two keys for the host, "Skip this one" and "Start now". His words: "Wins so far label is not making any sense to me, let's remove it. Only the winner of last game stays on podium and rest all below. Also instead of skip this game, we should have pause option, so that if they want to take a break before starting a next game they can do so. Skip I think is not needed, they have set up the games by their own will and order."

Apply: the moment after a game belongs to whoever won it, alone on the step, saying so. Everyone else stands below with their name; nobody is second or third, and nobody is drawn twice. No tally, no count, no rank on that screen: the awards sum the night up once, at its end, and a running score between games turns a party into a league table. What a group needs between two games is time (a drink, a phone call), so the host's quiet key is Pause, and Resume starts the countdown whole so people have time to get back. A choice the group already made together is not offered again as a button to undo it: they picked the games and the order, so nothing skips one. A game is passed over only when it cannot be played, and the screen says which and why.

The rule under it: a label that needs explaining is counting something nobody asked for. And a control for changing your mind belongs where the choice is made (tonight's list, before Start), not on every screen after it.

Not this: second and third on steps; a heading over the crowd; a number in anyone's eyes here; "Skip this one", between games or in a game's menu; a paused clock that comes back with two seconds left on it.

The games sheet: a tap is the whole act, the game's own picture does the selling, and a title is a title.

Seen when: 2026-10-12, over several rounds on the sheet that holds Game, Tournament and Party in the new room. On voting: "When a host taps on a card, it gets selected, but when a guest taps on a card, it gets voted." So there is no Vote button and no Pick button. On the first list of games: the cards were "very basic… We have a beautiful animation for each one, but we are underutilizing it." On what he wanted back: ideas that are "very creative and, at the same time… so much clarity." On an initial on every head once a colour repeats: "remove." On the groups' headings, which were set like small labels: they "can be made better." And, with the room and the sheet as they then stood: "Everything looks good. Let's start the real build. Finalize this approach."

Apply: one tap on a game does the one thing that person can do: the host's picks, a guest's is their one vote (on another game it moves, on their own it is taken back). The picked game is up on a big screen at the top of the sheet, PLAYING its own scene, and every other game is a small still under it, so "picked" is never a word laid over a picture. Votes are the friends who cast them, as heads, and how many is said once; a head is a plain face at every head count, and a tap on one says whose it is. A group of games has a real title in the headline face ("Everyone plays", "Some play, some watch", "Not enough of you yet") with a thin line between groups. The one line a guest is told, "Tap a game to vote", is on trial at the far end of the first group's title: "Let's put it and see how this looks. If it just looks good, we'll keep it. Otherwise, remove it."

The mascot is the brand's character. A player gets one only when the game needs it.

Seen when: 2026-09-28, the mascot home page concepts. The coral robot (antennas, a black visor for a face) was chosen to give the app personality, like Duolingo's owl. Asked whether every player should be a coloured copy of it, Among Us style: "For now, the brand's character." A mascot per player comes only with games built around it (an Among Us type game), because the current games do not need one. And later the mascot can be upgraded: accessories to sell, such as a different pair of "headlights" (its antenna tips), glasses or hats.

Apply: one coral mascot hosts the product; players keep their colour dots. Draw it as separate parts (body, antennas, face, hands) so it can move, change colour and wear things, and leave room for accessories on the head, face, antennas and hands. A mascot must do a job wherever it appears (present, point, react, explain), never sit there as decoration.

And the home he chose (same day): of four live concepts (a game-show host, a guide that walks the page, a sticker book, a board of pose tiles) he picked the sticker book, "The Crew", without a single change: "perfect… this is what I wanted." Friends on a couch pass one phone down the row, each way in is a little scene, the games are stickers stuck on at an angle, a friend naps in the footer. Coloured copies of the mascot are welcome as the friends in a picture; they are illustration, not avatars.

Apply: the approved drawing is the spec. Carry it into the app as it is, with the same motion, rather than re-imagining it in another tool.

Then two calls (same day): "I don't have a designer… you will be the only one writing all the code", so the mascot and every new pose are drawn in code, never handed to a design tool. And light mode only: "animations that look good in light mode might not look good in dark mode… a few games looked good in light mode but not in dark." Finally the order of work: the animations first, on the simulator and the web, to touch and play with (the reactions sheet and the home), and only then the plan for the other screens.

Apply: show motion running on a real device before planning screens around it, and never use pure white (people play at night).

Then he tested instead of guessing (same day): given a Light/Dark switch on the mascot sheet, he found dark mode worked except the antenna stalks, which vanished on the dark ground ("change them to some lighter colour"), so dark mode stays. But not on purple: "I don't like the purple background… explore a few other colour palettes for the dark mode." And the plain look beat the sticker look: "the plain version looks better", the white cut-out edge went.

Apply: when he is about to drop a feature because it might not work, give him a switch to try it first. Anything drawn in the outline colour needs a lighter tone on a dark ground.

And the night look (same day): of four night palettes on the live Crew page he liked Midnight and Charcoal, leaned Charcoal, and then chose Midnight: "Midnight looks good. Let's go with it." He asked first whether the dark colours live in one place, because he wants to walk the whole app in them, not judge from one page.

Apply: dark mode is deep navy, never purple. A palette is judged on real screens, and it lives in one block of shared colours, so no screen may type its own dark colour.

Then he changed two calls after living with the result (2026-09-30): "I actually like the mint background on the homepage, and I think I was wrong to not have it on the whole application", so light mode is mint everywhere. And "I was wrong about not having this mascot on the game level screens": a player's colour dot with an initial can become the mascot in that player's colour (the players list, whose turn it is). But not everywhere at once: "show me one or two places first, then let me go screen by screen… once we find a pattern, then we can repeat it for other screens without manual review."

Apply: a call he made before seeing the thing is provisional; when he reverses it after seeing the result, the new call wins and the docs change the same day. New visual ideas go screen by screen until a pattern is approved, and only then roll out without per-screen review.

First review of player mascots (same day): he liked the little full-body buddies, and rejected the cropped head ("the face is not completely drawn… the bottom part is kind of oval"). He worried that with 30 players the eight seat colours repeat, so two players get the same mascot. And the turn line should not sit in a box: "bring the mascot out and show the wording inside the bubble", the way the set-up screen's mascot says "Now pick a game!". He liked all three turn ideas (a buddy, a stage row above the board, pieces that are mascots) and asked to try the stage and the buddy together, with the crowding of shared squares answered.

In the app (same day): little buddies up to 12 players, a zoomed face with the initial past 12 (the letter must be legible). Snakes & Ladders: the pieces are mascots; the players "peek over the rim" of the board with no name tags (six tags clutter), the one whose turn it is climbs up and speaks; under the board only the die. Feelings match the board: a ladder is a jump for joy, a snake bite is sad and crying, each with its own sound. Online, EVERY player sees the die tumble, not only the roller (this replaces the earlier "only the roller's phone shows the die"). The win screen celebrates with the winner's own mascot in their colour, crowned, dancing, not the brand's.

Apply: never crop the mascot; it is always the whole character. Anything that tells players apart must still work when colours repeat (an initial, for big tables). A mascot's words go in its speech bubble, not in a card beside it.

The app icon is the mascot's face. No letters.

Seen when: 2026-10-03, five icon mocks, each with its launch screen: the face on mint, a pop-up on party yellow, three friends, the face on Midnight, a winking visor filling the tile. He picked the face on mint. The two-G letter mark went with the neon look.

Apply: the brand's mark is the character, never initials or a monogram, and it stands on the app's own ground so the icon, the launch and the first screen are one colour. The launch screen is the mascot standing still, and the app opens from that exact picture with one small move (the antennas spring, a blink, the name rises in). An opening moment is about a second, plays once, and is skipped with reduced motion.

Small spots get the mascot's head. The drawing is never covered. The drawer lives on the paper.

Seen when: 2026-09-30, the player mascots reaching Quick Draw, picked from a phone mock. For the small avatars (a guess line, a pill, a seat in a list) he was shown four: a round badge, a framed crop, a letter circle, and the head. He picked the head, the whole head with both antennas and no arms, feet or frame: "this is looking like the mascot only". The badge and framed versions did not. Past twelve players the initial goes on its visor, the same rule as the buddies. A right guess shows a tick in place of the eyes.

And the drawer (same review): the drawer's own mascot stands inside the canvas, bottom-left (moved from top-left the same day, when it became a phone watcher's react button, below), pencil in hand. As a turn starts it waves and a bubble beside it says "Karim is drawing" ("Your turn to draw!" on the drawer's own phone; one shared phone names the drawer, because the whole table reads it) for about two and a half seconds, then leaves the paper to the drawing. It comes back at the reveal, laughing, and stays with a funny line (below). A line drawn in its corner must never hide under it, so it fades while a line is there. The phone's separate "who is drawing" row went: the corner says it. Picking a word, the drawer's mascot peeks over the word card and says "Pick one to draw", so the bar above keeps only the round and the clock.

And the reveal line (2026-10-01): the drawer's mascot says something funny, in the drawer's voice, and it depends on how the drawing landed. Everyone who was guessing got it: it brags ("I'm basically Picasso!", "Mona Lisa who?"). Only some got it: it teases the ones who missed ("Glasses, anyone?"). Nobody: mock offence ("Nobody? Really?", "I blame the pencil."). "We should not say it has nailed it if only some got it." Twenty lines a case, each two to four words and never more than five, so the bubble fits a phone and a party does not hear the same line on a loop ("it needs some kind of fun"; the first pair, "Nailed it!" / "Tricky one!", felt flat and repetitive). Every phone shows the same line. On one shared phone a right shout ends the round, so it counts as the drawing landing, and the brag lines never claim "everyone".

And picking a word (2026-09-30): everything behind the word card dims, with the same scrim the app's dialogs use (blurred on the web, like them), so the eye lands on the three words. The peeking mascot and its bubble stay bright with the card.

And the reveal: the drawing stays in full view. Nothing is laid over it. The word is in the bar above; everyone who scored stands under the canvas as their own little buddy with their points, cheering once.

And pass-the-phone: the next player's own mascot in their colour, big, holding the phone, standing straight on the page. No card or scene box behind it, no letter circle.

Also seen: a yellow mascot on Quick Draw's white paper in dark mode lost its antenna stalks, because they took the dark-mode light tone. The paper is light in both themes.

And the paper is white, never tinted (2026-09-30): the canvas still wore the retired lavender, and the approved mock had white paper. It is pure white in light and a soft off-white in dark, so it does not glare. White ink is the paper's own colour, so it erases cleanly in both.

Apply: where a whole buddy will not fit, use the head, never a badge or a framed crop. Never lay a card over the thing the room made. Put whose turn it is where everyone is already looking, say it briefly, then get out of the way. Antenna stalks (and a bubble) follow the surface the mascot stands on, not the app's theme. A mascot on its own moment stands on the page with no box behind it.

Chain Reaction: the players peek over the rim and feel the blast. (Built overnight 2026-10-01, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the player mascots reaching Chain Reaction, designed from the game's own moments rather than copied: it is explosive, spatial and fast, so the table should be calm between moves and feel every chain. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the rim, eyes that carry a number, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events).

What was built: the standings pills and the turn pill are gone. Every player's mascot peeks over the board's top edge, and their orbs on the board are their eyes, read off the board on screen, so the numbers tick wave by wave as a chain crosses: yours falls as the blast lands on your cells, the mover's only climbs (their orbs in the air still count). A player who has not placed yet has no number. Whoever is up climbs onto the rim and says whose turn it is.

A chain is a show: the mover stays up and feels it grow, a hop at the first capture, a cheer at three waves, sparks at six, a laugh at ten, and says a line as each size is reached (twenty each: "Boom!", "Domino time!", "History was made."). Everyone the blast reaches ducks behind the rim as it lands on their cells, and pops back up. A one-wave pop says nothing: it is the game's ordinary move.

A knock-out: the wiped-out player's mascot is shocked, then cries, while the mover says goodbye by name ("Nighty night, Leanne.", twenty lines, and twenty for two at once). When the move lands they sink to their chin behind the rim, dimmed and asleep, one puff of z's, for the rest of the game. The "Ben is out" toast is gone: the rim says it. A chain with a line keeps the settled board one second so it can be read; the one-wave pop hands over at once.

The win: the last colour standing climbs up, cheers in confetti and says "Ana wins!" before the winner screen.

Left out, on purpose: emoji reactions. The whole table is reading the grid, and floats would cover it; the table talks instead.

Charades: the actor steps into the spotlight in a top hat, and takes a bow. (Built overnight 2026-10-01, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the player mascots reaching Charades, designed from the game's own moments: it is about performing while the room shouts, so the phone should be calm while someone acts and have a little show at the reveal. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the stage speaks, feelings only on real events, twenty funny lines a case).

The top hat: the actor wears the mascot's top hat for their whole turn, and in Reverse every actor wears one. Whoever wears the hat is on stage.

Between turns (online only; one phone has the hand-off): the actor's own mascot stands big on the page, waves, and says whose turn it is ("Ana's turn", "Your turn, Ana"). The "Waiting on Ana" strip went: the bubble says it.

Choosing: on the actor's phone their mascot peeks over the prompt card, curious, and whispers "Shh! Our secret." (Reverse: "Don't show Sam!"), the note that used to sit in the status bar. A skip is a flick of its hand as the new card lands, and at five seconds left a question mark pops over its head. Everyone else sees the actor in the spotlight, thinking: "Ana is picking". If they skip, the watchers see it flick the card away: "Nope! Another one."

Acting: the ring stays the hero and nothing covers it. The mascot the turn is about sits in the ring's empty lower-left corner: the actor in Classic, asking the room "What am I?" ("You're on!" on the actor's own phone), the one guesser in Reverse, saying "Show me!". The line stays about two and a half seconds. The "Ana is acting" and "Shout your guesses" lines went. The clock gets nervous: at ten seconds, the moment the ring turns coral and ticks, the mascot jumps and keeps a worried face, and at three it fidgets. Karim's call (2026-10-01): the emojis are always out here. The acting screen is a clock and little else, so a watcher's emoji row sits at the foot of the screen, under the thumb, on a phone as well as a big screen, and the emojis rise from it over the ring. The mascot is not a button and the "Tap me to react!" line went (the rule is in the reactions card, "Out when there is room").

Who got it: each friend is a big tile with their own whole mascot, name under it, each with a different shouting face, never a list of look-alike heads.

The reveal, a curtain call: the name lands, then the people the turn was about stand on the page with their points under their feet (the points pills went). Classic, got it: the actor and the friend who got it face each other; the friend jumps for joy in confetti, the actor takes a bow and has the last word. Nobody: the actor alone, sad and then in tears. Reverse: the guesser and the acting crowd in top hats beside them ("+35 each"); the guesser has the last word. Twenty lines a case, in the speaker's voice: the actor brags when it was fast ("Born for the stage."), is relieved or teasing otherwise ("Took you long enough."), and takes offence when nobody got it ("Tough crowd."); Reverse's guesser is smug ("I read minds."), relieved ("Phew!") or blames the actors ("You lost me."). "Fast" is a guess in the clock's first quarter. Every phone shows the same line.

Left out, on purpose: the mascot miming along while someone acts (a decorative loop, and a mascot acting things out was turned down on 2026-09-30); every guesser peeking over the ring (it would compete with the clock).

Undercover: the players sit round a table, and everything happens to them where they sit.

Seen when: Karim's review of the mascot build, 2026-10-01. The first build kept the old screens (a list of names, a separate vote list, a tally list) and put a mascot's head on every row. Karim: "we are literally translating the existing design with the mascots." A list with heads on it is still a list. He approved a mock of the room itself: an oval table in the chunky outlined candy style, whole mascots seated round it, a name tag under each, their words over their heads.

Up to eight, the round table. From nine, the meeting room. Past eight a ring stops fitting a phone, so the table grows long: players down both sides and one at each end, each with a card on the table in front of them carrying their name and their word. Karim picked it over an auditorium (rows of desks facing a stage): "the meeting room looks like an extension of the normal table. That way it stays consistent." Seats size to the screen and never overlap: twenty on a phone are small and still whole. Past twelve a mascot's eyes are its initial, and the name is on the card. A big screen lays the long table on its side and uses the width.

The deal is unchanged: your own mascot peeks over your word card and winks ("Shh! Keep it secret."); Mr White's peeks over the dark card, puzzled ("Shh… bluff it!").

Saying the word: the one on the clock perks up (taller, lifted, a yellow disc under them) and online their eyes are the clock: the seconds left, a jump at five, a fidget at three. Everyone else rests still. A word pops out as a speech bubble over the head that said it (the round table) or lands on their card (the meeting room), and it STAYS for the round, because the room votes on words. A silence is "No word" on a grey bubble or card, with a sheepish face. On one phone the words are said out loud, so a seat that has spoken gets a tick for eyes instead of a word, and the holder taps the speaker to move on.

The argument and the vote, at the table: the headline asks "Who's the undercover?" beside the clock, with "Tap a friend to vote. One vote each, and it's final." There is no vote list. You tap a mascot (it jumps, a yellow disc and a lit name), and only then does the button name them ("Vote for Dev") beside "Not yet": a slip on a table of twenty must not be final. Your mascot slides a face-down card to the middle. As others vote their cards slide in and their eyes become ticks: who has voted is public, who they voted FOR stays sealed until the count, and nothing on screen is drawn from a sealed vote. One phone casts one vote for the whole table.

The count: the cards turn over one at a time and fly to the one they name, stacking in front of them, each carrying its voter's little head. The votes against a player are their eyes. When the last card lands, the rest of the room fades back and the one the room picked is left in a pool of light, sweating, with a last word from the twenty protest lines ("I can explain!", "I demand a recount."), which never lean on their side. A tie says "It's a tie. Nobody goes." at the same table, with nobody in the light. The host turns it over ("Unmask Sam"); one phone's card carries no head, because the room cast it together.

The chat is a tray at the foot of the table (Karim): "a bottom tray where you see multiple messages, and you can swipe up, which comes on top of the table... it stays open at the bottom like a minimized view. You can expand it, and pull it down. The table will be visible, and the chat also can be visible on phones." Minimised it is the box to type in and the last two lines, each led by its speaker's head (an out player's head dozes). Swiped up, or its handle tapped, it covers about half the screen with the whole conversation. While a friend is picked the tray steps aside for the vote button. A big screen has no tray: the same lines sit in a panel beside the table.

The reveal, an unmasking: the one voted out stands still in dark shades through the drumroll. Everybody wears them, whatever their side, so they say nothing. Then the side lands under their name, the shades fall off their face, and they feel it: a civilian is sad, then cries ("I was innocent!"), a caught undercover jolts and winks ("Busted!"). Mr White's unmasking is the guess screen: a question mark pops and he is on the spot ("Um… hi."); a wrong pick is a sad shake ("Worth a try."). Twenty lines a case, the same on every phone. The emoji row sits out over the button, on a phone too (the reactions rule, 2026-10-01: the row shows whenever the screen has room, and hides behind a mascot only where it would cramp it). The first build hid it behind the unmasked mascot on a screen with plenty of room; the mascot is no longer a button.

Game over, the team photo: every player's mascot on a tile with their name and side. The winners stand first on yellow in party hats, laughing, and the first six jump for joy once; everyone else sulks. A phone keeps the emoji button in the corner there: twenty tiles leave the row no room.

Left out, on purpose: the list and the separate vote screen (rejected above); the auditorium; mascots side-eyeing each other through the discussion (a decorative loop); a role-coloured anything before the reveal; "Sara voted" lines in the chat (her tick and her card say it).

Trivia Clash: the question's winner takes the stage, and the host holds the mic. (Built overnight 2026-10-01; the question screen itself is Karim's call in the next card.)

Seen when: the player mascots reaching Trivia Clash, designed from the game's own moments: it is a quiz show, so the table should feel the lock-in, the answer landing, and who knew and who fell for it. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (heads in tight spots, tick eyes, the stage speaks, feelings only on real events, twenty funny lines a case) and sized for thirty players on a phone.

While the clock runs: the question stays the hero. Under it the room is a crowd of every player's head, and a head's eyes become a tick the moment that player locks in (answers stay sealed: only "locked in" shows). In the last five seconds everyone still out goes wide-eyed, so the room sees who is holding it up. Heads step down in size as the table grows, so thirty is three calm rows. The "Locked in" chips went.

The reveal, who fell for it: each option wears the heads of the players who picked it, hung on its bottom edge like stickers, fastest first: laughing on the right answer, sad on a trap (four heads, then "+6"). The losing options dim less than before so a trap's heads stay readable.

The question's winner takes the stage: the fastest right answer stands under the options (on a big screen: under the question, beside the host) with their time under their feet ("2.1s") and says a line that depends on how hard the question turned out: only them ("Just me? Wow.", confetti), everyone ("Too easy.", a hop), most ("Keep up, folks!"), half or fewer ("The smart ones.", sparks). A photo finish: when the next right answer landed within half a second, the runner-up stands a step behind on the winner's other side, wide-eyed, both times shown ("By a whisker!"); the line stays beside the winner's head, never stacked over it. Nobody right: the fastest answer steps up anyway, jolts and goes sad ("So sure. So wrong."). Twenty lines a case, the same on every phone, never repeating on consecutive questions.

The quizmaster: see the next card (Karim's call, 2026-10-01). In host mode the host's own mascot wears the bow tie and holds the mic on every phone; everything they say comes from their ring: the warm-up line in the big bubble while the next question is hidden ("Eyes on me!", twenty lines), "Time's up!" / "Everyone's in!" beside the ring when the window closes early, and the last word if nobody answered at all ("Hello? Anyone?").

One phone: "Who got it?" is a grid of whole buddies, each shouting a different face, name under it (four to a row with initials past twelve). The tap puts that friend on the page: they jump for joy in confetti, "+100" under their feet, and brag about being first ("Buzzer beater!", never claiming they were the only one who knew). "Nobody got it" is closed by the holder, the quizmaster up in the ring: a sad face and the last word beside it ("Nobody? Wow."). Undo stays under it.

Left out, on purpose: emoji reactions (the reveal is the busiest screen and lasts five seconds; floats would cover the heads people are reading); a streak badge (the rules keep no per-question history).

Trivia Clash: the quizmaster asks the question in a giant bubble, and the answers are white buttons with a coloured letter.

Seen when: three concepts for the question screen side by side (2026-10-01): "the quizmaster" (a host asks, four full-colour answer tiles), "the big card" (the question on a playing card, white answer buttons with a coloured letter tile) and "the countdown show" (a huge clock, four colour blocks). Karim: "The quiz master UI looks so good. The only issue is with the coloured options for the choices. They look good, but kind of overpowering… for the options we should go with the approach of the big card options. They look good and work well with the quizmaster UI." So the screen is the quizmaster with the big card's buttons.

The host asks: a mascot in a bow tie with a mic stands in a ring that is the clock (the band empties, the seconds sit in a chip on its rim, coral for the last five) and says the question in one giant speech bubble in the display face, the category a small ribbon on its corner, "Q 1/10" beside the ring. The question is the hero: as large as fits, stepping down for a long one, never cut. A big screen puts the host on the left and the bubble beside it.

Who the host is: when a friend runs the room (host mode, or the one holding the phone on one phone) it is that friend's own mascot, named under the ring. When the clocks run it nobody hosts, so the brand's coral mascot asks. This is the one board the coral mascot stands on mid-game: it has a job there.

The answers: white candy buttons, each with a big coloured letter tile (A pink, B sky, C yellow, D green). Colour lives in the tile, never the whole button: four full-colour tiles under the quizmaster were "kind of overpowering". Stacked on a phone, two by two on a big screen.

Long answers wrap, never cut ("three- to four-word or five-word max answers are possible"): the four share one type size set by the longest, the text wraps to a second line and the button grows; no "…". The sizes are stepped so two lines stand no taller than the letter tile, so a wrapped answer does not leave its neighbours looking short.

Locking in and the reveal: your button turns yellow the instant you tap and the other three dim; the crowd sits on a bench under the answers, eyes turning to ticks ("3 of 8 locked in"). At the reveal the right button goes green with a tick in its tile and bounces once, the wrong ones sink, your own losing pick keeps a pink ring, each button wears the heads of who picked it, and the host cheers or winces. Beside the ring a phone reads its own result ("You got it +120", "So close!"). When the clocks run it, the same ring counts down the gap to the next question, with the host's Pause beside it.

The rule: one hero per screen and it is the question; a set of four choices takes its colour in a small tile, not four painted slabs; and words a player has to read are never truncated, the box grows.

Trivia Clash: no standings on the reveal, and a reveal fits one screen.

Seen when: the reveal after a question (2026-10-01) showed the question's winner with their line, then a "Standings" list sliding under it. Karim: "the standings are coming below it, and it is not visible even on the laptop. They're pushing down… Either do not show the standings, or make it instantly visible without needing to scroll. I don't think standings are needed here because they come for a few seconds after the question ended, and you can still see the standings from the Players button at the top header."

So: the reveal is the question, the four answers with the heads of who picked each, and the question's winner with their line. The running scores live in the header's Players sheet (rank, mascot, total), and the final table is the winner screen.

It fits one screen, no scroll: on a phone the winner stands under the answers, the line beside their head (a photo finish stands the two smaller so the line still fits beside them). A big screen is wide and short, so the winner stands under the question, beside the host, and the answers stay on screen under them.

The rule: something that is on screen for a few seconds must be seen without a scroll, or it is not there. Before adding a block to a timed moment, ask where else the player can already get it; if the answer is "one tap away", leave it out.

Tambola: the host calls the numbers from a bottom corner, the standard way, and a prize says nothing until it is claimed.

Seen when: the player mascots reaching Tambola (built overnight 2026-10-01 from the game's own moments: a hall full of people, a caller with a patter, the private tension of waiting on one number and the shout of a claim), and Karim's review of it the same day, which made the four calls below.

The caller stands beside the ball, in a bottom corner: "The mascot is not looking good with that number circle animation that is overlapping at some times… top centre is also not good on desktop. Maybe we can keep it in the bottom corner." The ball starts bottom right on every screen and the board keeps room under its last ticket, so nothing to daub or claim is left under it. The host's own mascot, in a headset, stands next to the ball on the ball's ground, then its bubble on its far side: ball, caller, words, side by side, never one over another. Drag it anywhere and the caller and bubble move to the side with room (over its head when a phone leaves no room beside it). "Eyes down!" opens the match; a break is "Tea break!" (twelve lines) with a sleepy face; after the ninetieth, "That's all ninety!".

How numbers are called is the host's choice: "We should have a mode in the game settings to select which mode they want to hear." Two styles in the start sheet, and the bubble and the voice both follow it: the number ("Eighty-two") or digits first ("Eight, two. Eighty-two", the default, the way a real caller says it). There are no nicknames: "It's kind of distracting to me. Let's have only Number and Digits-first modes." A call is the number, said clearly, and nothing else to decode while you are hunting for it on a ticket.

One sound switch, and it is always true: "When I muted it on both, the sound is still coming." The header's sound button is the only switch for the voice, the blips and the recordings. Off means that screen makes no sound of any kind: a line being said stops mid-word, and nothing is said after a new number, a claim, a pause, a reconnect or a reload until it is switched back on. Whether a phone speaks is that phone's own switch, never the host's. The rule: a switch a player cannot trust is worse than no switch, so every new sound goes through this one.

Nothing shows on a prize until it is claimed: "Don't show anything on the claims unless someone has actually claimed it, because someone might have missed their number, and we are showing that that player already got 5, which will spoil the game for others." An open prize tile says only "Not claimed": no heads, no count, no hint of who is close. A phone is not even sent it. A won prize shows its winner's head, laughing. The rule: never show one player's progress to another before they claim; in Tambola noticing your own number is the game.

A claim is a moment: for the five seconds the next number waits, the claimer stands beside the ball in a party hat (a crown for Full House), in confetti, their name and the prize under their feet ("Top row +10"), bragging in their own voice (twenty lines a prize: "Early bird!", "Top of the world!", "House! House!"), the same on every phone. The caller gasps. The won tile shows the winner's head, laughing. The "Lappy claimed Top Row" toast went: the moment says it.

The mascot on your ticket speaks only when there is a claim to make: "I want the mascot to appear on the ticket only when there is a claim to be made… This helps users easily identify that they are eligible to make a claim." Most of the night it is out of sight behind the card. The moment a prize is complete on that ticket's daubs, is open, and nobody has it, it climbs over the ticket's top edge and names it: "Claim Early Five!", "Claim Top Row!", "Claim Middle Row!", "Claim Bottom Row!", "Claim Full House!". Those five lines are all it ever says. With two prizes ready it names the first in the order prizes go, then the next. The moment the prize is claimed, by anyone, it drops back. A nudge while a ticket was one number away ("Come on, 47!", "47! Daub it!", "So close!") was tried and removed: "Suppose 4 numbers are done and it is waiting for 1: this mascot is distracting to me."

The mascot points, the player claims: "They have to explicitly scroll up or click on the claim buttons. Mascot should not claim." The mascot and its bubble cannot be tapped and are no shortcut; a claim is made only on the prize tiles. The rule: a mascot that tells you something is a sign, never a second button for the same action.

Left out, on purpose: a strip of every player's head (thirty heads with no job); the heads of players one call away on the open prizes (removed in review: it tells the room who is close); a mascot on your ticket waiting on one number (a distraction); the coral brand mascot as the caller (it never stands on a board mid-game, and the host already runs the calling); emoji reactions (the ticket is what everyone is reading).

Word Search: the hunters peek over the grid, their finds are their eyes, and a find is shouted. (Built overnight 2026-10-01, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the player mascots reaching Word Search, designed from the game's own moments: it is a quiet, focused race where finds are little bursts of joy, so the grid stays the hero and the players only move when something real happens. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the rim, eyes that carry a number, the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events).

The pill row went: every player's mascot peeks over the letter panel's top edge, in seat order, and their finds this round are their eyes. Nobody has a number before their first find, so a fresh board is a row of plain faces and the first find lights one up. The mascot of whoever holds the phone is awake (breathing, eyes open), so you can tell which one is you; everyone else rests.

Your buddy watches your finger (new): while you drag, your own mascot's eyes leave your count and follow the end of the line across the letters, then settle back on your number when you let go.

A find is shouted: the finder climbs onto the rim and says the word ("Pizza!"), a cheer for your own, a hop for someone else's, then climbs back down. The longest word on a shown list is the spotter's moment: sparks and a brag after the word ("Crocodile! Eagle eyes.", twenty lines). In Parallel an opponent's word is hidden from you, so their find is a hop in place, their eyes ticking up.

Too slow (Race, your phone only): if someone claims the word your finger is partway along, your drag drops and your mascot climbs up, sad, and says so ("Too slow!", "That was mine!", twenty lines). A word you had already let go of is a sad face only, because the toast already says it in words.

The clock: at ten seconds your own mascot jumps, at three it fidgets.

One phone: the player whose turn it is stands on the rim all turn and opens it with a line of their own ("Eyes peeled!", "Let me cook.", twenty lines); the seats who have played keep their count as their eyes, even a 0, and the seats still waiting have none. The hand-off already shows the next player's own mascot.

The round's last word (across devices): once the last band has drawn, whoever took the round climbs up and says a line before the round sheet: a clean sweep in confetti ("Every single one."), a win ("Read 'em and weep."), or a shared round with the co-winners hopping beside them ("Great minds!"). Twenty lines a case, the same on every phone, never the same on consecutive rounds. The round sheet shows the takers as their own mascots.

Left out, on purpose: a head on the found capsule or the struck chip (it would cover letters, the capsule's colour already names the finder, and a found chip stays quiet); emoji reactions (everyone is reading the grid, floats would cover it); a round line on one phone (the hand-off, then the result screen, follow the last turn at once); a nervous face on everyone at ten seconds (only the one holding the phone feels the clock).

Checkers: the board is the hero, the pieces are candy, and the mover says what just happened. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim asked for more two-player games so a tournament has six to choose from, and named Checkers. Designed from the game's own moments: a quiet board you read for a while, then a sudden jump, a chain of jumps, a crown. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events, rules a tap away, the board never moves).

The board: sixty-four squares edge to edge in one card, so a 375 phone gets squares a thumb can hit (about 41). Paper and mint in the light, navy and night in the dark. The pieces are candy discs in the two players' own seat colours, thick, with a groove and a shine. A king wears a white crown.

A turn: tap a piece and it lifts, with a wash of your colour under it; the squares it can reach each show a small counter of your colour. Tap one and it goes. Tap another piece to change your mind. A piece that cannot move shakes its head.

The compulsory jump, without a lecture: nothing is written on the board. When only one piece can jump it is already in your hand, its landing square marked and the piece it takes ringed. When several can, they bounce and ask, and a tap on any other piece makes them shake: "one of us". Mid multi-jump the piece stays in your hand and the stage says "Ana's turn again".

The moves are shown, never teleported: a step slides; a jump rises over the piece it takes, which pops in its own colour; a crown drops on with a little sparkle and its player's mascot cheers. One noise per move, the strongest thing it did.

The stage: the same two mascots under the board as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect Four, whoever is up standing. When a turn ends with something worth saying, the mover says it before the other player stands up, from twenty lines a case, the same on every phone: one capture ("Yoink!", "Thanks for that."), a multi-jump ("Hop, hop, hooray!", "Bulk discount."), a crown ("King me!", "Heavy is the head."). In Giveaway a capture is a grumble ("Ugh, fine.", "Stop feeding me."). A plain step says nothing, and so does the move that ends the round: the round's own moment follows. The board holds for just under a second while the line is read.

It always ends: twenty turns in a row with nothing taken and only kings moving, and the board is counted up (a piece is 1, a king is 2). For the last ten of them a small pill in the gap under the board counts down ("Ends in 4 turns"), then shows the count ("Counted up: Ana 6 · Ben 4"). It takes no room of its own, so nothing moves when it appears. The winner screen says the count under each name.

Each phone sees its own pieces at the bottom. One shared phone, and anyone watching, keeps the board as it was laid out, and nobody changes sides between rounds: only who opens swaps.

Its card: a wooden board, violet's piece crowned on the far row after a double jump, violet shouting "King me!" and gold tilting back.

Left out, on purpose: a line under the board saying "you must jump" (a rule on the board); a tally of pieces taken beside the board (the board shows it, and the count matters only at the very end); the other player's mascot crying at every capture (twenty captures a game is twenty tears); emoji reactions (two people are reading the board); a small quick board (see decisions, 2026-10-04).

For his eye: the white-and-mint board in the light may be too pale; the line after every capturing turn holds the board for a beat, which may feel slow once a table plays fast; the countdown says "Ends in 4 turns" without saying why (the rule is in the how-to).

Dots and Boxes: the paper is the hero, a line is the whole gap between two dots, and a box is its owner's face. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim asked for more two-player games so a tournament has six to choose from, and approved this one. Designed from the game's own moments: a quiet duel of single lines, the held breath when a box has three sides, the glee of running a chain. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the rim, eyes that carry a number, the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events, the board never moves).

The paper says whose move it is: one card with a grid of dots. Every line still to draw is a faint guide in the colour of whoever is on the clock, fainter on a phone that is only watching. Close a box and the guides stay your colour: that is "go again", with no banner. Draw a line that closes nothing and the whole paper changes colour.

A line is easy to hit: its tap target is the whole gap between its two dots, reaching to the middle of the box on either side: well over 50 long and 50 wide on a phone's big board. The guide lights up under the finger before the line is drawn, so a thumb can slide off a line it did not mean. A tap that lands exactly between two lines draws nothing rather than the wrong one.

The line is shown, never teleported: it runs from dot to dot in its drawer's colour, and keeps that colour until the next line, so a watcher sees what was just played. Every older line is plain ink. A tap never waits for the line before it: a chain is tapped out as fast as a thumb goes.

A box is a face: a closed box fills with its owner's colour and their mascot's head pops into it, laughing while it is the newest. No initial, no badge.

The score is their eyes: the two players peek over the paper's top edge, the same rim as Ludo and Chain Reaction, with their boxes as their eyes. Nobody has a number before the first box.

The stage speaks: whoever is up says whose turn it is, and "again" after a box. A line worth a word gets one, twenty a case, the same on every phone: a box ("Mine!", "Yoink!"), a chain from the third box of one turn ("On a roll!", "Box buffet!"), the last box ("Pens down!", "That's all, folks!", never claiming the win, because whoever closes the last box may still have lost). A gift: when a player hands boxes over though a safer line was there, whoever is up next says thank you ("For me? Thanks!", "Is it my birthday?") and the one who slipped is caught wide-eyed. Late in a game every line gives boxes away, and that is the game, so nobody says a word.

A chain builds: a hop for a box, a cheer at three, sparks at five, a laugh at seven. From the third box each one bursts as it pops, a little bigger every time, and the one noise a line makes gets brighter. The round's winner cheers in confetti as the last box lands.

The end: the winner screen shows the boxes as the score ("15" and "10"). In a series the round sheet says "Boxes: Ana 6 · Ben 3" under who took the round.

Its card: a sheet of paper, green closing the top row box by box with a little green mascot in each, green laughing and pink glum with its one box.

Left out, on purpose: a mark on a box that has three sides (noticing it is the game); a score strip (the eyes are the score); a "go again" banner; emoji reactions (two people are reading the paper); the three- and four-player game (see decisions, 2026-10-04).

For his eye: the players peek over the paper here, while Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four and Checkers stand under their boards; the guides' colour may be too quiet for a yellow player in the light; the menu offers Pause on one phone although there is no clock there; across phones the turn clock is thirty seconds unless the host changes it, the same as Checkers; if he wants chips, "fewest boxes wins" and a board with its fence already drawn are the real variants.

Sea Battle: the sea under fire is the hero, a shot flies before it lands, and nobody is ever sent a ship they have not sunk. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim approved the hidden-fleet game for tournaments: "hidden ships, real suspense". It is called Sea Battle, never the trademarked name. Designed from the game's own moments: hiding a fleet, the held breath while a shot is in the air, a hit that lets you go again, a ship going down, and the reveal at the end. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events, one hero per screen, the board never moves).

One sea at a time on a phone: the sea that is being fired at fills the screen. On your turn that is your friend's sea. On their turn it is your own, with your ships on it, so you watch their shot come in. Two tabs over it name the two seas and show each fleet as five little ships, struck out as they go down. Tap the other tab to look at the other sea; the next shot brings you back. A big screen has room for both seas side by side, each player's mascot standing under their own, and a shot flies across from one to the other.

Hiding the fleet is one tap, and yours to arrange (Karim, 2026-10-06): the game lays a fleet out for you. Shuffle lays another. Ready locks it in. Nobody has to place anything. Karim, after playing it with his wife: "Currently, it just shuffles. I would like to have it move the ships around the way I want it." So a ship is dragged with a finger: it lifts and follows, a wash of yellow shows the squares it would land on, and it sets down there. A tap turns it. A ship that cannot lie there shows no wash, goes home and shakes its head. One line under the sea says so, because the first way (tap a ship, then a square) was there and nobody found it: "Drag a ship to move it. Tap to turn it."

A minute to hide (Karim, 2026-10-06): across phones the fleets are hidden against one minute, up from 45 seconds: "1 minute is more than enough to hide their fleet."

A piece put down makes a soft stamp, never the snake's whistle (Karim, 2026-10-06): a ship set down played the long falling whistle of a snake in Snakes & Ladders: "Either change the sound effect or remove it." The same goes for a plain move in Chess and Checkers. The whistle stays with the snake and Ludo's captured token; a refused drop keeps its low buzz.

The shot is shown, never teleported: a cannonball arcs in from the shooter's side and lands: a white splash and a white dot for a miss, a coral burst for a hit. The square just fired at wears a ring until the next shot.

A sinking is a moment: the whole ship shows itself, grey, rocks and comes to rest askew under its bursts. The shooter cheers. Its little ship on the tab is struck out, and when the last one goes that player's face on the tab is sad.

The stage speaks: the same two mascots under the board as the other duels. The shooter says what their shot did, twenty lines a case, the same on every phone: a miss ("Just water.", "Scared a crab."), a hit ("Boom!", "Knock knock."), a ship down ("Glug glug glug.", "Bye bye, boat."), the whole fleet ("Fleet? What fleet?"). No line ever says how near a miss was. A shot never waits for a sentence: aim the next one the moment the last has landed, and the line gives way.

The end: both fleets are on the table for everyone, so each player sees where the ships they never found were hiding.

One phone: each player hides their fleet in private, behind the usual pass-the-phone screen. Then the phone sits between the two of them: it shows only the sea being fired at, with nobody's unsunk ships on it, so there is nothing to hide and nothing to pass. Whoever's turn it is taps.

Its card: yellow's shot landing on pink's ship, yellow shouting "Boom!" with its arms up, pink tilting back.

Left out, on purpose: a small picture of your own sea beside the big one (too small to feel a shot land in, and the tab is one tap away); letters and numbers down the sides of the sea (nobody calls squares out, they tap them); telling the other player which ship was hit before it sinks; emoji reactions (two people are reading the sea); salvos, mines and other variants.

For his eye: a hit fires again, which is how most families play it, but it lets a lucky player run a whole ship in one go; a line on every miss may be too chatty over a long game; on a phone your target sea is hidden while your friend fires, unless you tap its tab; ships may touch each other; Ready is final, with no way back to move a ship; the ring round the last square is heavy on top of a burst.

Chess: the board is as wide as the phone, the pieces are their players' colours, and nobody waits for a sentence. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim asked for Chess by name, for tournaments. Designed from the game's own moments: a long quiet read of the board, then a capture, a check, a king tucked away, a pawn that makes it across, and the one move that ends it. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events, rules a tap away, the board never moves).

The board: sixty-four squares in one card, reaching into the page's margin on a small phone so a square is a full finger from a 375 phone up (42 on a 360 one). Paper and mint in the light, two navies in the dark, a touch lighter than the Midnight ground. A tap that lands a hair outside a square that matters still goes to it.

The pieces: drawn in code, chunky, on a strong outline. Each is told apart by its shape first: a ball (pawn), battlements (rook), a horse's head (knight), a pointed hat with a notch (bishop), a crown of points with balls on them (queen), a cross (king). Which side it is on, is its body: ivory for whoever moved first, ink for the other, the same for any two players in both looks. Whose it is, is its foot: every piece stands on its player's own seat colour, like their mascot ("mine stand on yellow"). On the Midnight board an ink piece wears a pale rim so it never sinks into the navy. (A review measured the first build, bodies in the seat colours: yellow and green all but vanished on the light squares, and sky and cyan were told apart only by a foot. All 144 pairs of colours were looked at before this was settled.)

A move: tap a piece and it lifts, on a wash of your colour; a dot marks a square it can move to, a ring a piece it can take. Tap one and it slides there. Tap another piece to change your mind; a piece that cannot go shakes its head. The last move's two squares stay washed in the mover's colour. A king in check stands on a red starburst and shakes once: no banner. The burst is a shape and a red nothing else on the board has (a coral frame was the coral player's own colour).

The three moves people argue about, shown: castling is one move, the king and the rook crossing together. En passant rings the square you land on and, dashed, the pawn it takes. A pawn about to cross opens four tiles on the board where it is going, the queen on the very square you tapped (tap it again for a queen), the knight, rook and bishop under it; nothing is sent until you choose.

The stage speaks, on events only: the same two mascots under the board as the other duels. A quiet move says nothing. A check says so ("Check!", "Knock knock. Check!"), a capture ("Yoink!", "Was that important?"), castling ("Hide and seek!"), a promotion ("All grown up!"), an en passant ("Yes, that's legal."), a mate ("Checkmate. Good game!") and a stalemate, kindly ("Stalemate. Shake hands."): twenty lines a case, the same on every phone. The line goes up as the move lands and gives way to the next move: with a clock running, nobody ever waits for a sentence.

At their feet: under each mascot, their clock (when the game has one) and the pieces they have taken, small, the pawns in a row under the rest. The running clock is the yellow pill; its last ten seconds are coral and tick.

Chess is played on the clock (Karim, 2026-10-04). "I think chess needs a timer. We are not professional-level players. No timer is also allowed, but let's encourage timer-only mode. Each player gets some time, and when his turn is running, only the time counts." So an ordinary game, in a room and on one phone, opens on five minutes each. The host can pick three or ten, and "No clock" is the last choice, on a line of its own under the three lengths ("Think as long as you like."). It is a plain clock: yours runs only while it is your move and a move gives nothing back, so five minutes each is a game over about ten minutes after the clocks start. Run out and you lose, unless your friend has nothing left to mate with (then it is a draw).

Nobody's time runs before they have touched the board. Each player's first move of a game is free of the clock, everywhere chess is played: the clocks start counting once both have moved. In a best of three every game starts on full clocks that wait the same way, whoever taps "Next round", so starting the next game never costs the other player a second.

In a tournament it is the same clock in the same place: the start sheet asks the same question without "No clock", because a round has to end, and it opens on three minutes each, because a room is waiting on every match. The board shows the two clocks at the players' feet, and the people watching see both clocks beside the two mascots. A flag loses that game. A party plays Chess on three minutes each too.

Are you there? (tournaments only.) A free first move must not let one dead phone hold the room. So in a tournament each player's first move has one minute, a whole one. The mascot of whoever has to move says how long is left ("First move in 0:45"), on both players' boards and for everyone watching. No move in the minute is a no-show: the match goes to the other player, exactly as when somebody leaves. In an ordinary room, on one phone and in a party there is no such minute. The first move simply waits.

Karim said "2 minutes or 3 minutes". The lengths built are 3, 5 and 10. A tournament and a party open on 3, an ordinary game on 5, because two minutes each is a move every three seconds for people who are not strong players. The list is one line in the rules and one entry of words: his to overrule. Built 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.

Not this: a few seconds back for every move (the first build's "5 minutes each, plus 3 seconds back": the game then has no latest end, and it is one more thing to explain). A clock that is off by default on one phone. A tournament that swaps the chess clock for a different one in a different place. A clock that starts running on a player who has not moved yet. A whole clock's wait for a phone that was never picked up.

The end: a mated king tips over on its red starburst while the winner says it. A draw the rules call (the same position three times, fifty moves each with no pawn moved and nothing taken, too few pieces) is said by a small pill under the board, not by a player: nobody did it on purpose. The winner screen says how it ended under the name.

One phone: the board stays one way up for the whole match, the first game's opener at the bottom. It never turns between moves. The colours swap each game; the seats do not.

Resign: a white flag, a full finger wide, between the two clocks in the row at the players' feet, so it is never under the fold; for a player only, asked about before it is sent ("Resign this game?", "Ana wins this game.").

The clock on one phone: it runs only while the game is on screen. Put the phone away, hide the tab, leave the screen or close the app and it stops; Resume, or Keep going on the paused card, starts it. The same for every game with a clock on one phone. A party plays Chess as one game on three minutes each, in a room and on a shared phone.

How to play: the card does not pretend to teach chess. Four steps on how to move in this app, then each piece drawn beside the one line that says how it moves, then castling, en passant, a draw and the clock. The clock part says the two rules a player would otherwise meet only while they count: "Your first move is free: the clocks start once you have both made one." and "In a tournament you have one minute to make your first move. Miss it and the match goes to your friend." Who picks the clock is said so that it is true everywhere: "Whoever sets up the game picks how long you get, and a party picks for you. Only a game on its own can go without a clock." (It used to say only "The host picks how long you get, or no clock at all.", which a tournament and a party both break: a tournament always has a clock, though its host still picks the length, and a party plays one length. And on one phone there is no host: whoever sets the game up picks.) Built 2026-10-04 and 2026-10-05, awaiting Karim's review.

Its card: sky's rook on the back row, coral's king on its side behind its own pawns, sky shouting "Checkmate!" with its arms up and coral tilting back.

Left out, on purpose: offering a draw (two more buttons and a question that can be asked again and again; the rules already end a dead game); dragging pieces (the tap does the same); letters and numbers round the board; a list of the moves played; hints; undo; variants; turning the pieces upside down for the player across the table; emoji reactions (two people are reading the board).

For his eye: the pieces are ivory and ink on a foot of the seat colour: is a foot enough of a player's colour, or should a piece wear a second trim; the ink pieces' pale rim on the Midnight board; Resign is a flag with no word beside it; the sheet says "Rounds" where chess says games; the lengths are 3, 5 and 10 minutes each where he said 2 or 3; coming back to the app shows the paused card and waits for a tap; a line after every capture may be chatty in a long game; the how-to card is long.

Reversi: one field, a wave of discs turning over, and the score is the two faces. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim approved Reversi for tournaments: "one rule, huge swings in the last moves". It is called Reversi, never the trademarked name. Designed from the game's own moments: a quiet look for the square that traps the most, the disc going down, the row turning over, the corner nobody can take back, and a count that can change hands on the very last move. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the rim, eyes that carry a number, the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events, the board never moves).

The board: one field of squares with a thin grid, in one card: soft green felt in the light, deep navy at night. No two-tone squares: every square is played on. On a small phone it reaches into the page's margin and the field runs to the card's edge, so a square is a full finger from a 375 phone up (42 on a 360 one, the same as Checkers and Chess). The discs are flat candy counters in the two players' own seat colours. Because two seat colours can sit close (yellow and gold, sky and cyan), each player's discs also carry a mark of their own, a groove for one and a dimple for the other, and two players dealt the very same colour get a deep shade for the second.

A turn: the moment it is yours, every square that takes a disc shows a small dot of your colour. Nobody else sees them. Tap one and the disc goes. Hold a square (or point at it on a laptop) and the board shows what it would do instead: the disc, faint, and a ring round every disc it would turn over. A hold only looks: letting go after one places nothing, so the tip ("Hold a square to see what it would flip") is true and a player can try every square before choosing. A tap on a square that traps nothing makes the dots swell once: "here". The square played last keeps a wash of its player's colour.

The flip is the moment: the disc drops on, then every disc it trapped turns over, edge on and round again in its new colour, in a wave outward from the new disc, ring by ring. One noise a move, brighter the more it turned. Even the longest wave is over in about a second, and nothing can be tapped while it runs.

The score is their eyes: the two players peek over the board's top edge, the same rim as Dots and Boxes, with their discs as their eyes, and the numbers tick as each ring of the wave shows its new colour: the mover's climbs, the other's falls.

The stage speaks, on events only: a plain move says nothing. One line a move, the strongest thing it did, twenty a case, the same on every phone: a corner ("Corner office!", "Try flipping that."), a big wave of six or more ("Pancake day!", "Flipped the script."), coming from clearly behind to in front ("Overtaking!", "Plot twist!"), and the last disc ("Count them up!", "That's a wrap."), which never claims the win, because whoever plays the last disc may still have lost. The line goes up when the wave has landed and gives way to the next disc: nobody waits for a sentence.

A skipped turn says so itself: a player with no square to play is passed over, and never has to tap anything. Their own mascot climbs up, wide-eyed, and says it ("Nowhere to go!", "Fine, go again."), then the other player's turn line reads "Ana's turn again".

A corner: a small moment of its own: a gold sparkle on the square, and its player cheers.

The end: when nobody can move the board holds for a beat on the final count, whoever took it cheers in confetti, and the winner screen shows the discs as the score ("34" and "30"). In a series the round sheet says "Discs: Ana 35 · Ben 29". Level is a draw, and says so.

Someone only watching (a tournament) has the two players over the board already, so the rim is not drawn there. They get the count as two small discs with their numbers over the board instead.

Its card: green felt, gold holding a whole row, blue's disc landing at its end and the row turning blue one disc after another, blue shouting "Flip!" with its arms up and gold tilting back.

Left out, on purpose: the other player's dots (their options are not yours to read); a score strip (the eyes are the score); a "you were skipped" banner or a Pass button; the other mascot crying at every big flip (it happens all game); hints for the best square; emoji reactions (two people are reading the board); counting empty squares for the winner at the end (a rule nobody at a party knows).

For his eye: the players peek over the board here, like Dots and Boxes, while Checkers and Chess stand under theirs: the eyes that count were worth more than the family look; the green felt in the light sits close to the app's own mint; the groove and the dimple are subtle; a lead line comes about once a game and a corner line up to four times; the quick board draws about one game in seventeen when played at random, the classic one in twenty-five; a wave cannot be skipped by tapping.

Pairs: the table of cards is the hero, a miss is held up for everyone, and a found pair wears its finder's colour. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim approved the memory game for tournaments: "flip two cards, find a match; fun to watch". It is called Pairs, the name a friend says, and never the trademarked one; its address is /games/memory, the word people search for. Designed from the game's own moments: the first card going over, the held breath on the second, the two wrong cards everyone gets to learn, and a run of pairs. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet; it applies the approved patterns (the rim, eyes that carry a number, the stage speaks, twenty funny lines a case, feelings only on real events, the board never moves).

The table: one card with the cards laid on it. Every back is the same calm drawing: the brand's coral, a paler line inside the edge, the mascot's visor looking out. The full game is thirty cards, five across and six down, each about 60 wide on a 360 phone. The quick game is eighteen, laid 3 · 4 · 4 · 4 · 3, so four big cards fit across and the short rows sit centred. A card's whole place on the table takes the tap. The table never runs under the fold: it measures the room really left under it.

The pictures: fifteen, drawn in code in the candy look: a die, a pencil, popcorn, a trophy, a snake, a ladder, a heart, a sailing boat, a top hat, a balloon, a microphone, a game controller, the mascot in a party hat, a star and a moon. They are told apart by SHAPE at 50 wide, never by colour, so each reads the same on any player's wash. One mascot, not three: three friends in three colours were one outline three times. No emoji, no image file, no letter.

A turn: tap a card and it really turns over, edge-on and round, in a fifth of a second. Tap a second; it never has to wait for the first to finish turning. A pair pops in a little burst of your colour and stays face up, and you go again.

Whose card it is, said twice: a found card wears a wash of its finder's colour, made for the card's cream paper (the same in the light and the dark), and a tab of the full colour in one corner: the top corner for the first of the two players, the bottom corner for the second. So it reads for all twelve seat colours, for two players dealt the same one, and for someone who cannot tell two colours apart.

A tap waits for the screen: a card can be tapped only once the screen has shown what the player is acting on. A tap before that does nothing and says nothing. Nobody can turn cards they have not seen, and however fast someone taps the screen is never more than a card's turn behind the game. A pair's pop plays on while the next card turns, so a quick player is not kept waiting for it.

The miss is the game: two cards that differ stay up for about a second and a half, held by the rules' own clock, the same on every phone, and nobody can turn a third card meanwhile. Then they turn back together and the other player stands up. Every screen shows them for exactly that stretch. If the timer that turns them back never comes, the next tap on the table turns them back first, from either player: the one who is up plays their card on top of it, the other only clears the table, which starts the turn clock of a player who is away. A lost timer cannot freeze a game.

The score is their eyes: the two players peek over the table's top edge, the same rim as Dots and Boxes and Reversi, with their pairs as their eyes. The number ticks as a pair pops. Nobody has a number before the first pair.

The stage speaks on the moves that matter, about five a game: a first card, a plain pair and a plain miss say nothing; a plain pair keeps its little hop. One line a move, twenty a case, the same on every phone: a pair on the first try, with two cards nobody had seen ("Pure luck!", "Call me psychic."); the third pair or more in one turn ("On a roll!", "Greedy? Me?"); a pair that takes the lead from level ("In front now!", "Nose in front."); a slip, which is a miss on two cards they had both seen while there were still unseen cards to turn ("I was so sure.", "Goldfish moment."); and the last pair ("That's the lot!", never claiming the win, because whoever finds the last pair may still have lost). A line stays for its whole beat, even if the next card is tapped at once. A line is worked out only from what the whole room watched: which cards were turned, whether they had been turned before, and the count. It never reads a picture, so it can never hint at a card that is face down.

The clock: across phones, thirty seconds a card unless the host changes it. Run out and your cards are turned for you, at random: both, or the second if one is up. That player says "Time's up!", wide-eyed. Three turns in a row like that lose the round, and the player who ran out says so from the rim; the winner screen reads "Won on the clock".

The end: the last pair pops, whoever has more cheers in confetti, and the winner screen shows the pairs as the score ("8" and "7"). Both tables hold an odd number of pairs, so there is always a winner. In a series the round sheet says "Pairs: Ana 8 · Ben 7".

Someone only watching (a tournament) has the two players over the table already, so the rim is not drawn. They get one quiet line over the table ("Pairs: Ana 3 · Ben 2"), and the table leaves room for the reactions.

Its card: a lilac table of coral backs, cyan turning up two hearts and shouting "Snap!" with its arms up, yellow tilting back, a pair of stars yellow found earlier.

Left out, on purpose: a "tap to turn them back" step (the room waits on one person); a hint of any kind, even "you have seen that one"; a count of turns taken; found pairs flying off the table (the table would reshuffle under people who are remembering places); emoji reactions between two players; three to six players (see decisions, 2026-10-04).

For his eye: the coral backs are loud on the white table in the light; the corner tab is small (about fifteen pixels on a 360 phone) and may want to be bigger; a pair now turns and pops in under half a second, which may feel too brisk; whether five lines a game is the right amount, and whether the slip's groan comes at the right moments; three missed turns in a row lose the round even for a player who is ahead on pairs, as in Reversi; 3 · 4 · 4 · 4 · 3 is not a plain grid.

Colour Clue: one secret colour, a clue of one or two words, and the whole room guesses at once. (Built overnight 2026-10-06, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: Karim sent videos of real groups playing games that had gone viral: "I went to Instagram and found some viral videos in which they are playing some kind of games which can be converted to the games in our app." This one was a board game played on a grid of colours. It was built while he slept and tried on the web only, never on a phone. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet. The name is not his either, and he may change it. Every paragraph below is a call made for him: his to confirm or overturn.

What was built: for 3 to 30 players, on one phone or in a room. One board of 140 colours, 10 across and 14 down, each shading into the next. Every round one player gives the clue. They are dealt three squares, pick one in secret and give a clue of one or two words. Everyone else marks the square they think it is. Then the square is shown with a frame round it, and the next player gives a clue. The host picks 6, 8 or 10 rounds. A party plays 6.

The board has no letters or numbers down its sides: nobody calls a square out. They tap it.

The giver is dealt three and picks one: the three are always far apart on the board. The pick can be changed until the clue is out.

Typed in a room, said out loud on one phone: in a room the clue is typed and every guess stays hidden until the reveal. There are clocks: 45 seconds to pick and give the clue, 30 seconds to guess. On one phone the giver says the clue, the phone goes round the guessers, and the markers already down stay on the board, the way the cardboard game is played. One phone has no clock.

Tap, then lock in: a square is smaller than a finger. A tap picks it and "Lock in" confirms it.

Closer scores more: on it scores 3. One square away scores 2. Two away scores 1.

The giver's points are a share of the room: 3 when half the guessers land on it or next to it. 2 for a quarter of them. 1 if anybody does. So thirty guessers cannot hand the giver thirty points.

A slow giver spends the round. A giver who leaves does not: when the giver runs out of time nobody scores and the round still counts, so a room that walked away always ends. When the giver leaves before the reveal, the next giver plays that round.

The reveal: each marker wears its own points. There are no standings on the board. The giver's mascot says how the room did, eight lines a case: "We share a brain." when most were close, "One fan is enough." for one, "Is it me? It's you." for nobody.

For his eye: the name. 140 small squares on a phone. A clue is only checked for its shape (one or two words), so nothing stops a clue like "top left". Whether a table misses the standings at the reveal.

Hide and Seek: a place seen from above, four to pick from, and it grows with the table. (Look, places, a bigger place for a bigger group, the host choosing the seekers: Karim's calls, 2026-10-06. How it does those, and the rules: awaiting his review.)

Seen when: one of the viral videos Karim sent (2026-10-06): a house with numbered hiding spots and a masked figure searching them. The first build drew a doll's house from the side, with nine doors. Karim reviewed it the same day and turned the look down.

His call, the look: "One thing I didn't like is the hide-and-seek room, which is looking very childish and not looking good. I wanted a better-looking UI for the room." He was shown the same flat drawn two ways, from above and from the side, and picked the one from above: "look A with all four places". That is how the video shows it too. So a place is a floor plan: walls with thickness, furniture with hard little shadows, and the nine spots are the furniture itself. The seeker walks the corridors with a torch and its light is one flat, lighter wedge. Day colours in the light look, night colours in the dark one. The side view is deleted.

His call, the places: "also different locations, so that users can choose a different location each time they play and go to hide." There are four: the flat, the school, the wedding hall and the night train, nine spots each. The host picks one on the start sheet or leaves it on "Surprise me", which is the default. A room that keeps playing gets all four before one comes back. One place lasts the whole game.

His call, a big group: after watching the game played, the same day: "In the hide-and-seek game, the train looks small. Can we have a bigger train with multiple compartments so we can scroll also? Even if it is not fitting on one screen, you can scroll and go to the compartment so that multiple people can play in this. For the other rooms also, like the flat we have created, we can create a bigger flat so that we can scroll that area and hide it. At least a 20, 30-person group can also play, where 2, 3 people will be the ones looking for the other people." So a place is no longer one screen. The train's coach fills the phone's width and the train runs to several screens. Every place has three sections of nine spots, and you scroll through them.

His call, who seeks: "Maybe we can give the number of seekers as a configurable option for the bigger rooms. They can choose one or two seekers. It's up to the host. Maybe for a 30-member team, they wanted to have only a single seeker so that they keep the excitement going and follow only one person to see who they find out first." So the start sheet asks: Fits the table, 1, 2 or 3. Two are offered from 6 players and three from 12.

How it does that (awaiting review): the place grows with the TABLE, never with the seekers. One section for 3 to 8 players, two for 9 to 16, three for 17 to 30, taken at the start and kept. "Fits the table" is one seeker a section. The flat adds the neighbours' flat across the landing and the terrace. The school adds the upper block and the grounds. The wedding adds the lawn and the guest wing. The train couples on coach B and coach C, with the guard's van always last. A slim strip over the place names where you are ("Engine", "Coach A", "Pantry") and a tap jumps there.

Following (awaiting review): while somebody else is looking, your screen follows that seeker as they walk. Scroll by hand and it stops, and a small "Follow Hana" chip brings it back. A hider whose own spot has scrolled away gets a "My spot" chip. The seeker whose look it is scrolls freely.

Looks keep pace with the place (awaiting review): a round is four sweeps. In a sweep every seeker gets the same number of looks, the sections divided by the seekers and rounded up, taken one at a time in turn. So one seeker at a table of thirty gets three looks a sweep and simply keeps looking. One look is on every screen at a time, and a look is not taken until the last one has been watched.

Length is never set by the size of the table (awaiting review): the host picks Short, Normal or Long, not a number of rounds. More looks in a round means fewer rounds: 6, 8 or 10 at a small table, 5, 6 or 8 at a middle one, 4, 5 or 6 at a big one, and 2, 3 or 4 when two seekers share the biggest place (sixteen looks a round). A party plays Short.

His call, who sees whom (2026-10-08): "I expected all the hiders will be visible to everyone. Only the seekers don't see anything." Hiders see each other. Only the seekers see nothing. A hider sees every other hider who is in, each in their spot in their own colour, and goes on seeing them after being found. He accepted what follows: the first person found can say where everyone is, as in the real game. Seeing each other move about live comes later, with roaming.

His call, when time runs out (2026-10-08): "A hider taps a spot but never presses 'Hide here'. Time runs out. Where are they? In the spot they tapped." And: "If someone hasn't tapped any spot and the timer runs out, the system should hide them in some random spot."

The rule under both calls: a mock first, the build after his yes. "Show me first the locations you will be redoing. Once I approve it, then build it in the app."

What was built (awaiting review from here down): for 3 to 30 players, on one phone or in a room. Each round some seek and everyone else secretly taps a spot and hides. The seekers take turns to look, one spot at a time. Whoever is inside is found. Then the next seats seek, carrying on round the table, so as many different people as possible get a go.

No monster: the video has a masked figure hunting people. Ours has nobody scary. The seeker is one of the players, as their own mascot, and it is somebody new every round.

The spots: in the flat, the wardrobe, under the bed, the bathtub, behind the sofa, the curtains, the kitchen cupboard, the laundry basket, the balcony plants and under the dining table. The school has lockers and a school bus. The wedding hall has the mandap, the buffet and the decorated car. The night train has an upper berth and the guard's van. Any number of players may share a spot.

You see yourself hide: a tap rings the spot and tucks your own mascot into it. Nothing is sent for a tap: "Hide here" is the one message that hides you, and in a room you may move until everyone is in. To a seeker a full spot and an empty one look the same until it is opened: nothing on it hints at who is inside, or how many.

The seeker walks, never through a wall: along the corridors and through the doorways to the spot. The spot opens first, then whoever was inside pops out, and it stays open for the rest of the round. A crowded spot shows three heads and a count.

Points (awaiting review): a hider scores 1 for each whole sweep they last, so 0 to 4. The seekers of a round are a team and each scores the same: 1 for taking the job, and up to 4 more for the share of the hiders they found between them, so 1 to 5. The first build paid a seeker 1 a find, and a review showed the seat that seeks least then won twice as often as anyone else. Now a round spent seeking is worth about what a round spent hiding is: over 2,000 games of random play at 3, 4, 8, 12 and 30 seats, every seat wins within 8 points of an even share. A round ends early when nobody is left hidden. The points are added only after the room has watched the round end.

In a room everyone hides at once: 20 seconds to hide. When they run out a hider is in the spot they tapped, and one who tapped nothing is hidden by chance. A seeker has 15 seconds a look, or the app looks in a spot by chance.

On one phone: the phone goes round the hiders behind the pass-the-phone screen, and no seeker is handed it. The hider holding it sees the hiders who went before. Then it sits in the open and the seekers pass it between them, on a screen built new, so nothing the last hider did to it is left. One phone has no clock.

A look takes three seconds on screen: the walk, the spot opening, then who was inside. The seeker says what they found, eight lines a case: "Peekaboo, Ana!", "Just socks."

A seeker who leaves: with another seeker still in, the round goes on and their looks are gone. When the last seeker leaves, the round is void: nobody scores, the next seats seek, and the round is played again with the same number.

Open, for Karim: on one phone a round grows with the table. Thirty players is 29 hand-offs before anybody looks, and there is no clock to hurry them. Nothing caps it yet. And the usual game at 17 to 30 players (three seekers, twelve looks a round, five rounds) is about 12 minutes, or 21 if every clock runs out: four rounds would be 9 and 17, and would also shorten a table of 12 to 16 that picks three seekers.

For his eye: the name. The eight new sections and the two new coaches are drawn by the builder with no mock first, so he has not seen any of them. Two seekers at a table of 17 or more get sixteen looks a round, where one or three get twelve. The wedding hall's photo booth was redrawn after the mock, so it is the one piece of furniture he has not seen. On the start sheet the four places are short pills ("Flat", "School", "Hall", "Train") with the full name under them, because five long names do not fit one row on a phone. Three seconds a look, four times a round, may feel slow. Hiders may pile into one spot, which hands the seeker one easy point and costs the hiders nothing extra.

His calls after playing it at home with friends (2026-10-27): three things were not clear at the table. "It is not very visible that the player is counting because the count is coming on the person's face. The mascot is so tiny... The count should be outside, and it should be clearly visible." So the clock left the seeker's eyes: "Leanne is counting" is said big over the place with the seconds in a big yellow circle beside it, and the seeker counts with their eyes shut. "It should move like it is walking, not like it is flying from one place to another." So a walk takes as long as its way at a steady pace, with a soft start and stop. "One for me" is what no one understood. So the round's end line says only who was found ("Found 2 of you!"), and every player's points sit on their head in one row, the seekers included. And the bed showed nearly all of its hider while every other spot shows a head over an edge: now every spot hides the same way. The rule under all four: a mascot is too small to carry something the whole table must read from across the room, and a line is not the place for a number with no name on it.

His calls after watching the recorded game (2026-10-27): "There is no visual distinction between the counting mode and seeking mode... It should be very clear that someone is counting, someone is seeking, and someone is hiding... even to the kids or to the elders. Think on it and try something creative." So each beat has its own look (lights on for the hiding, lights out with one torch for the seeking) and each phone says its own part in a big coloured band. "Let users choose how much duration they want for counting and how much duration they want for seeking." Short, Normal and Long were "very vague": the host now picks seconds, minutes and rounds. "The number of spots should be at least 2 more than the number of players." He first wanted one try per hider. He took a third of the spots once he saw that it finds nearly everyone in a full room. The rule under all of it: say a game's beat in pictures and plain numbers, never in a word a child has to decode.

Doodle Twist: everyone gets the same outline, draws it into something else, and the room picks a favourite. (Built overnight 2026-10-06, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: one of the viral videos Karim sent (2026-10-06): worksheets headed "This is not a jellyfish. This is a ____", where everyone draws the same outline into something of their own. Built while he slept and tried on the web only. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet, and the name is his to change. Every paragraph below is a call made for him: his to confirm or overturn.

What was built: for 3 to 16 players, on one phone or in a room. Everybody gets the same small outline on their paper, draws it into something else and names it: "This is not a jellyfish. This is a rocket." Then the pages turn one at a time, and the room picks a favourite. There are 24 outlines. The host picks 2 to 5 rounds, 3 unless changed. A party plays 2.

In a room everyone draws at once: 75 seconds to draw, 5 seconds a page in the gallery, 20 seconds to vote. The room's clock moves every phone on together, so nobody presses anything.

A drawing is sent once, when it is done: never line by line as it is drawn. Nobody sees a drawing before its page turns. The reason is in decisions, 2026-10-06.

A vote in a room: each player picks a favourite that is not their own. Each pick is 1 point to the artist. A pick can change until everyone is in.

On one phone: the phone goes round for the drawing, each behind the pass-the-phone screen. Then it lies on the table, anyone turns the pages, and the table picks one favourite, worth 3 points. One phone has no clock.

The outline cannot be painted out: it is printed over the drawing, on the paper and on the finished page.

"Turn the paper" is in: a player can turn the sheet a quarter at a time, and the outline turns with it.

A room remembers the outlines it has drawn on: the next game in the same room gets ones it has not had, until all have been used.

For his eye: the name. Whether 75 seconds is right. One phone's favourite is worth 3 while a room's vote is 1 each, so the two do not score alike. A big room's gallery is long: sixteen pages at 5 seconds each.

Gibberish: read the nonsense out loud until it sounds like a phrase you know. (Built overnight 2026-10-06, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: one of the viral videos Karim sent (2026-10-06): "guess the gibberish", nonsense words that sound like a known phrase when read aloud. Built while he slept and tried on the web only. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet, and the name is his to change. Every paragraph below is a call made for him: his to confirm or overturn.

What was built: for 2 to 30 players, on one phone or in a room. A card shows nonsense words: "Bray Cull Egg". Read aloud, again and again, they turn into "Break a leg". A game is a run of cards and whoever hears the most wins. The host picks 8, 12 or 16 cards, 12 unless changed. A party plays 8.

The cards were written for this game, and nobody has heard them: 375 cards. They were checked by spelling the sounds out, not by ear. 33 are marked as the least sure. They are for Karim to read aloud and cut.

Two decks: "Mixed" is sayings, films, food, places and famous names. "Desi" is 106 cards of Hindi film lines and everyday Hinglish, and plays by itself.

In a room everyone types: a card is up for 40 seconds. A hint appears for everybody at 20. Right before the hint is 3 points, after it 2, and the first one in takes 1 more. A wrong guess joins the feed for all to read. A right one never shows its words.

On one phone the room shouts: whoever holds the phone taps Hint, Got it or Skip, then taps who said it first, or Nobody. 2 points, or 1 if the hint was used. No clock. A slip of the thumb can be undone.

A small slip still counts: one wrong letter is forgiven, two in a long answer. Typing the card's own nonsense back never counts.

Desi answers are judged by sound: Hinglish has no one spelling ("chhoti", "choti"), so a guess is right when it sounds right.

A phone is never sent a card's id: only its nonsense words. The reason is in decisions, 2026-10-06.

For his eye: the name. The cards marked least sure, and the Desi deck most of all, since nobody has said them out loud. Whether the bonus for the first one in is wanted. English only for now.

Next Letter: one letter each, the row must still start a real word, and lives are the mascots' eyes. (Built overnight 2026-10-06, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: one of the viral videos Karim sent (2026-10-06): "complete the word", friends adding one letter each until somebody cannot go on. The video was watched without sound, so the rules here are that idea made into a game the app can referee, not a copy of theirs. Built while he slept and tried on the web only. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet, and the name is his to change. Every paragraph below is a call made for him: his to confirm or overturn.

What was built: for 2 to 8 players, on one phone or in a room. Players take turns adding one letter to a row. The row must always be the start of a real word. A letter that starts no word costs a life, and so does a clock that runs out. Out of lives is out of the game. The last one in wins.

A finished word costs nobody anything: when the row becomes a whole word that nothing longer starts with, the player who finished it brags, and a new row starts.

The app holds the words, and the table can overrule it: about 53,000 everyday English words of 3 to 15 letters. No list is complete. So for six seconds after a refused letter there is a button, "That is a word", and the life comes back. In a room it is the host's. On one phone it is anybody's.

After a miss the table is shown a word that would have worked: a short one. Unkind and grown-up words can be spelled but are never shown there.

The host picks a length, never a number of lives: Short, Normal or Long. The lives each player gets are worked out from the size of the table, so two players and eight both play about ten minutes on Normal: the table loses 7 lives on Short, 13 on Normal and 20 on Long, shared between everyone but the winner and rounded up. Nobody starts with fewer than one, and there is no most. Two players get 7, 13 or 20 each, eight get 1, 2 or 3. The reason is in decisions and learnings, 2026-10-06.

Lives are the mascots' eyes: the number left is on each player's mascot. No row of hearts.

All 26 letters are always there: the keys never show which letters would work. A tap out of turn is answered in words, never a dead key.

The clock: 8, 12 or 20 seconds a letter, 12 unless the host changes it. It runs on one phone too. A party plays Short on 8 seconds.

The lines: twelve a case, from the player it happened to: "Who made this list?" for a refused letter, "My brain went for snacks." for time up, "Told you I can spell." for a finished word, "I'm out. Avenge me." for the last life.

For his eye: the name. In a room only the host can say "That is a word", so a host can save a friend or not. Six seconds to say it may be short. A table of eight gets 2 lives each on Normal. English only.

Story Builder: one word each, on a clock, and the finished story is a page to screenshot. (Built overnight 2026-10-06, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: one of the viral videos Karim sent (2026-10-06): a "story making challenge", one word each in turn. It takes the place of the line-up's old "coming soon" Story Builder, which said one sentence at a time. Built while he slept and tried on the web only. Nothing here is a call Karim has made yet, and the name is his to change. Every paragraph below is a call made for him: his to confirm or overturn.

What was built: for 3 to 8 players, on one phone or in a room. The app starts a story and the table writes the rest one word at a time, in turn, each word on a short clock. At the end everyone reads it, and the table picks whose words were the funniest.

One word, not one sentence: a word is quick, nobody waits long, and the story swerves with every turn. A second word is refused and the table says "One word!".

The story starts itself: from one of 48 openers that stop mid-sentence ("Nobody knew that grandma"), so the first word has somewhere to go. The first writer gets five seconds more, to read it. A room does not get the same opener again until it has had the others.

A slow clock costs nobody anything: the app writes a silly word of its own and the turn passes. On the page that word is quiet with dots under it, so nobody is blamed for it. The slow player says a line: "Blame the app."

Ending a sentence is one tap: tap the full stop, the exclamation mark or the question mark and the word goes in with that ending.

Length and clock are the host's: 40, 60 or 90 words, 60 unless changed. 8, 12 or 20 seconds a word, 12 unless changed. For the last five words the stage says "Wrap it up!". A party plays 40 words on 8 seconds.

The finished story is a page of a book: each word in its author's colour. It is the page people will screenshot.

The vote: in a room each player taps one friend, never themselves, and the picks stay hidden until all are in. Tapping a friend lights up their words first. On one phone the table picks one, and it may be anybody.

For his eye: the name. Whether the app's filler words are funny or a nuisance. Whether a vote is wanted at all, or the page is the prize. A table of 8 on 40 words gets five words each.

The lobby is a living room: the code is a garland, the door is the knock, the TV is the game. (Built 2026-10-02 from the mock he picked; his first review the same day is folded in below.)

Seen when: 2026-10-02. He asked for the room lobby to be rethought ("the current layout is not good, it was designed before mascots… go wild") and was shown three working mocks: a living room, an arcade you walk around in, and a party bus. "The living room looks so good. Let's build this… build it like how we have created the living room."

Apply: the online lobby is ONE scene. The code hangs as yellow letter tiles (tap them to copy) with the room's name in a small frame and a Share tag. The people are whole mascots in their seat colours on a sofa (faces with initials past twelve): the host wears the crown and holds the remote, your own wears a "You" tag, and a tap on anyone shows their name. The door is the knock: the knockers peek round it and the host's bubble holds the two answers. The TV is what we are playing: only the game's picture, playing, with nothing laid over it. It stands on a wooden TV stand, and the stand's front is where the next step is: a cream name plate with the game's name and details, arrows that flip to the next game the room can play, and "All games", which opens the list. A friend's say is a choice of two buttons: "I want this" (popcorn at the TV, and "3 want this" on it) or "Other games", where a tap votes for another game and their mascot holds up a sign, in its own hand, that the host can tap to put it on. Start is the yellow button and no animation ever holds it up. The lamp goes off as the game starts. Calm: only the mascots that matter are awake (the newcomer for a moment, the host, you). One shared phone does not set up in it (the next card). It draws this room only between two games of a party: bunting in place of the code, "Game night" in the frame, and an "Add a friend" seat that takes a name.

Not yet: hats and accessories for your mascot. "That won't be scalable when you have more players… that is for later." No room you walk around in.

The main button is never dead at the moment it is the next step. With no game picked the yellow button said "Pick a game" and was greyed out, the TV asked "What are we playing?" and a caption said it a third time, and none of the three opened anything. "For someone coming for the first time it won't be clear what the next step is… I don't want to literally tell them to do this, but looking at it you should know 'okay, this is where it is'." So: the yellow button is live, says "Pick a game" and opens the list, then becomes "Start". It sits on the TV stand, right under an empty test card (the whole screen opens the list too); a guest reads "Karim is picking a game" on the stand instead, over their own "Vote for a game". Say a thing once per place: under "Pick a game" a line appears only when the room needs something else first ("Add who's playing."). A label names what it opens, never a metaphor to decode: "All games", not "Guide"; "I want this" and "Other games", not "I'm in!" and "Guide"; in the list a guest reads "Tap a game to vote for it."

The next step lives where people are already looking: on and under the TV, never a far corner. He tested as a guest on a laptop. The TV said who was picking over an empty grey band, and his only button sat in the bottom right corner. "That's the main area people are looking at. The bottom area is not where they will look… the natural next position is the area below, which is currently empty… everything we can show on the TV itself, not in the bottom-right corner." So: everything a person does next is right under the picture, on the front of the TV stand (the entry below), for the host and for a guest, on a big screen and on a phone. A big screen has nothing in its corner and a phone has nothing docked at its foot. Nothing a mascot holds up may reach a button: the room makes space instead.

The TV shows only the picture; the stand is the control surface (2026-10-03). The caption laid over the foot of the picture was tried and rejected: nothing covers the game's picture. Four ways to name the game without covering it were mocked (A the TV's chin, B a TV stand, C a poster on the wall, D the remote as the label) and he chose B. The TV stands on a low wooden cabinet drawn like the sofa (outline, flat fills, the same in the day room and the evening one), and its front holds everything: for whoever picks, one yellow "Pick a game", then the arrows round the name plate over "All games" and the yellow "Start"; for a guest, "Karim is picking a game" over "Vote for a game", then the name plate over "Other games" and "I want this", and who everyone is waiting for. The same stand on a phone, so Start sits beside the TV and nothing is docked at the foot. Said once per place: the plate names the game, so the button says "Start"; the empty TV is a plain test card, and the yellow button under it is the only "Pick a game". The stand is how "where people are already looking" is kept without covering the picture.

The lobby's lines stay plain. He asked for more fun wording than "Lapsyy is picking a game", read a bank of samples ("Lapsyy has the remote", "Remote hog: Lapsyy", "Press play, Lapsyy!") and turned them all down: "I didn't like any of these. Let's keep it as it is. The current one is better." Banks of funny lines belong to moments inside a game. A line that tells a guest what is happening and who they wait for says exactly that: "Karim is picking a game", "Waiting for Karim to press play", "Pick a game".

Everyone at the door is seen. "When more players are knocking, only one mascot is visible… suppose 10 people are waiting, you should see 10 mascots behind the door." The one who has waited longest stands in front, whole and awake; the others crowd the doorway behind as heads in the colours they would wear, smaller, dimmer and still the further back, and the door opens wider for a crowd. Answer the front one and the next steps forward. Up to nine behind on a big screen, five in a phone's small door; the bubble's "and 9 more" counts everyone. A count beside one mascot is not the same as seeing your friends. (A guest is only told that somebody is there, so a guest's door shows one.)

The Players sheet is the same room, as a list. The sheet behind the header's people button wore the old look: a knocker was a green slab with an initial in a circle. Now each knocker is a calm candy card with their mascot's head in the colour the door's crowd shows them in, "Riya is knocking", and the door's own two buttons (plain Keep out, green Let in). The people under them are their mascots, with Host and You tags and the host's Remove. One sheet for the lobby and for a game in play, never a second copy.

Nothing peeks out from behind a button. On a big screen the host's two answers stand under the door, on the door mat, and the mat stuck out behind them: "looks odd". While the answers show, the mat is not drawn. It comes back when nobody is knocking.

Furniture must read as what it is. The beanbags were smooth domes with a knob on top: "they look like dish trays." A drawn thing is checked by asking what a stranger would call it. A beanbag is a slumped sack: a soft back gathered into a tied knot, seams running down from the knot, a fat saggy lap with a dent where someone sits, and the sitter resting in that dent.

People walk in along the floor, in front of the furniture, never behind it. A newcomer crossed the wall behind the TV stand: the body hidden, the feet poking out under it. "They should come in front of the TV stand, not get hidden by it. That looks odd." He drew the way: out of the door, a step down onto the floor, along the floor in front of the stand, then into their place (the sofa, its arm, a beanbag; the beanbag by the door is reached straight down that side of the room). Someone on the move is drawn in front of the stand and the TV; once sitting, they are in front of the sofa's back, or behind it if they stand there. Moving to another place is a hop drawn over everything. A short walk, not a tour, and nobody walking ever takes a tap meant for Start. With motion reduced, they are simply sitting.

A vote is a sign the player holds in their hand. The sign first floated on a stick above the middle of the head: "the placement right above the head is what made it odd." A speech bubble was offered and turned down: "Voting on a stick is better if they hold that stick with their hand… it looks like they're holding it and it stays on that player's mascot, very little chance of overlapping the next player." So the mascot raises a hand with the stick in it, on the side its place leans to, and the board sits on that stick over its own shoulder. Faces (past twelve players) have no hands: their sign stands beside the head on its own stick.

For his eye: two things the mock did not settle. A sign carries the first word of the game ("Snakes", "Trivia"). The door's second answer says Keep out, not the mock's "Not now", because it sticks to that device.

One shared phone: the next friend waits as a mascot, and you type their name. No room to walk into, and never a plain list.

Seen when: 2026-10-09, as the online lobby was about to become a new scene (a playground, a pool party). "On a shared phone, we don't need this live room. We just need a static list, like how it was there initially, which should be enough. We don't care about the room or how it looks. The only thing we care about is adding the names of the participants quickly and getting started. For a shared room, keep it simple: no need for the room. A simple list should be enough."

Then he saw the list that was built from those words (the same day): a name field, a row per friend with a small head, a white row asking "What are we playing?", a white row for Party. "I absolutely hate the current design of the single device. It is looking so bad, so ugly. No personality or creativity at all... It's looking very basic. I don't want to tell you what I want you to change. I want you to figure it out." Both calls stand together. "Simple" was read as "plain", and that was the mistake.

His pick, of three built to play with (the same day): "I like the first idea. Writing the mascot name and the mascot coming in the center of the screen is all good. It's clean, and that's creative. That's what I'm talking about." The friend who is about to join is already standing there, in the colour they will wear, under "Who's playing?". Their name is typed on the tag under their feet, Return sends them into the crowd, and the next colour steps up with the cursor still in the tag. The crowd is everyone as a whole mascot with a name tag, smaller as the table grows and in even rows, thirty included. A tap on a friend brings them up to the same place to fix the name or take them off. The game is a sticker on the dock beside Start. On a big screen the stage stands in the middle until somebody is in, then goes up once and the crowd takes the room under it, as big as the screen allows.

Apply: a scene belongs where people arrive one at a time on their own phones and have something to do while they wait. Where one person types everybody in, the screen is a tool, and its one job is names in fast and Start. A tool is still ours: the friends are whole mascots in their colours, the game is its own moving picture and never a blank row with an arrow, and the thing you type into is a character, not a form. Ask what a screen's ONE job is before dressing it, then dress it without slowing that job by a single tap. A row of small heads beside names is the contacts app, whatever colour the heads are.

What stays the same: everything the screen decides. Who fits, who sits out, what Start asks first and the party's list are the lobby's own rules and sheets, shared and never copied. Two screens may look different. They may not answer differently.

Not this: the two he did not pick, deleted the same day. A sign-up sheet on a clip with each name in its own colour's ink, and the games laid out on the screen with the names as tags. And the plain list.

For his eye: the crowd stays whole mascots past twelve friends, where every other screen switches to faces with an initial: a name tag is under each, so colours may repeat. Taking somebody off is two taps (the friend, then Remove). A friend being fixed says "Change my name?".

Leave Easter eggs: not everything is announced. Some things are found, and shared.

Seen when: 2026-10-02, his review of "sit where you like". Every free place wore a dashed outline and a mascot said "Sit anywhere you like". "We're showing the spots they can click on with dotted circles, which I don't like. They look odd. Let them figure out by clicking on random places… It's like an Easter egg. They should find out for themselves, so people can discover and share 'you know what? you can click here and switch positions'. Leave some Easter eggs; don't make everything obvious."

Apply: sort a feature before drawing it. What a player NEEDS in order to play (the next step, Start, the code, whose turn) is plain and never hidden. What is a DELIGHT on top (moving your mascot to the beanbag) gets no marker, no hint, no first-time bubble and no hover outline: it simply works when someone tries it. The thing they tap is the thing itself (the sofa's arm, the beanbag), so trying is rewarded. A found thing gets told to friends, and that is the point. A screen reader still hears it by name.

Not this: hiding a step the game needs, or an egg that surprises badly (a tap on empty furniture with nobody to move does nothing at all).

Worked example: sit where you like, below. No markers, no hint.

People sit where they like: you pick a place, you do not walk around. (Built 2026-10-02; the markers and the hint came off in his review the same day.)

Seen when: 2026-10-02, on the living room. "Currently the positions are fixed. I would like the mascots to sit wherever they like, kind of an interactive area. As soon as you enter you are seated on the sofa… if I want to sit next to some player, or on the couch, we can move the mascots as you like."

Apply: the free places are real and unmarked: a spare cushion on the sofa, its arms, the beanbags, standing room behind the sofa, a place on the rug. Nothing is drawn on them and nothing announces them (an Easter egg, the card above). Tap one and your mascot hops over. Only the mover moves: nobody else shifts along. In a room each person moves only themself. One shared phone has no places to pick: it sets up on a list. Newcomers still land on the sofa first. A nearly full room has few free places or none, and that is fine.

The rule under it: a seat is the NAME of a place ("the second beanbag"), never a spot on the screen. He plans room scenes people can buy later (a playground, a cruise ship, a bus), so a pick must make sense on any screen size and in a room with other furniture. A pick the room in front of you does not have simply waits, and you sit where there is room.

Not this: a room you walk around in (he turned that mock down), swapping seats with someone, a tutorial, or dashed outlines on the furniture ("they look odd").

For his eye: the sofa keeps one spare cushion, so two friends sit a little smaller than before. Standing room opens only once the sofa and its arms are full.

Every result becomes a picture people share. The saved file is the product, not the screen. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: 2026-10-04, the share pictures mock (steps B1 to B8). "Like people share their PUBG wins": a result that leaves the app is how the next group hears about it.

Apply: one Share button on every final result, the same on one phone and in a room. It opens the picture exactly as it will be saved, with ONE button under it: Share on a phone (the phone's own share sheet, which also saves it) and Download on a laptop. Then the mascot says it is done, and Done closes. The picture is always the mint look, in light and in dark, because it has to be recognisably ours in someone else's chat. It is one tall poster: our living room's wall and floor, the game's name hanging from the garland, the headline, and the brand's label at the foot. Players are their own mascots in their seat colours, the winner on the gold block in a crown, and past twelve players every mascot wears its letters. A long name shrinks before it is ever cut. Everyone who played is on the picture exactly once, so each of them can find themselves. A draw crowns nobody and throws no confetti. The picture shows only what every phone was sent.

Not this: a screenshot of the result screen, a picture that follows dark mode, a second button beside Share, a picture made on a server, or a role or a secret word drawn from anything a phone did not receive.

Worked example: ~/ui/sharePicture, on the shells' one winner screen. Every picture, from made-up results, with the real button under it: the dev-only page /share-preview (two players, a table of four, a winning side, fourteen, thirty, long names, joint winners, a draw).

Open for his review: Undercover gets the ordinary ranked picture, not the mock's team picture, because its result is a score table and names no side. A two-player picture shows the score but not "best of 3".

The share picture after its review: everyone who won looks like it, a name hangs under the feet, and the mascot only says what happened. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: 2026-10-04, an independent review of the saved files. Four joint winners had three on the podium and the fourth filed in the grid with the people who lost, under the headline "4 winners!". On a table of thirty a name tag covered half the bronze mascot and bit into its "3". Android said "Done. Looking good!" to a player who had closed the share sheet. Share took a full row and pushed Rematch off a small phone.

Apply: every winner reads as a winner. Up to five joint winners of a small table all stand on the gold block. On a big table four to twelve of them stand crowned over the grid, in one row or two (the back row on the bench), each over a gold name tag. Past twelve their cells in the grid are gold. The headline says their names while they fit the line ("Karim and Riya win!", "Ammu, Dev and Karim win!") and counts them when they do not ("8 winners!"). A name tag hangs under the feet, on every picture: on a podium it sits on the block's face with the place under it, so the mascot is whole. Tags shrink with the podium. Nothing touches the brand label: the lowest thing drawn stays a clear gap above it. The label itself stays where the mock put it, on the story-safe line; the bare floor under it is the part a story covers. A short grid lets the podium grow rather than leave half the floor empty. Share costs the result screen no row: on a phone it is a small square with the share arrow at the start of the actions row, on a big screen the arrow and the word; the actions are pinned under the standings, so Rematch and New game are on screen at eight players on a small phone. The mascot only says what happened: "Done. Looking good!" after a share the phone confirmed, "Check your downloads." after a laptop's download was started, "Hold the picture to save it." in a browser that can neither share nor be trusted to download (the ones inside Instagram and WhatsApp), and nothing at all when the share sheet was closed or does not say (Android). A name in any script is measured for what it is, and a flag, a family or an accented letter is never cut in half.

Not this: a winner in a white cell among the losers, a tag across a mascot's body, "Saved" said on a guess, a full-width Share above the buttons that move the night on, or a name cut for being Cyrillic.

Worked example: ~/ui/sharePicture (layoutBig.ts, tagMetrics.ts, fitText.ts, SharePictureSheet). Look at them on /share-preview: win4, win4-big, win8-big, win14-big, world, world-big, leaver, and any of them with &screen=1 for the result screen itself.

From the second review (built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review): players who finished level are drawn the same way. On a big table the podium holds whole places only: three level on third behind a first and a second are three cells in the grid, never one on the bronze step and two filed under it, and a podium of two steps stands in the middle. "New game" stays on one line beside Share on a 320 phone (the row's buttons wear less side padding). In a room past twelve everyone keeps the colour they played in after a guest leaves, on the result and on the picture. And the visor of a player past twelve shows a whole flag, never half of one.

Open for his review: the share arrow alone on a phone (no word), and silver and bronze standing a little taller than the mock's so a name and a place both fit on the face.

A room is a night, not a group. One open room per host.

Seen when: I proposed rooms that come back ("Friday crew", remembered members, a Profile history of rooms). "That is not the product direction I wanted. After each day we clean up… the same code might be assigned to some other room." And: "If you have created one room, you can always create one room."

Apply: nothing outlives a room. Never design memory around a room code. Show a room only while it is live; an ended room appears nowhere. Simplify by removing a count (five open rooms → one), not by adding a rule.

A party night: a poster on the wall, the room between games, and an awards show. (Built overnight 2026-10-04 from the mocks he approved, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the party flow and the posters-on-the-wall mock he approved (2026-10-03), built for one shared phone and as the screens both shells share.

Apply: Party is a framed poster on the living-room wall, a thing in the room, so nobody is taught it. One shared phone has no wall: its set-up list offers Party as a plain row under the game, and no tournament (that needs a phone each). A room with no working poster hangs none, never a dead or locked one. The chosen poster wears a gold frame and a tick, and on a laptop it becomes tonight's list. Building the party is one sheet: tick games, hold a row and drag it, or tap Random and have the night picked for you (the card below), and the foot says how many games and about how long. Only games that seat everyone are offered. The ones this many are too few for stand under the list the way the room's games sheet shows them, as the dimmed stills of "Not enough of you yet" (his 2026-10-14 call on a sentence of game names: "It just shows the names of the games in text format. It is not looking good"); the ones for smaller groups are named in a line. The TV then shows the night like channels, the awards as the last one (one phone's list shows it on the game's card: what is up first, how many games, about how long). Between games the party shows its own screen, never the room (his rulings of 2026-10-12 and 2026-10-13, the room is for before and after and after a party game): the winner alone on the step saying the one thing that just happened ("I won Quick Draw!"), everyone else below, the next game on a countdown, and the host's Pause and Start now. Inside a game the only new thing is "Party · game 2 of 4" under its name (a game with its own "game 1 of 3" would otherwise read as two counts of one thing). The night ends on a stage: the curtain, a table of trophies, the coral host in a top hat with the mic, one award at a time (its name, a beat of who-will-it-be, the winner holding the cup, the true reason with its number on the plaque), and then everyone in the group photo with the one award that is most theirs.

One speaker at a time, on the stage too. The mock showed the host's bubble and the winner's bubble together. Built, the host's bubble holds the award's name while the host is speaking, and when the winner says their line it loses its tail and stays up as the award's card.

Award names are a friend's joke, never a dig. Two to four words, the mock's own where he saw them (Trophy hog, So close again, Fashionably last, Plot twist, One-hit wonder, Creature of habit) and the rest in the same voice (Quick off the mark, Last laugh, On a roll, Glow-up, Late bloomer, Joined at the hip, Always up there, Had a moment, Dodged the bottom, Stuck on repeat, Never missed a game, Best guest). The reason is the fact with its number ("Won 2 of 4 games", "5th and 6th. Then 2nd and 3rd."). The winner's own line comes from a bank of five, the same on every phone. Props are worn by three awards only: the crown, the party hat, the headset.

For his eye: the countdown between games is eight seconds, the first game included, and it waits while a friend is being added. Ending a party early goes back to the room with no awards. A table of five is not offered Ludo at all. The first game is announced by the first friend at the table, since one phone has no host. The six short versions: Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect Four play one round, Quick Draw one round on the 60-second clock, Charades one act each, Undercover one game, Word Search the small grid.

Worked example: /party-preview (dev only) shows every moment from made-up nights, for 2 to 30 friends.

Selection is the problem, order is not: the party sheet has Random, not Shuffle.

Seen when: 2026-10-09, on the party's build sheet, which had a Shuffle button that put the ticked games in another order. "Along with shuffle, we should select random instead of shuffle, so that the system will select some random games for the party. Shuffling is not a big deal. Selecting which games to play at the party is a big deal. If the player group can't decide on games, they can just click on random, and the system will select a few games in some random order. If they like the games but want to change the order, they can do it manually. Changing the order is not the problem anytime. Selection is the problem."

Apply: the button reads "Random". A press replaces tonight's line-up with a fresh pick, in a random order: only games everyone here fits, each once, and never the same line-up twice running. It picks three, which is what a party asks for before it can start, or as many as the night already has when that is more. Ticking, unticking and dragging stay as they are. It is the same sheet in a room and on one phone, so both have it.

The rule under it: before adding a button that helps, ask which part the group is really stuck on, and help with that part. A table argues about WHAT to play. Nobody argues about what comes second.

For his eye: the count. He said "a few games"; three is the sheet's own least, and a night he has already made longer keeps its length.

A party in a room: the same night on every phone, one award at a time together, and a card each to take home. (Built overnight 2026-10-04 from the mocks he approved, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the party flow's host and guest views and the posters mock (A1 to A8, B6, B7), built for an online room as a thin layer over the one-phone party's screens. Nothing here is a new call of his.

Apply: a room's party is the one-phone party with a phone each. The same poster, the same sheet, the same screen between games, the same stage. What a phone each adds: the host builds the night and everyone watches it take shape on the TV ("Up first: Tic-Tac-Toe", then "Waiting for Karim to start"); a guest who taps the poster reads one line about what it is; between games the host has Pause and Start now and a guest reads who can start it sooner; the door stays open, so a late friend knocks, is let in, watches the game that is on and plays the next.

The awards are watched together. Every phone is on the same award at the same moment. The host's yellow button moves the show on, and it also moves on by itself, the curtain included, so a host who puts the phone down never leaves the room looking at a closed curtain. A phone that reloads lands on the award the room is on. The emoji row is out under the stage (there is room) and the cheers float up it.

Then one card each. After the last award each phone shows its own player the one award that is most theirs: "This one's yours", a white card a little off true like a photo on a wall, the friend in their own colour holding the cup, the award's name, the true reason, whose room it was and how many games. Share is the yellow button there and makes it the tall picture, with their name in the headline and on a tag at their feet for whoever was not there. Done goes to the group photo, where everyone can share the photo and the host has "Back to the room" and "Another party". A guest reads "Karim is picking what's next".

Nobody's name falls off their cup. The show is drawn from who was in the room when the party ended, so a friend who goes home during the awards still takes theirs on stage.

Not this: a second lobby, sheet or stage for the online room; a phone deciding which award is on; a result line ("I won Quick Draw!") shown before the board has finished showing how the game ended.

For his eye: the mock's popcorn on the posters ("3 want this") and a guest ticking several games are not there: a wish is still one game each, and the host's sheet shows those counts beside the games. A closed curtain opens by itself after twenty seconds and the trophies' table moves on after twelve. A late friend sees no line telling them they play the next game.

Worked example: /party-preview?scene=online (dev only) runs the show with a timer standing in for the server, then the own award and the photo; add &guest=1 for a guest's phone, &at=photo to land on the card, and scene=award for the card's picture.

A party after somebody played it: nobody takes the stage over, a line reads the way it happened, and the photo says who got what. (Built 2026-10-04 after a played review, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: a review played a whole party on one phone and probed the room's side. None of these is a call of his yet; each is the smallest rule that makes what the screen says true.

The stage is shared out. Nobody holds more than two of the stage's awards, and everyone gets one before anyone gets a second: first what the night earned, then what is plainly true of the friends who earned nothing ("Had a moment", "Dodged the bottom"). In the played night Ben had three of four; now Ben has two and all five friends are called up.

The show keeps that order, and does not say one thing four times. (Built 2026-10-04 after an independent review, awaiting Karim's review.) Everybody's first award is handed over before anybody's second: the round of firsts, then the seconds, the wooden spoon or the last laugh still closing wherever that rule lets it. After the wooden spoon, no winner goes up and no award for a win is handed over (the rule decided 2026-10-04; the build awaits his review): "Fashionably last", then the winner up again for "Trophy hog", or "Last laugh" straight after it, read as rubbing it in. The winners are everybody level on the most games won, whether or not anybody holds "Trophy hog". Where one would follow, the spoon's holder is first given something of their own ("Never missed a game"), so the spoon is their second and closes the show; where that cannot be, that award is left off. An award the friend who came last shares is never left off: going up again beside a friend ("Joined at the hip"), the winner included, is a kind close. The same award name goes up twice at the most: a friend gets a line about how they played before one that only says they were there, and a name not on the stage yet before one that is; a friend whose every true line is up twice already is not called up and keeps their own award. A stage is three awards or more, or none: a night of one game, or one where no game ran its course, opens on "A quiet one. Everybody gets a cup." and goes to the photo, where everybody holds theirs.

A line says what happened, the way it happened. A win shared with others counts and says so ("Won 2 of 3 games, 1 shared"); a one-hit wonder needs a win of their own, and its other games are "the rest", never "then" ("Won game 3. The rest: 5th and 4th."). A comeback or a late bloom is only said when every later place is better than every earlier one. "Of 4 games" is the same four in every line. "Joined at the hip" needs a table: two friends alone are always side by side.

Nothing played, no show. When every game was skipped the room is simply back: "Nothing got played" over "Another party?", with Back to the room and Another party. No curtain, no cups, no "0 games" card.

The photo says who got what, at any size. Up to six on a phone it is the picture he approved (the bench). Past that everyone stands in rows that never overlap, four to a row on a phone, each over a tag with their name and their award; thirty on a small phone scroll rather than shrink to initials. The shared picture does the same.

One speaker at a time, in the room too. A friend who sits down says hello first and the party's line ("Skipping Ludo.") waits for it. Removing a friend between two games asks first, in a room and on one phone: "They'll be out of the party, and keep what they won."

A colour is the friend's. On one phone whoever sits down takes the first free colour and keeps it: when somebody ahead of them goes home nobody changes colour, in the next party either.

Not this: a clock running behind "Pass the phone" (Resume waits for the tap that takes the phone); a countdown that opens part-spent because a skip or a late friend moved it; a ring that sits full while its number falls.

For his eye: whether a plain "Never missed a game" belongs on the stage for a friend who earned nothing, or the stage should stay shorter; the two-line tags under a crowd in the photo; the wording "Nothing got played" / "Another party?" and "Won 2 of 3 games, 1 shared". Big groups get a thin party today: nine or more on one phone are offered very few games, because a party only offers games that seat everyone.

Worked example: /party-preview?n=20&at=photo and &scene=picture (dev only), at 8, 12, 20 and 30.

A party never changes in silence, and both shells keep the same beat. (Built overnight 2026-10-04 after the party's reviews, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the reviews of the party on one phone and in a room found places where the night changed without a word, and places where the two shells had drifted apart.

Apply: when a friend coming or going puts a ticked game out, whoever runs the room says so in a bubble, once, a beat after the newcomer's own hello: "Ludo needs 4 or fewer. It's out." The same line is in the sheet under tonight's list. A party that this leaves too short stays on the TV with what is left, the plate reads "2 games · pick 1 more" and Start party waits; it never falls back to an empty room in silence. Between games the same thing is said about a game further down the list.

One beat in both shells. "Next up" is eight seconds everywhere, the first game included. A game that has just ended keeps its board up for about five seconds (longer when its own ending runs longer), and only then does the party's own screen come, on a countdown that starts whole. A game that will not start says "Undercover can't start. Not tonight." in both, with no toast.

Nobody skips a game. Ruled 2026-10-13 (after a party game): "they have set up the games by their own will and order." While a game is being played the menu has "End party" and nothing over it. A table stuck on somebody whose phone has died takes them out from the Players sheet, and the game plays on.

Another party. From the photo it opens the games sheet on the night just played, in a room and on one phone alike. The host changes what they fancy and starts; the room goes straight to the new night's "Up first".

A guest keeps the end of their night. When the host taps "Back to the room", the room is the lobby again, and a guest still looking at their card or the photo keeps it, with "Back to the room" of their own. If the host closes the room instead, the sign over the photo reads "The party's over" and the button reads Done. A reload at the photo lands on the photo: a card already looked at is not shown again.

Not this: a number that quietly drops ("of 3" becoming "of 2"); a toast for something the room can say; two bubbles at once; a countdown that appears part-spent; a "First award" button on a night with no awards (it reads "That's everyone").

For his eye: the five seconds a finished board stays up, and whether a party left short by a game going out should keep the TV (as built) or let the room go back to a single game. The wording of the two "It's out." lines and of the skip question are first drafts in his voice.

A tournament, from the lobby to the podium: one moment at a time, chance shown doing it, and a bracket that only draws what is true. (Built overnight 2026-10-04 from the mock he approved, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the tournament flow he approved (2026-10-03), moments 1 to 5, 7, 8 and 10, and the Tournament poster and its sheet from the posters mock. Watching (moments 6, 9, 11, 12) is the card below.

Getting in: nobody has to find a tournament mode. With a two-player game on the TV and three or more on the sofa, the yellow button reads "Start tournament"; with exactly two it is an ordinary match. The Tournament poster on the wall is the other way in: the host taps it and gets only the games two people play, each as its own moving card; under three people it says "A tournament needs 3 or more" and offers the code. A guest who taps it reads one line about what it is. While the poster wears its tick the stand's name plate says who the game is for ("2 players") and leaves the minutes off: one game's length is not the length of a tournament, and the start sheet says that (built 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review).

The start sheet: one question, "how should it run?". A card per format with its small picture and one line (Knockout, Everyone plays everyone, Set rounds; a big room is offered the two that fit it), a rough length, and Start. It never asks how long a match is: a match is one game (his ruling of 2026-10-05, under "One game a match" below). The game's own options (its mode, its board) sit under a rule at the foot. A game's own turn clock is never one of them: the server gives every match the platform's clock and throws that answer away, so the sheet says it in one line instead of asking ("Every match has its own clock.", built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review). Chess is the exception, because its clock is the length of the game: its own "Chess clock" question is asked there, 3, 5 or 10 minutes each and no "No clock", opening on 3, and it stands in for that line. That answer is the tournament's own: it does not move what the ordinary start sheet opens on. The two buttons, Cancel and Start, stay pinned at the foot of the sheet on a phone, however long the sheet is. Beside the rough length a quiet "Just one match" leads to the ordinary set-up sheet, where the host picks the two who play and everyone else watches: a tournament is what the room is offered, never the only thing it may play.

The draw: everyone is on it for the count. The pairs slide in as mascots facing each other, the viewer's own on a soft panel with a "You" tag. An odd count keeps the room guessing for two seconds: the free pass spins through everyone's colours, then lands, that mascot cheers and the host names them ("Noor! Straight to the semi-finals."). Between rounds the winners hop into their new places, the host counts ("Semi-finals in 3"), and a card says who you play. Nobody to play is said in EVERY round it happens, never only the first: the host names them before it counts ("Dev has the free pass. Straight to the final."), a ticket sits on their place in the bracket, and their own card says it ("Free pass: Straight to the final"). In a league the host says who sits the round out, and between rounds everyone sees the table first, this round's pairs under it, and their own card at the foot with the count on it ("Round 4 in 3: You play Sam").

Your match: the board you know plus three small things: a bar (you, the round's name, who you play, a clock each, yellow while it runs), the round's other matches as two small heads each (a green dot while on, a tick on whoever took it), and a Reactions switch that is off until you ask and then stays on for the whole tournament. The mode chips are not on a tournament board: the host chose the mode at the start, and a chip that can only refuse is not offered. Between the two names the bar says "vs" and nothing else: a match is one game, so there is no score to keep and no sheet between games. When the game ends the board holds its last move for a beat and the result follows. The first-move line is held to its minute ("First move in 1:00" at most, "0:01" at least). It is still the phone's own reading: a phone whose clock is wrong counts wrong, and nothing is decided by it. When the other player leaves the match ends, and the leaver keeps their name on everything still on screen, never "Someone". The Players sheet is the whole room on every tournament screen: "playing Riya", "through", "plays for third", "out", "watching", and the host may remove anyone from it.

Through, or out: your own mascot, big, on the page, says it from a bank (sixteen lines for through, sixteen for out, twelve to fourteen for a league's win and loss, ten when the other player left, each two to five words, the same on every phone). One plain line under it says what is next, and one yellow button goes to the other matches. A tap on the mascot asks for another line. The loser never gets a sad screen. A LAST match has banks of its own, because a line about "the next one" would be untrue: the final's winner ("The cup is mine!") and its loser ("Silver suits me."), and any other last match won or lost (third place, a league's last round: "Ending on a win!", "Went out swinging."). A line about someone who LEFT is kind, always: a dead phone is not running away ("Dev had to go.", "Hope Dev is okay!", never "Dev ran.").

One game a match (Karim, 2026-10-05). "Best of three in tournaments: remove." His reason: "at any point in time, only one game will be played at any stage of the tournament." So a tournament match is always one game: one result, then the toss if it is a draw, and the room never waits on extra games. The host is not asked, in any format or any kind of match. An ordinary room and one phone keep their best of three. He knows a Tic-Tac-Toe knockout between careful players is mostly coin tosses, and accepts it: nothing is built around it, and the toss stays a fun moment, never a fault.

A draw goes straight to the toss (Karim, 2026-10-04). "For the tournament, when there is a draw, we are going for a retry... I think that will cost other players a wait time. Maybe instead of that, a chance is a better option here. If there is a draw, a toss will happen, and depending on the toss, whoever wins will proceed to the next round. That will remove the wait for other players." So a drawn match is never played again, in any format and in any kind of match: a round's, the one for third place, the final.

The toss is a moment, not a silent result. For its two players the drawn board stays up for a beat, then the coin stands where the board stood (the round's other matches still under it). Each face is one of the two players. The host says a short line while it is in the air ("A draw! Coin time."), it lands, the winner cheers in confetti and the host says who it is ("The coin says Cleo!"). The people watching keep the drawn board and the two mascots: one says "It's a coin toss!", then the winner says "The coin picked me!". The coin only ever lands on the result the programme already recorded. It is tossed and lands on one timetable in every game, and the people watching are told a beat after it is down for the two players, never before. The next round's pairs are not shown to anyone until that has been read. Built 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.

The podium: "Riya wins!" ("You win!" on the champion's phone), three steps, medals on chests, the crown on gold, one shower of confetti, and the best fan's prize given by the host with the mic ("Best fan: Karim!", "5 right picks out of 7"), the fan beside it holding a heart. When nobody backed a winner there is no best fan and the host says a kind word from a bank of twelve. Share, then the host's "Back to the room" and "Play again"; a guest reads "Waiting for Karim". The picture is the same podium in our living room with the best fan's own label.

Where it differs from the mock, and why: (1) the mock's bracket joined pairs of first-round matches to a semi-final, but the rules draw fresh pairs every round by chance, so the picture joins a match only to the place its winner takes and leaves later rounds as open places until they are drawn. For the same reason "You play Karim or Riya" became "Semi-final next."; an opponent is named only once known. (2) The first round is always "Round 1", as in the mock, even where the rules would call it a quarter-final. (3) The mock's fourth format, winner stays on, was dropped before the build. (4) A result gives way by itself when your next match is about to start, because your clock runs from its first second.

For his eye: a round starts ten seconds after its draw (six was tight for whoever finishes last: ending, result, bracket, match); a room of thirty on a phone is a tall bracket of small faces that scrolls down, never sideways (the mascots get smaller once the final and the match for third place are drawn, so eight still fit a phone's width); the stand's name plate still reads "2 players" under the game rather than "Tournament"; "Just one match" is a quiet link on the start sheet and wants his word on where it sits.

Worked example: /tournament-preview (dev only) shows every moment for rooms of 3 to 30, in all three formats, as host or guest.

Watching a tournament: one match fills the phone, the stage speaks, and a cheer belongs to a match. (Built overnight 2026-10-04 from the mock he approved, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: the tournament flow he approved (2026-10-03), moments 6, 9, 11 and 12: the screen most people are on, because at any moment most of the room has no match of its own.

Apply: a phone shows ONE match, big: the two players as their mascots facing each other, their board under them, the pair tabs over them (two heads a tab, a green dot while it is on, a tick on the winner once it is over). A tap on a tab or a swipe hops to another match. A watcher lands on the match they were on, else the final, else the first one still being played. A big screen shows the matches side by side, four to a page, and a tap on one says "my emoji go here" with a yellow ring; with two on the page (the final and third place) the chosen one is the big one, its ring stays on it once its match has ended (the emoji still go there), and only the chosen board is heard. A late joiner gets one line from the coral host ("It started without you. Pick a side!") at the TOP of the screen, where the round's name and the tabs then appear, for six seconds, once per tournament on that phone: it covers nothing of the match and nothing moves when it goes. Someone just knocked out was told so on their own result screen and is not told again.

The stage speaks, one speaker. "My turn" is said by the mascot whose turn it is, in a small bubble over its head, in every game: a board that tells its own turn story to its players draws no mascots of its own while it is only being looked at, so one pair stands over one board. When a match ends the winner says it ("I'm through!", "The coin picked me!") and the loser fades; when the other player left, the one who stayed says only "They had to go." In a game on its own clock, whoever has a first move to make says how long they have ("First move in 0:45"), the same line the two players read on their own board, and each player's clock stands beside their name. While the coin is in the air nothing says who it picked: one player says "It's a coin toss!", and the winner's line, the tick and the fan point wait until it is down. Nobody is "through" in a league: there the winner says "I won!". These are plain, fixed lines; the funny banks stay with the players' own result screens.

Backing a player is one tap under them. "I'm with Riya", with the small heads of whoever is already behind her on the button. It turns yellow when picked and can be changed until picks close. Then the other button goes pale, the line says "A fan point for you if Riya wins", and at the end "Riya won. A fan point for you!" or "Riya lost. No point this time." The two players of a match never see these buttons. Fan points sit in the top strip with a star and hop when they grow.

The emoji row is out, and a cheer lands on the board being looked at. The eight emoji sit under the screen the whole time (there is room, so they are never behind a tap) and float up across that match's board. Someone watching another match does not see them. The two players see none unless they turn them on.

The league table wears the wins. Each row is the player's head with their wins as the number on its visor, the name, and the last three results as dots in their colour (an empty ring for a loss). The leader's row is party yellow. Under it, who plays whom this round; in set rounds the pairs sit under "Won 1", "Won 0", because similar scores meet.

For his eye: the watcher's board is smaller than a player's (it is not tapped, and the two mascots, the buttons and the emoji row must fit over and under it on one phone screen). The mode chips are hidden on a watched board and the round sheet never opens over it. The pick line reads "Pick a side in the first minute" (the mock said "the 4th move"; picks close on the clock, 45 seconds after a match starts, because a tap that arranges ships is not a move). A big screen pages a long round four matches at a time instead of shrinking fifteen boards onto one screen. While a finished match's board is still on its way the stage keeps its room and says nothing; "had to go" stands in for a board only when a match was never played.

Worked example: /watch-preview (dev only) plays a made-up tournament through the real screens: ?at=final, ?format=everyone, ?n=30 (fifteen matches, faces with initials), ?as=out, on a phone and on a laptop.

In a tournament, chance takes the blame. In a party, nobody is ranked.

Seen when: the tournament and party flows he approved (2026-10-03). The free pass with an odd number: "Nobody picks, not even the host, so nobody can sulk." A draw goes to a coin. The party ends with "the games are over and nobody is ranked": awards, one at a time, each with the true reason, and every phone keeps its owner's own award "so nobody leaves with nothing".

Apply: whenever one friend would have to be picked over another (who sits out, who wins a tie), let chance do it and show that it did. Never ask the host to choose. A party has no overall winner and no league table. An award says only what really happened, with the number that proves it; no clear standout means no award. Lobby and system words stay plain; the funny names live on results and awards, in banks.

Filled in while building the rules (built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review): a player who left keeps the round they got through, so they can hold a medal, but level with someone who stayed the one who stayed is ahead; two players may share an award only when five or more took part; the best fan needs at least one right pick. The reasons are in decisions, 2026-10-04.

Filled in while building the online room (built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review): a clock each that only runs on your turn and gives a little back when your turn passes on, so a player who keeps playing never runs out and a phone left face down loses the match (Chess plays on its own clock there instead, so many minutes each with nothing back, and a first move that has one minute, so a chess match has a latest end too and a phone never picked up costs the room about a minute); nobody starting the next round for thirty seconds and the match is called on the score; the two players start their own rounds and the mode is fixed for the whole tournament; the host cannot pause a tournament; picks close 45 seconds after a match starts; a round starts ten seconds after its draw, a party's next game eight seconds after it is announced; play again means the whole tournament or party, for whoever is in the room now. The numbers are all in one place and cheap to change.

Signed out means anonymous — nothing of the account's shows.

Seen when: a host signed out on the Home screen and their own room's card turned into REJOIN (the seat is bound to the device, the room to the account). "Once you sign out you are an anonymous user, and that room doesn't belong to you." Hidden, not relabelled: signing back in brings it straight back through the account.

Apply: anything that belongs to an account disappears with the account, even when the device still technically holds it. Where the device lands the person somewhere that needs the account (the room itself), say it once up front ("This is your room — sign in to run it"), never on every tap.

One product, one page for a thing — even when the reason for the copy sounded technical.

Seen when: the live root showed the content site's home instead of the App Home ("the app home page is different… I'm thinking we should get rid of the static page"). Then: "do we need the shopfront at all? The main idea was SEO. If that can be achieved with the app, drop it." It could, so it went.

Apply: when two things exist for one job, check whether the technical reason for the second still holds before maintaining it. Search and AI findability are requirements on the one product, not a reason for a second one.

A one-minute game is played as a series. Ask for the rounds at the start.

Seen when: "if I challenge my friend, we play four or five rounds of Tic-Tac-Toe; whoever wins most is the winner" (2026-09-11). Three rounds by default, a Mix option that changes the mode each round, the tally in the Players sheet ("we don't need to show the stats" on the board), the end screen naming the series winner.

Apply: any game that ends in under a couple of minutes gets a rounds setting in its start sheet and a between-round moment OVER the board — a locked dialog on a wide screen, a sheet on a phone — with NEXT ROUND ("a card under a laptop-sized board fell below the fold"). A square board never grows past what leaves its turn card in view. Keep the board clean; the running score lives one tap away. A sheet choice that needs a sentence sits apart from the plain pills, under a rule, with the sentence beneath.

Rules are a tap away, never a line on the board. And the board never moves.

Seen when: Connect Four's tip under the chips flipped between two lines and one as the turn changed, and the whole board jumped with it; "once I know the rule, why would I want to see this every time?"; and a guest never saw the rules the host read in the start sheet (2026-09-11).

Apply: nothing above a board changes height while a round is on. The rules live in the play header: a third circle after Sound and Theme, Info, opens the game's card — the SAME card the picker's "?" opens, steps then every mode's one-line rule, the mode in play lit — for anyone at the table. A chip tapped mid-round asks in a dialog, not inline. A move that changes the board (a pop, a drop) gets a clear, satisfying animation — the shelf's burst, a visible fall, a bounce — not a teleport.

A round won is celebrated before the sheet. A series already decided is the players' call.

Seen when: every Tic-Tac-Toe move blipped, then three in a row got nothing — "the sheet is opening directly"; and with two of three rounds won, "there is no point in playing round three" (2026-09-11).

Apply: the deciding move lands, THEN the celebration, a beat on the lit board, and only then the round sheet — the reveal has the same shape as the match end (the disc lands, then the winner screen). A draw gets the beat and no fanfare. The celebration matches the shape of the win: a LINE (three in a row, four in a row) gets a line drawn through it with a whoosh, then the fanfare — he compared it with a burst on each cell and kept the line ("coming perfectly, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally"). The burst is kept for arrivals that are not lines: a token reaching home in Ludo, the top square in Snakes & Ladders — "sparkle, not a line". When the rounds left cannot change the tally, the sheet says who has won the series and whoever runs the table chooses: FINISH NOW (the result screen, the tally as it stands) or play the rest. Never end it for them — the remaining rounds are still fun. A tournament has no series to decide (Karim, 2026-10-05): a match there is one game, so this sheet never opens on its board.

One card for a game, everywhere. Help sits with the other switches, not with the chips.

Seen when: the modes' "?" sat beside the chips above the board and opened its own little sheet, while the game card from the picker explained the modes in a paragraph. "Showing it next to the chips is not right — put the question mark next to the sound and theme circles. Clicking it opens the game info card, and that card should have the modes too, so there is a consistent card everywhere" (2026-09-11).

Apply: a game has ONE card (poster, then How to play) and every "?" opens it — the picker's, the lobby's, the play header's. Never a second, smaller sheet for part of the rules. A game with modes has no separate "Modes" section: the start sheet's row of chips sits INSIDE How to play, above the 1-2-3 steps, and the steps change with the chip — "the steps were describing Classic, which is not what applies to Vanish". Not a row per mode ("I need to scroll the sheet to see all the rules"; a row cannot hold numbered points). The screen-wide switches — Sound, Theme, Info — travel together as one row of circles.

A game's picture is a little scene of mascots playing it. It rests on a still, and plays only while you look at it.

Seen when: 2026-10-02, the game cards and their listing. Every game was a static picture in the old neon style, which no longer matched the Crew. "Instead of static images, you can go for animated gif style, with our own drawings, to make them more lively." He was shown each game as a small looping cartoon drawn in code, mascots in player colours playing that game (a row struck through, a disc dropping in, a cat sketched stroke by stroke), and approved them as drawn: "the animations are looking good for the game cards. All fine."

Apply: a game's card is ONE scene drawn in code (~/ui/gamecards), never an image file, with the real mascot playing the game, so someone who has never heard of it gets what you do from the loop alone. It rests on its most iconic frame, which must be complete and good-looking as a still. It moves only while it is the one being looked at: pointed at on a big screen (hover, focus, a press), the card nearest the middle of the screen in a list you scroll on a phone, or the single featured card on a sheet or a page. Everything else rests, so a wall of games is calm and exactly one card plays. A loop runs four to seven seconds, tells one tiny story (set-up, the fun bit, a reaction), and never plays under reduced motion. The approved mock is the spec: the same drawing and the same timing, in both looks. Boards and paper stay light, only the ground changes.

One game, many modes — switched on the board, as chips, with a gentle tip.

Seen when: Tic-Tac-Toe with one mode was "boring" (2026-09-11). He asked for modes players switch "during the gameplay itself, some chips kind of UI or gentle tips", and picked Vanish + Slide + Avoid now, Ultimate later.

Apply: a game's variants are chips above its board, first one the classic. The mode is game state (everyone sees the same chips); switching mid-round asks first; a rematch keeps the mode. The rules of every mode live in the game's card (the header's Info circle), never on the board. Research the real variants before proposing, and rank them by whether they can draw.

A player's colour as TEXT is always the ink shade of it, never the raw colour.

Seen when: 2026-09-13 — the Snakes standings pill wrote each name in that player's own colour, and party yellow on the light ground was a name nobody could read.

Apply: a colour has two jobs and two values. As a FILL — a dot, a token, an avatar, a rim, a pip, a die's face — it stays the bright party colour it is. The moment it becomes writing, it switches to that colour's ink shade for the appearance on screen: a deep amber, teal or forest on the light ground, a pastel on the dark stage. Every palette colour has both, one shared lookup resolves it, and a screen is never allowed to pick the raw hex for type.

Standings are one row that scrolls sideways and follows the turn.

Seen when: 2026-09-14 — Ludo with four players wrapped the standings onto a second line, which pushed the die under the fold on the iPhone.

Apply: the players above a board never wrap. When they do not fit, the row scrolls sideways (no scroll bar, a little space at each end), and when the turn passes the new player's pill glides to the middle. It moves only when the player changes; with reduced motion it jumps. The row's height never changes. The die is the control, so on a short phone the board gets smaller rather than the die leaving the screen.

And it sits ABOVE the board on every size (2026-09-17, Chain Reaction on the iPad): a big screen was given the same pills as a rail down the left, and he asked for the row back. One place for the players, phone and monitor alike — the board simply centres under it.

The die is the player's colour, drawn in the dark outline.

Seen when: 2026-09-14, Ludo on the simulator — a white or dark-purple die with only a coloured rim did not read as the player's die.

Apply: every face is filled with the rolling player's colour, the two side faces shaded darker of it; the rim, the seams and the pips are the dark outline every candy face wears, in both appearances, so yellow and cyan read as clearly as red and green. Between turns the die is blank in the next player's colour.

A player's own timer wears that player's colour, and a "you can go here" mark is half strength.

The timer (Karim, 2026-10-06): "For my wife, who has the yellow-colored mascot, the timer is coming in blue. It feels odd, so the timer progress should always match the mascot color of the player if it's an individual timer for them." A bar that counts one player's time is that player's colour on every screen, to the end (the last seconds pulse); a timer the whole room shares keeps its own.

The dots (Karim, 2026-10-06): "The dots are the color of the mascot, which is good, but they are too strong. I want them to be light, like 50% opacity... just like an indication." The dot where a piece may go and the ring round a piece it may take are half strength in every game, in both appearances.

The dot is plain (Karim, 2026-10-06): "they have this round circle, like a white circle, around them... Just yellow circles or the blue circles, depending on the player color, are enough." No edge round a move dot; the ring round a piece that can be taken stays.

The last move's squares are soft (Karim, 2026-10-06): "Softer. Keep them, at about half strength." The square under the piece in hand keeps its strength, so it still reads as the one in hand.

Only a drawn line is solid (Karim, 2026-10-06, Dots and Boxes): "The solid lines represent the one which is already done, so these should be dotted lines or no lines at all if they are not drawn yet." A line nobody has drawn is a light dotted guide; it fills in under the finger.

Haptics on taps that change something — never on every animation frame.

Seen when: 2026-09-13 — he asked for "haptic feedback on the interactions that deserve it".

Apply: the phone buzzes when a tap DOES something: a button pressed, a choice landing, a game won, a move refused. It stays quiet while things merely move — a token walking, a camera pushing in, a die tumbling (the tick belongs to the moment it stops on its number). The buzz lives in the shared buttons, so no game writes haptics code, and it is silent on the web and for anyone who has turned haptics off on their phone.

Sound: the game sounds stay, the mascot has a little voice, and it talks only at the awards. (Karim's picks, 2026-10-05.)

Seen when: 2026-10-04. "One major issue I felt is sound effects and the music. Our game is lacking those... Even in mascot interactions, if we can have some kind of sound, that will be so cool." He was given a development build that switched between options from a sheet, played with it on 2026-10-05, and ruled.

• The game sounds stay as they are. "Today's current game sounds actually feel right compared to the remaining ones." Four other sets were made (two built from tones, two recorded); all four are deleted. There is one set of game sounds, and it is the one the app has always had.
• The mascot has a little voice for its feelings. "The only thing I like is the sound when mascots make the feel." So a mascot's big feelings (a cheer, a giggle, a gasp, a hum, a hello) are heard in its little recorded voice, whenever sound is on. The big feelings only, never two at once, and never anything a game keeps secret.
• A mascot you tap answers out loud. "On the home page... when I tap on any mascot, the mascot is reacting, but it's not making any sounds." The home page is hushed on purpose, because its mascots move by themselves all day. A tap is the person asking for it: a tapped mascot is heard, there and anywhere else a mascot can be tapped. A mascot moving by itself on the home page stays silent.
• Mascots do not talk during a game. They talk at the awards. "I found it annoying when they talk during the gameplay. When I was looking at the award show, when they receive the award and say the word, it feels nice because that is where we expected the mascot to talk." A line is said aloud in one place, a party's awards show. Everywhere else it is read.
• Music: the awards have a tune, and it is the big band one. He liked the awards show with music, stepped through the show with three tunes on a switch, and chose: "Big Band is good." It plays for players at a party's awards show and a tournament's podium. The other two are deleted. Nowhere else has music. For the lobby he has another idea, not designed yet: the host plays a record for the room, "cozy music or party music, whatever music they would like to play".

The little voice, sound by sound (2026-10-05). Tapping mascots on the home page he found the voice "a little odd", tried five whole styles there, and kept this one with two exceptions: "I like Little Voice, but in Little Voice, two modes are not good: Happy and Hello. The other modes, like Cheer, Surprise, and Thinking, are all good." Offered five takes of each of those two in the same place, he chose: "Happy: Mm-hmm. Hello: Yoo-hoo." So a happy mascot gives a pleased little hum, not a giggle, and a hello is a two-note call. Apply: he judges a voice one sound at a time, not as a set. When a set is "mostly right", ask which sounds are wrong and offer takes of those, in the same place.

"Yoo-hoo" is the mascot's word, and the brand's (2026-10-29). Choosing a name, he found the hello "yoo-hoo" said the name he liked (Yuhu), and that a tap on the home page almost never played it: two taps in three hummed "mm-hmm". He heard the options on a page of tappable mascots and chose: "the Yoo-hoo sounds exactly like my domain name, which connects and gives a reason and a story." So "yoo-hoo" is what a mascot says when it cheers, wins, says hello, or is tapped for a small move. A laugh keeps the "woohoo", a surprise the "ooh", a think the "hmm". The hum went: "it doesn't sound happy either. It's kind of... a sad, annoyed type of thing." Apply: a sound that tells the brand's story beats variety. A sound that reads as the wrong feeling is removed, not kept for its label.

What already held, and still does: the dice is the one recording he picked himself. One move makes one noise. The header's sound switch silences everything, music and voice included.

How he judges a sound. Not from a list. "This is not the right way to analyze the sound effects because I need to literally play the game to see the sound. I can't directly judge it. Maybe I should have asked for you to create a setup where I can play the scenarios directly, like a player move, a winning screen, or the award show." The sheet of options told him little; playing a real scene told him everything, in a sentence.

Apply: when the answer is taste, put the choice inside the played scene it belongs to (a switch on the awards preview, not a settings panel), and offer few options. It worked the second time: three tunes on the show itself got an answer in one sitting, where a sheet of fifteen options had not. Expect "the one we have is right" as an answer: the sounds he kept were the ones already there. When he picks, the options that lost are deleted the same day, not kept "for later". And a sound is welcome where a player expects it (a mascot getting an award, a mascot they just tapped) and annoying where it repeats under play.

Cheering is live-stream reactions: tap an emoji, it floats up everyone's screen.

Seen when: Quick Draw needed a way to cheer a good drawing (2026-09-15). Karim asked for reactions like hearts on a YouTube or Instagram live: a small button opens a row of emojis, a tap floats one up every screen in the room at once. Built as one kit any game, lobby or results screen can use, not a Quick Draw feature.

Apply: decoration, never a score. Online only: on one shared phone the table cheers out loud, so the button is not there. Spamming is fine to feel, never to flood.

Reactions are for the watchers (2026-09-15): the one drawing never gets the emojis to send, not even at the reveal of their own drawing, but sees everyone's float up. THE PERSON BEING CHEERED MUST SEE THEM (Charades, 2026-09-18) — a cheer that lands everywhere except on the actor is the one screen it was sent to. Every screen in the room holds the channel while the moment is on, whether or not it may send. The eight emojis (thumbs up, thumbs down, heart, heart eyes, laughing to tears, fire, clap, thinking) always show under the canvas on a big screen; a phone shows them too wherever the screen has room, and hides them behind the mascot only where the row would cramp it (the card after next). Ten taps inside ten seconds pauses that player for ten seconds: the emojis dim and do nothing, no message, and come back on their own.

The drawing paper never changes with the theme (2026-09-15): it is the same light sheet in dark mode too, so everyone in the room sees the same picture in the same colours. Only the frame around it follows the theme.

Reactions stay emojis floating up the canvas. In Quick Draw a phone opens them from the drawer's mascot.

Seen when: 2026-09-30. Earlier the same day the emoji row was swapped for six moods the drawer's mascot acted out (Love, Haha, Wow, Cool, Hmm, Yay, with the sender's head popping up). He tried it and turned it down: "The way we are showing the emojis and the emojis flying on the canvas is better." What he kept from it is the mascot as the way in.

The call: the eight emojis and the emojis floating up the canvas, exactly as they were. On a big screen the row always shows under the canvas. On a phone the round corner button is gone: a watcher taps the drawer's mascot in the canvas's bottom-left corner and the same row opens above it, folds away a few seconds after the last tap, and dims during a spam pause. The drawer's screen, one shared phone and LAN get no tap on the mascot. A watcher's first two watching turns on a phone, the mascot says "Tap me to react!" once the turn's line has gone.

The emojis are Google's Noto 3D set: bundled pictures, not the phone's emoji font, so every phone shows the same eight, in all three games. Karim picked Noto 3D out of Fluent 3D, Fluent Color and Flat, Noto 2D, Twemoji, OpenMoji and the phone's own. A set we drew ourselves in the mascot's style came first and he turned it down: it "looked cheap".

On a phone the emojis rise from the mascot's corner: they start just above the drawer's mascot, where the row opens, and fan out up the paper, never from the old button's corner.

Rejected: the six mascot moods and the mascot acting them out.

Apply: a reaction is a quick, light thing people fire off many times. Keep it an emoji that floats up where everyone is looking. A character on screen can be the door to it, but the reaction itself should not become a performance. Use a polished, shipped emoji set rather than drawing a weaker one ourselves, and let the emojis rise from whatever opened them.

Reactions: out when there is room, behind the mascot only when the row would cramp the screen.

Seen when: Charades, 2026-10-01. The overnight build copied Quick Draw's door onto the acting screen: a watcher tapped the actor's mascot to open the emojis. Karim: "I don't think it is needed here because we have space… the screen is completely empty. We can redistribute the space and show these reactions all the time."

The rule, in his words: "If the screen has space, we can have the reactions out. If the screen does not have much space and adding the reactions outside will cramp it, then we move it inside."

Room: Charades' acting screen (a clock and nothing else) on every size, and every big screen. The row sits at the foot of the screen, in thumb reach, and the emojis rise from it.

No room: Quick Draw on a phone. The paper takes the whole width and the guess box sits under it, so a row outside would push the paper smaller. There the drawer's mascot stays the way in.

Apply: the choice belongs to each screen, made once and written beside the code. Start from "out". Hiding the row is the exception and needs a reason you can point at on the screen. Never copy a door from a sibling game because it was approved there: it was approved for that screen's lack of room, not as a pattern.

Appearance has three choices, and the default is to match the device. (Built 2026-10-03. Superseded 2026-10-14 by the next card.)

Seen when: "I think we should support light, dark, and system mode as well for the theme now." The choices are Match device, Light and Dark, in that order, each with a small drawing (a half-and-half disc, a sun, a moon) and a tick on the one in force.

Apply: the header button shows the look that is on screen, so it never lies, and one tap opens the three choices in a small menu right under it. Never a button that cycles: nobody can read "match device" from an icon. Profile shows the same three rows. A choice between three things is rows with a tick, never an on/off switch.

Appearance is a toggle between light and dark, like sound. There is no Match device. (2026-10-14)

Seen when: the three-choice menu above, in use. Karim: "I would like to have it as a toggle only between light mode and dark mode, like how we toggle the sound on and off. Match Device: we can remove it. By default, when the user opens the app for the first time, we can set the light mode or dark mode based on the user's system preference. Thereafter, if the user switches it, we remember what the user switched to last time… Every time the user changes the device settings, we will not change it here. It is only used for reading it for the first time."

Apply: a thing people flip often is one tap, not a menu. The button shows the look on screen (a sun or a moon) and a tap flips it; its label says what the tap does. The system's setting is read once, on the first launch, and never followed after. Profile has the same flip as an on/off switch, because two choices are a switch.

Native per device, never scaled. Phones get a phone, desktops use their width.

Seen when: boards may use desktop width (Tambola two tickets side by side, five claim tiles in one strip, the caller top-centre on desktop, bottom-right on a phone); the phone play header is two rows so the game name never clips; sheets on phones, dialogs from 768px.

Apply: decide per width, not per platform. If the desktop has empty space, use it; if a phone row is crowded, stack it.

A waiting moment always has the mascot and one true line. A person is never a letter in a circle.

Seen when: 2026-10-03, the leftovers of the Crew redesign. Karim: "plain grey text with no mascot when a room is loading… not just rooms. There are other places too, like when a game is loading, a 'board is loading' type message… a simple blank text screen or a completely empty screen." The same pass found friends still drawn as an initial in a coloured circle on the Tambola tickets rows, the "who sits out" chips, the host's open room and the home's room cards.

Apply (waiting): any screen with nothing to show yet (finding a room, getting a board, reading back a saved game, checking who is signed in) shows the coral looking round with one short line that says what is happening: "Getting things ready…", "Getting the board ready…", "Finding the room…". No spinner, no grey text, no blank screen, no joke. It is one shared piece (MascotWait), and it holds back for a blink so a fast load never flashes a mascot on and off. A small section inside a card that is still loading stays small: nothing, or a head.

Apply (people): wherever a person is shown small, it is their mascot's head in their colour (PlayerHead), with their name as text beside it. The signed-in account in the header is not a seat, so it wears the brand's coral head, the same coral that greets them on Profile. The letter circle is left only where a game has not moved to mascots yet.

Two layouts only: a phone, and a big screen. A tablet is a big screen.

Seen when: Quick Draw on a tablet and a small laptop (2026-09-15). Below 1080px it showed the phone layout with a huge canvas and pushed the tools, the guesses and the input off screen. Karim: below 768px the phone layout, and the three-column big-screen layout for everything from 768px up, tablets and desktops alike. The whole game fits the window's height without a scroll.

Apply: never a third "tablet" layout between the two. The big layout scales its columns to the width it is given; a control that does not fit a narrow column changes shape (the Guess word becomes a send arrow), it never spills out. One exception, his own (next card): the room's games panel.

The room's games panel is a sheet on a tablet. Only a laptop or desktop gets the side panel.

Seen when: 2026-10-14, the online room on a tablet, with Game, Tournament and Party open in a side panel a third wide. Karim: "The panel for showing the games, tournaments, and party is coming for the tabs also. I didn't like it. I would like to have it as a bottom sheet only, even for the tablets. Show the side panel only for bigger screens like laptops or desktops. For the tablets and phones, show it as a bottom sheet only."

Apply: phones and tablets open the games from the bar at the scene's foot, as the phone's bottom sheet (centred, no wider than a sheet grows, on the wider screen); the side panel is for a laptop or desktop only. In the app a tablet is never a desktop; on the web a desktop is a wide window with a mouse or trackpad, so an iPad's browser gets the sheet. This is the one place that asks the question (useIsDesktop); everything else keeps the two layouts above. The why: decisions.html, 2026-10-14.

The one thing the room is looking at fills the screen. Nothing floats with a void above it.

Seen when: Charades, 2026-09-17. "No hero, half the phone empty" — the prompt, the clock and the buttons all sat in a huddle at the bottom with nothing above them. And on a desktop the same screen stretched instead: GOT IT ran about 1,250px across a 1,280px window.

Apply: a play screen is one column sized to the window — the players' row, a slim status bar, then the HERO taking every pixel that is left, then the buttons under the thumb. The hero is whatever the room is actually staring at (the prompt to act, the drawing, the question), and its type steps up in bands as it gets shorter so a big card is never a small word in a field of colour. A big screen keeps that exact composition, centred in a reading column, and the controls stay at a sane width: a button the width of a monitor is not "using the space", it is stretching. If a card has room left over, the fix is bigger content, never more padding.

And the reveal is the same card turned face-up (2026-09-17): the payoff of a turn shows the prompt where the prompt already was, at the same size, with the points landing under it — the screen shows its hand rather than swapping itself for a differently-shaped card.

Each beat of a turn has its own hero — and the clock belongs to the beat, not to a bar.

Seen when: Charades, 2026-09-18. "The UI looks so bad… we tried to fit Quick Draw's UI into this." The rebuild he approved gives every beat one job: while you are choosing, the prompt is the screen and the seconds are a small line inside its card; while someone is acting, the clock is the screen — a ring the width of the phone with the seconds inside it — and the prompt is nowhere. The slim status bar with a clock in the corner went with it.

Apply: ask what the room is staring at in THIS moment and make that the biggest thing on screen; everything else on that screen is small or absent. A number the room is watching is a hero in its own right, not a readout. Two screens of the same game may therefore look nothing alike, and that is the point. Never show the same number twice in two places.

The host can stop the clock in any game that has one — and the game stands still, not the app.

Seen when: Karim, 2026-09-18, playing over a video call: "if there is some ambiguity or discussion, the host can pause the game… make it a generic rule in the common setting for the host." Not a Charades feature — a rule of the platform.

Apply: a game that races a clock offers its host Pause in the play header's ••• menu, and Start again beside it. While it is stopped, every screen in the room shows the same quiet card over the board — the game still visible behind it, the clock frozen mid-sweep, taps refused — and only the person who can start it again gets the button; everyone else reads who they are waiting for. On one phone the person holding it is the host. Nothing about the game itself pauses: the match's own time stands still, so every deadline simply waits.

In a room, only the person who can KNOW gives the point. On one phone, whoever is nearest.

Seen when: Charades online over a video call, 2026-09-18. Everyone was shouting at once and GOT IT sat on every phone — so a guesser could hand themselves the point, and nobody else could tell who had actually said it first. Karim: the actor is the only person who knows who shouted it, so the button is theirs. Their screen also stops saying "shout your guesses" — they are the one miming.

Apply: ask who can KNOW the answer, not who is quickest to reach the phone. On separate phones the judging control belongs to that person and nobody else's screen offers it; on one shared phone there are no other screens, so it stays with whoever is nearest. And the list that asks "who got it?" always carries a free way back — "Nobody got it, keep going" returns to the running clock, because a mis-tap must cost nothing.

On separate phones, a button belongs to the person it acts for. One phone has one button.

Seen when: Charades' reveal, 2026-09-18. The turn's result is a moment the whole room reads, and the way on was one "Next: Sara" button — on every phone. Karim: the next player's phone should say It's your turn now and carry the button (it opens their own prompt); everybody else's should say Waiting on Sara, with nothing to press.

Apply: ask who the action is FOR, not who is looking. On one shared phone the viewer is the table, so the single button stays and its label names the person it hands the phone to. In a room, the action goes to the seat it belongs to and every other screen gets the quiet line — and when a side shares the turn (Reverse), any of them may press it. A shell that hands one phone its turn with a hand-off gives a room the same thing by simply opening it.

A big screen's game sits right under the header. The keyboard never covers the guess box.

Seen when: Quick Draw on an iPad, TestFlight build 31 (2026-09-15). Centred, the game left a big empty band under the header, and the on-screen keyboard then covered the canvas's foot and the guess box. Karim: on every big screen, tablet and desktop, the play area sits at the top with a small gap under the header, like the phone. On a touch screen with the keyboard up, the guess box stays just above the keyboard and the canvas stays in sight, shrinking if it has to, and comes back when the keyboard closes. iPad Quick Draw is played upright; that is the case to get right.

Apply: every game's board starts under the header on a big screen (one shared rule for all play screens). Anything typed on a big touch screen is checked with the keyboard open. A physical keyboard or a desktop changes nothing.

A row of choices stays ONE row. When it is wider than the screen, it scrolls sideways.

Seen when: Quick Draw's inks grew to ten with black and white (2026-09-15). Karim: the swatches are always one horizontal row, on a phone and on a desktop, and never wrap to a second row. The tools (brushes, the bucket, Undo, Clear) sit in one row under them.

Then (2026-09-30), for the inks: all ten show at once on any phone, no sideways scroll. The circles shrink to share the row, and each tap area is its whole slot and 44pt tall. Black comes first, then white, then the colours, and every pen starts on black: "yellow on white was barely visible".

Apply: a strip of like things is one line, not a block that changes height with its count. When the set is small and fixed (the inks), fit it all in view. When it can grow past the screen, let it scroll sideways and let the half-cut item at the edge say there is more. Keep every target 44pt.

A phone always says whose turn it is, and a typing strip shows who said what.

Seen when: Quick Draw's guess feed on a phone (2026-09-15). Looking at a phone, nobody could tell who was drawing, because the pencil lives in the players column only a big screen shows. Karim: the guess box's first row stays put and says "Karim is drawing" with their avatar, "You're drawing" on the drawer's phone, "Karim drew" at the reveal. While the keyboard is up the feed is one sideways row of small cards (option B of four): the name as a tiny coloured label on top, the guess under it, "You" for your own, "close" in the warning colour, a green card for "got it".

Then (2026-09-30): the row gave way to the drawer's own mascot standing in the canvas corner, which says whose turn it is on the paper everyone is already watching (see the head, drawer and reveal card above).

Apply: a phone that hides a big screen's column must still carry the one fact that column answered. In a cramped strip, a label above beats a name squeezed beside.

A game's status is one slim bar: round at the far left, the word in the middle, the clock at the far right.

Seen when: Quick Draw's separate "Round 1 of 2" label above the bar (2026-09-15). Karim folded it into the bar as "1/2", on the phone and the desktop, both modes. A long word or its blanks shrink to fit between the ends; they never wrap or touch them.

Apply: no label floating above a bar that could hold it. Equal-width ends keep the middle truly centred.

ONE play header — every game, every mode, every width.

Seen when: 2026-09-18. The header had two layouts, one for games that needed the phone's height and one for the rest, and they drifted. Karim's ruling: one header everywhere. The name on the left; on the right, always, Sound · Theme · Players (with its knock badge) and a ••• menu.

Apply: the menu holds what is RARE, in this order — How to play, Pause game / Keep going (the host of a game with a clock), then End game or Leave room, thin lines between the groups. How to play lives there rather than as a "?" in the row: a rule is worth a tap to find and is not worth a button over the board. Sound and theme stay switches, because a blip in the wrong moment is something a player reaches for without thinking; Players stays one tap, because the list, the standings and a knock are what people actually check (2026-09-15).

And the menu looks like the header (2026-09-14): the ••• is the same square raised button as Players, so the row reads as one family. A dropdown is a card: dark outline and a hard offset rim, never a blurred shadow. Never a per-game header.

A tap that is not yours answers with a toast, never a dead button.

Seen when: a guest tapped Tic-Tac-Toe's mode chips, nothing happened, and he "felt the app was not working" (2026-09-11). Only the host may switch.

Apply: show the control dimmed, let the tap through, and let the rules refuse it with words the shell toasts ("Only the host can switch modes."). Silence reads as broken; a sentence reads as designed.

The turn card sits under the board, never wider than it.

Seen when: Tic-Tac-Toe's mode chips and tip line made the space above the board crowded, and on a desktop the full-width turn card "is not looking good" (2026-09-11).

Apply: the space above a board belongs to the game (its chips, tips, scoreboard). The shell's whose-turn card goes below the board, centred, at the board's width on every screen size.

A tool never flickers between enabled and disabled under the hand.

Seen when: Quick Draw's Undo and Clear greyed out and back after every stroke (2026-09-15), which was distracting while drawing.

Apply: a tool button in constant use always looks ready. A tap with nothing to do simply does nothing: no greyed state, no error toast.

A choice shows its reward, and the screen shows only the choice.

Seen when: Quick Draw's word choice (2026-09-15). Each word card now carries its level and, right under it, the points in green ("+200"). While the drawer is choosing, the guesses box below is hidden for everyone, because there is nothing to guess at yet.

Apply: when a player picks between options, put what each one is worth on the option itself, and hide anything on the screen that cannot matter until the pick is made.

The web gets no phone-app padding. A browser tab starts below the bars.

Seen when: the home page in Chrome on his iPhone had a status-bar gap above the header and a home-indicator gap under the tab bar (2026-09-11): "for web this won't apply, the page starts inside those bars."

Apply: safe-area padding is a native concern. On the web it is zero in a browser tab; only an installed home-screen app would earn it back.

The primary action lives where the thumb is, out of the content's way.

Seen when: the host's step button moved from mid-board to a bar pinned at the bottom ("easier to tap, and it doesn't get in the way of the question").

Apply: one repeated control per screen → bottom bar on phones. Colour it by state (yellow → cyan → green → purple) so the state is readable without reading.

Highlight only what is new; default states have no fill.

Seen when: ticket boxes lost their default shading so a called number could stand out; the wash became the player's own colour at ~18% ("solid yellow shouted"); the 1–90 board's called cells became solid discs because the tint was too faint there.

Apply: the baseline is quiet; the change is loud; the loudness matches the density (a single cell on a ticket wants a hint, ninety cells want a stamp). Use the player's colour when the thing belongs to a player.

A board shows the play, not a lattice of boxes.

Seen when: the Word Search grid put every letter in its own lavender bubble and he did not like it (2026-09-12). He brought a picture of what he wanted: plain bold letters sitting straight on the panel, and one rounded pastel capsule running through each word that has been found.

Apply: letters on the surface, no per-cell tile, border or rim. The capsule goes UNDER the letters, in the colour of the player who found the word, faint enough that the letters stay black and two crossing words blend. A drag in progress is that capsule's outline in the dragger's colour, and the fill arrives when the word is confirmed. In the dark appearance a found word's capsule is the player's colour at a little over half strength, with the letters on it in the normal light ink, so the band never shouts and two crossing words both stay visible where they overlap (a solid band there was too strong). Everything around the board stays as it was. A found word's chip in the list goes quiet (grey, struck through), never green; there is no hint line under the board.

Apply (rounds, 2026-09-12): Word Search is played in rounds exactly the way Tic-Tac-Toe is — the same chips above the board, the same sheet between rounds, the same "most rounds takes it". Its two modes are Race and Parallel; whether the word list is shown or hidden is a setting, never a mode, because either mode can be played blind. A round goes to whoever found the most words in it, everybody on a tie, nobody when the board was never touched. And a word never comes back while the topic still has ones the room has not seen — inside a series and across rematches in the same room.

Apply (the words, 2026-09-12): the words come through the same door the quiz uses, and that door opens BEFORE the start sheet — tap one of our topics, write your own, or take a random mix. The topic is never a setting on the start sheet again. Tapping one of ours costs nothing and waits for nothing, because those words already ship with the app. A host's own list is sacred: a board too small to hide their longest word is not offered, and the pick moves to one that fits — leaving a family name off the board in silence is not something the room forgives.

Apply (the door, second pass, 2026-09-12): he called the first cut “a literal copy of Trivia Clash without thinking”. The words have no order — the grid scrambles them and one round hides about nine — so they are never a numbered list you drag. A line the host is still typing is never marked wrong: “too short” waits until they leave the box, and only “too long” speaks live, because another letter cannot fix it. Every line carries its own ×. The game's options sit in ONE card with hairlines between them, not a card each. Board sizes read Small / Medium / Large with no dimensions, and the mode is picked once and holds for the series — no Mix, and no chips over the board — because the words are settled before the first round and re-dealing them in a new mode tells the room nothing new.

Apply (directions and topics, 2026-09-14): every board mixes its directions, whatever its size: across, down, diagonal, and backwards (right to left, bottom to top, a diagonal read backwards). A board of nine words all running left to right is one direction to look in, not a hunt. And no AI option: asked for one film star's movies, the model sent unrelated words, so the door offers twelve of our own topics, in his order: Animals · Food · Countries · Cities · Sports · Travel · Brands · Space · Ocean · Superheroes · Hollywood · Indian Cinema. Write your own and random words stay. More topics beat a topic box that can be wrong. Fantasy went, and Movies became Hollywood and Indian Cinema (2026-09-14): a film pack only holds titles that are real and easy to recognise, never a made-up one.

Apply (the door, third pass, 2026-09-12): words with no order get no preview at all. Tapping one of ours or asking for a random mix lands the host straight on the game's options — there is nothing to look at and nothing to arrange, and a cloud of sixty chips is a screen asking to be scrolled past. Writing your own still shows the lines, because that is the typing, not a preview, and “Use these” goes to the options too. The quiz keeps its preview: its order is real. In the options card the hairlines sit between two rows, inset to the card's own padding — run them edge to edge and they read as the start of a new section. The line under a row of choices reserves exactly the height of that field's longest note: never an empty line under a field whose notes are all short, and never a jump while tapping through. And a found word's chip must read done on both grounds — the platform's strike-through is a hairline it will not thicken, so the strike is a drawn 2px bar, and on the dark stage the label fades as well, because there the two grounds are both deep purple.

Apply (the door, fourth pass, 2026-09-12): the topics wrap to rows of four on a phone. Our own words are four letters at least: a three-letter word turns up on a grid of random letters by accident, so finding it is worth nothing. Words the host types themselves still go down to three, because a short name is a name they meant. A pick that costs nothing shows no loader — tapping one of ours or asking for a random mix lands on the options at once, so Word Search's door has no wait screen at all. Where a door does wait on a model writing (the quiz), that card stays up two seconds at the least, because a card that comes and goes in four frames reads as a glitch rather than as work. And the “lose these words” question is only asked when the words cost something: going back from one of ours or a random mix returns to the topics in silence, and going back from your own list returns to the boxes with every line you typed still in them. Only a model's words (the quiz) are worth stopping for.

Apply (same device, 2026-09-12): on one phone it is a hot seat, not the online game with the wires cut. One round, players in seat order, and every player gets their own scramble of the grid — a start-sheet option says whether that is the same list for everyone or a fresh set each. The pass-the-phone screen is the only gate, and the clock starts on “show me”: that screen already names the player and hides the board, so a second “this many words are hidden — tap Go” step asked the same question twice. The grid is on the screen the moment the shield drops, with the minute already counting. A turn ends when the clock runs out or they have every word, and then the phone goes round. Most words wins; among the players who cleared the board, the fastest to their last word, and equal counts share the place. A turn is one minute by default, stepped in half minutes up to five, so five friends is a ten-minute game. There is no Rounds and no Race/Parallel there — nobody is playing at the same time as anybody else. The row over the board shows everyone, in seat order, with the player holding the phone highlighted and the ones who have not played yet on nought: one phone is still one game, and a player has to see the number they are chasing. The phone-holder's pill is the one that stands out — their own colour on its edge, a wash of it inside, and their name a size up in the display face — while every pill keeps the same height, because the row sits right over the board and a row that grew as the phone went round would shift the board under the next pair of hands.

Apply (the rematch, 2026-09-12): a rematch never asks the options again. Rounds, board size, word list and turn length were settled before the first whistle and the next game keeps them; changing them means ending the game and setting up from the top. The sheet offers exactly two things — Same topic and Pick a new topic — and never “new words, same topic”, because a word hunt's list is not used up by one match: sixty words, nine a board, and the room remembers what it has been shown. So Same topic deals a new board there and then, with no screen at all between the tap and the phone going round, and Pick a new topic opens the topic door and nothing else before the game begins. The door is ONE component for both modes — what the couch does and what a room does may differ in where the words are kept and in nothing a player can see.

Apply (the hand-off, 2026-09-12): the pass-the-phone screen carries no secrecy at all here, because Word Search has no secret: each player gets their own scramble, and nobody at the table would gain a thing by looking. So there is no “screen shielded” badge and no “no peeking” note, and the button simply says “I’m Karim, let’s go!”. A game says for itself whether its turn is a secret (Charades' prompt), and only those keep the shield — dressing a plain hand-over as a conspiracy invents a secret the room does not have.

The board fills its panel; the die is blank until you roll; a jump is shown up close.

Seen when: he played Snakes & Ladders on the simulator (2026-09-13) and made three calls in a row. There was a gap on every side between the panel's rounded edge and the 10×10 grid. The die still showed the last player's number while the next player was being asked to roll. And a ladder climb or a snake slide happened somewhere out in a board of a hundred small squares, with nothing drawing the eye to it.

Apply: the grid fills the panel edge to edge inside the rim — no inner padding, the rounded corners clip the grid, and the square numbers are inset just far enough to clear the curve, because the first number the curve eats is 100.

Apply: the die carries only the roll that is still playing out, in the roller's own colour. The moment that journey settles the turn has really passed, so the face goes blank — the same blank face the game starts on — and waits for the next player. The whole story moves to one sentence under the board: who rolled, what they rolled, and what it did to them. “Anu rolled 4 and climbed a ladder.” Never two lines, never a line that leaves the number out. Before the first roll the line holds how to roll (below) at the same height, because nothing under a board may move while the game is on.

Apply: a ladder or a snake zooms the board in on the token and rides along with it, then pulls back out before the next player is asked to roll. A plain step move never zooms. The camera is a transform on the grid inside a panel that clips, so the panel's own box never changes size and nothing around the board moves a pixel; it is held back from the board's edge, so a token in a corner sits off-centre rather than dragging empty panel into the frame. Reduced motion keeps the whole board in view and the token still travels.

Apply (2026-09-13): the whole board is one moment. Tap the die and, for the roller, the turn pill disappears at once — nobody's turn is next while their move is still being played — while watching players online keep seeing whose turn it is until the move lands. The die shows the roller's number in their colour and does not answer. When the token arrives, everything moves on together in the same frame: the token is on its real square, the die goes blank in the next player's colour, the sentence under the board tells that roll, and the pill comes back with the NEXT player's name. Never half the board on the new turn and half on the old one. The pill keeps its space while it is away, because nothing around a board may change height mid-game.

Apply (2026-09-13): the turn pill follows the shared “Your turn” rule, word for word. It read “Karimulla's turn” to Karimulla himself in an online room. A game that draws its own turn line does not get its own wording: on separate phones the player on the clock reads “Your turn, Karimulla” and everybody else reads “Karimulla's turn” at that same moment, exactly as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect Four do; after a six the two lines become “Your turn again, Karimulla” and “Karimulla's turn again”. On one shared phone the line stays in the third person — there the viewer is the table, not a seat, and the name is how the board asks for the device. The sentence lives in one place for the whole product, so a game can only pick who holds the turn and whether that is you.

Apply (2026-09-13): the die IS the control — tap it to roll; there is no ROLL button. The thing you tap is the thing that rolls, the way it is at a real table. It sits under the turn badge, large enough to be an easy target, wearing the colour of whoever is up, and it breathes slowly so you can see it is asking for you. Tapped, it tumbles in place for a beat with its pips flicking through random faces, then settles on the real number with a small bounce, and a short dice rattle plays through the app's own sound, so the mute switch in the header silences it like everything else. While a move is playing it shows the number and does not answer; between turns it is blank in the next player's colour. Online only the phone whose turn it is shows the die; everyone else keeps the roll line and the pill, and the die's space stays so nothing moves. On one shared phone the die is always there, because every player is looking at it. The three rows under the board (the sentence, the badge, the die) keep their heights whatever is happening.

Apply (2026-09-13): the token waits for the die to settle. Tapping the die used to send the token walking while the cube was still in the air, so the board was showing the answer before the die had given it. Nothing on the board moves until the die has come to rest on its number and been readable for a short beat — then the token walks, and the ride, the sound and the camera follow as before. For the player the outcome does not exist until the die is showing it.

Apply (2026-09-13): a ride takes as long as it is long, and the camera stays to the end. A climb or a slide is timed by how far it actually goes, so the little ladder near the top is quick and the serpent that crosses the whole board is not. The camera holds the travelling token for the whole journey and starts pulling back only once the token has landed, easing out softly rather than snapping; the turn does not pass until it has finished. A fixed ride time is what let the camera leave a long snake halfway down.

Apply (2026-09-13): the die is a real cube, drawn in-house. Karim looked at the flat square turning on the spot and said it was not good enough: he wanted 3D, and he wanted it built here rather than bought in. So it is six faces standing in a box — each filled with the player's colour, the sides shaded darker, the rim and pips in the dark outline (the die card above has the colour rule). Tap it and it hops, spins on two axes, then slows onto the exact face carrying the rolled number, swings a hair past it and settles. Between turns the cube is blank in the next player's colour and breathes as before. It is ours, so it takes the player's colour and the light or dark ground for free, and one piece of code covers the phone and the website.

Apply (2026-09-13): a physical thing gets a recording; a screen blip gets a tone. The rattle built out of tones sounded like a beep, not like dice. Anything that happens to a real object — dice shaken and thrown, a coin, a card — earns a real recording. The app's own noises — a tap, a right answer, a countdown — stay built out of tones, because they are abstract and a recording would add weight for nothing. Recordings are free-to-use (CC0) and credited in the folder they live in, and they go through the same sound switch in the header as everything else.

Apply (2026-09-13): one roll makes one noise. Karim counted three or four on a single tap of the die — a click, something as it started, something during, something after. A throw is one event, so it gets the dice recording and nothing else. The tone version stands in only when the recording will not load, never alongside it, and the shell adds nothing of its own on top: the whose-turn chime belongs to a connected mode only, because its job is to make someone who has put their phone down look up, and nobody puts down the phone the whole table is playing on. On one device the turn changes on every single tap, so that chime was pure noise landing on top of the dice.

Apply (2026-09-13): a cube has to share its edges and shade its sides. The first 3D die read as three rounded tiles glued together with a grey slab behind it. Three rules came out of that. The corner radius belongs to the cube, not to a face — one face rounding its corners while its neighbour keeps them square leaves the shared edge looking broken — and that radius is small everywhere, so two faces meet in a single line rather than two fat rounded borders. Faces take a tint of black in proportion to how far they have turned from the light, because a box of one flat colour is not a solid until its sides are darker than its front. And the shadow is a soft ellipse on the ground that shrinks and fades as the die leaves the table — never a hard shape sitting behind a turning cube, which is exactly what the grey slab was.

Apply (2026-09-13): the die is ONE shape in every state — never a flat square. Karim slowed a recording down and went through it frame by frame: the cube in mid-air was “the perfect die”, and the fault was at the end, where it turned back into the flat rounded candy square with a thick rim it had been before. So the flat square is gone. Sitting still, the die is the same cube, parked at a fixed three-quarter angle like a die drawn on an old board-game box: the top face carrying the number (blank between turns), two sides falling away from it and shaded, the same tight corners and the same hairline rim it wears in the air. A throw spins that cube and lands it back on exactly that angle with the rolled number face up — the number is the cube turning, as it is on a real die, not the faces being relabelled. Nothing morphs, nothing changes shape, at any point. A morph between two shapes is a confession that there are two shapes; the fix is to delete one of them, not to smooth the join.

Apply (2026-09-13): Karim picks the sound himself, from the pack. He listened through the whole free library and chose one throw. That clip is now the only noise a roll makes: nothing shaken underneath it, no tick when it lands, no tone version alongside it — the tone stands in only if the file will not load. It starts on the tap, not on the landing. Choosing a sound is taste, the same as choosing a colour, so it is his call and not something to assemble out of several clips to be clever.

Apply (2026-09-13): the sentence names the square you ended on. “Aafreen rolled 4 and climbed a ladder to 18.” A roll that only says the number leaves every player hunting for their own token among a hundred small squares to find out what just happened to them. The destination is always the square the token is finally resting on, after the ladder or the snake or the bounce, so there is one number to read and it is the one that matters. Reaching the top is the exception and says so: “… and reached 100!”

Apply (2026-09-13): before the first roll that same line is the instruction. The slot under the board is empty only in the sense that no roll has happened yet, and an empty line is a wasted one: it holds “Tap the die or shake the phone to roll.” on a phone and “Tap the die to roll.” on the website, then hands the space to the roll line the moment somebody rolls and never comes back. Same slot, same height, nothing moves.

Apply (2026-09-13): a phone in your hand can be shaken to roll. At a real table you shake before you throw, so the phone does too — two jolts inside a moment count as a shake, one does not, and it stays quiet for a second and a half afterwards so one long shake is one roll. It is deaf unless the die in front of you is yours to tap, and it stops listening the instant the board is not asking for a roll or the app goes to the background. The website has no phone to shake, so it says nothing about shaking.

Apply (2026-09-13): a six rolls again. The rule everyone already brings to the table from childhood: roll a six and the die stays with you, after a ladder, a snake or a bounce alike. The turn badge comes back with your own name, the die goes blank in your colour as usual, and the sentence keeps its whole story and adds one clause — “Karim rolled 6 and moved to 6. Roll again!” A six that lands exactly on 100 just wins. There is no penalty for three sixes: punishing the luckiest moment of a game of pure luck is a rule nobody enjoys losing to.

Apply (2026-09-13): a rule that is not a step gets its own small block on the how-to card. The card is numbered steps, in order, one sentence each; the six rule is a bonus rather than a step, so it sits under them behind a short heading (“Bonus”) in the same card. Every game can do this, not just this one.

Ludo plays the Snakes & Ladders board rules, plus a choice of token.

Seen when: 2026-09-13 — he asked for every learning and styling call from Snakes & Ladders to be applied to Ludo, then reviewed the board through a day of passes on 2026-09-14 and signed it off.

Apply: the cross fills its panel. Since 2026-09-30 it wears the Snakes & Ladders look: every player's mascot peeks over the board's rim, no name tags, and whoever is up climbs onto it and speaks the turn line in a bubble; under the board there is only the 3D die (tap or shake to roll), which every phone sees and only the roller can tap. Each rim mascot's tokens home show as its eyes: “2/4” drawn on the visor in place of the eyes, the mouth kept. He spotted it by accident when a small pill on the rim landed over the visors: “it looks like their eyes were replaced by that number, and it really looked nice” (2026-09-30, replacing that pill, which had beaten pips and a house icon). A feeling (sad, crying, a cheer) borrows the eyes back while it lasts. Nothing moves until the die has landed and been read, and the next player climbs up the instant the last token settles.

Apply: a choice that is not a choice never asks. Two tokens on the same square, or tokens in the yard, make the same move, so they count as one: if every move a roll allows ends the same way, it plays by itself a beat after the die is read. When there is a real choice, one spot glows per move. No legal move, and the rim says so (“4. No move!”) and holds it a beat before the turn passes.

Apply: choosing a token dims nothing. “Instead of disabling the other tokens, keep them as they are. If we properly highlight the pulsating tokens we will be good.” A token that is not a choice looks exactly as it does at rest. Since the tokens became mascots (2026-09-30) the highlight belongs to the mascot: “the plain white circle is not good”, so a movable token wakes up and bounces gently, a small hop and a rest (“pick me”), on both boards, with nothing under or round it: a glowing platform under it was tried and dropped (“I don't like the platform under the mascot when jumping”). On a tile of its own colour (its start square, its home column, home) a token stands on a navy coin with a thin light edge, or it vanishes into the tile (“looks great, keep it”).

Apply: a token is a small whole mascot in its player's colour (2026-09-30, replacing the solid circle with a dark outline he chose on 2026-09-14, the same way the Snakes & Ladders pieces became mascots). It sits in its yard well, walks the track with its feet shuffling and facing the way it goes, and is awake only while its own move plays. Tokens sharing a cell shrink and sit side by side. Feelings, with the board: a captor cheers as it lands; the captured token cries all the way back to its yard, and its player cries with it on the rim; a token home cheers in confetti.

Apply: light and dark are two boards. Light is the full-colour board: yards, home columns, start squares and centre in the player's colour, white path tiles with a thin line (“the paths look disabled” when they were tinted). Dark is the night version of it (2026-09-30: the old tinted production board, which he had kept on 2026-09-14, “is not looking good in dark mode, try a different design”; he then compared it live with a neon-outline board and a jewel-tone board and kept the night one): yards in a deep, saturated shade of each player's colour with pale wells of the same colour, raised navy path tiles with a thin light edge, and home columns, start squares and centre triangles in the bright player colours, so whose path is whose reads at a glance. Only colours and strokes differ; the layout and everything else are shared.

Apply: stars: white on a coloured start square (“the black stars don't look good”) and grey on a plain tile, a lighter grey on the night board so it reads on navy.

Apply: the camera moves only for a capture. The captor lands first, then the board pushes in on the captured token and rides it back to its yard with the slide sound, and eases out when it arrives. A plain move stays flat.

Apply: Ludo's squares carry no numbers, so what the roller says on the rim names what happened, never a square, each line from the moment it is true: “6! A token comes out”, “4! Off it goes”, “Captured Leanne!” as the captor lands, “Home!” (kept in front of their next turn line), “No move!”, “Three 6s! Turn lost”.

Apply: a player stuck in the yard is helped quietly toward a 6; nothing on screen says so. The die is proven fair first, then helped, never the other way round.

Reveal like a game show.

Seen when: host mode shows the question, then four blank A–D cells, then the options fill in ("like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"); the ready card celebrates (🎉) rather than reports.

Apply: a state before reveal should look like the shape of what is coming (blank cells), not a placeholder card explaining the wait.

Big things are big. Small controls are small.

Seen when: the between-question countdown became a 64px number above the question ("a small line under the options was easy to miss"); the pencil in a list row was "too big" and became the small size; the Trivia answer highlight had to be instant.

Apply: the one number the room is watching gets the biggest type on the screen; a repeated per-row control gets the smallest touch-safe glyph; feedback is immediate (optimistic), never after the round trip.

A tap target is a finger, so a board of small squares takes gutter back on a small phone. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: a review measured Checkers' squares at 41px on a 375 phone and 34 on a 320, under the 44 the design language asks for. The board already had the whole column; the room either side was the page's own 20px.

Apply: a board of eight squares a side reaches into the gutter on a phone, as far as a 44px square needs and never closer than 8px to the screen's edge; a phone that is wide enough gives nothing up, and nothing else on the screen moves. Where some squares are never played on (Checkers' light ones), a tap on one goes to the nearest square that takes it. Where every square is live and a tap cannot be taken back (Sea Battle), taps stay exact. Not yet his call: whether the board may sit wider than the header on small phones.

Sea Battle goes further, to a hairline (built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review): its squares measured 42 on a 360 phone, and a shot fired at the wrong square cannot be taken back or nudged to the square that was meant. So its sea, and the two tabs over it, take the gutter down to 1px at the screen's edge where they must: a full 44 on a 360 phone (44 on a 375 and a 390 too, with more margin). On a 320 phone eight fingers do not fit across at all; the sea is as wide as the screen and a square is 39. Every other board keeps the slim 8px margin. Not yet his call: whether a card may sit that close to the edge.

The stage's bubble fits the row: both players of a duel are always whole on screen. (Built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review.)

Seen when: a review measured the two-player stage on a 360 phone: two mascots and "Ana's turn again" came to more than the row, the row slid to keep the speaker in view, and the other player's mascot was cut off at the edge. A long name ("Bartholomew's turn") did it on every duel.

Apply: where the seats leave real room for a bubble, the bubble takes that room and no more, and its words are set to fit: two lines at the phone's own size, else a step smaller, down to the small bubble a list row uses. On a very narrow row (a 320 phone, or a small board on a laptop whose window is short) the mascots also stand a little smaller. A row too crowded for any honest bubble (many seats on a phone) keeps the full bubble and slides to its speaker, as before. Measured with eleven-letter names on Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, Checkers, Chess and Sea Battle at 320 and 360 (Sea Battle at 375 and 390 too): both mascots whole, nothing cut. Reversi and Dots and Boxes speak from the rim over the board, where the bubble already had the board's whole width. Not yet his call: the smaller type for a long name (15 where the usual is 20).

Grouped, tabbed, and sized for the biggest room.

Seen when: tickets per player moved to their own tab because Tambola seats 30; the lobby splits Players and Games on a phone; the "or" rule with two door cards separates other ways in from topic chips ("they should be different from the chips").

Apply: design for 30 players on a phone, then check 2. Things that are different kinds must LOOK like different kinds (a card is not a chip is not a link).

No step that asks nothing; one thing per screen.

Seen when: same-device Trivia went "Random questions" → an empty "Start Trivia Clash / START GAME" screen ("we should start the game directly, right?"); the add-a- question screen showed Previous / Next / Back / Use these and a "0 of 1 needed" counter ("it was a little confusing… just Done").

Apply: a step exists only if it has a decision on it. A screen opened for one job carries one primary action named for that job, and no counters or navigation it does not need. But a tap on a choice is a choice, not a launch: "Random questions" lights up and the footer becomes START — it does not start the game by itself ("that is not what I expected").

What you just made lands where you are looking.

Seen when: a question added from the preview list went to the end of the list, below the fold ("it's not visible… add the question to the top").

Apply: a thing the player just created appears at the top of the list they are on, never appended out of sight. Scroll position is part of the feedback.

A "You" tag marks the person holding the phone — so it means nothing on a shared one.

Seen when: the same-device Players sheet said "Karim (you)" ("everyone is playing from the same device, so there is no 'you'"); the online lobby roster showed the host crown but a guest could not find their own row ("I don't see where I am in that list").

Apply: every list of people in an online room marks the viewer's own row with a "You" tag in the host tag's style — a tag beside the name, never glued into it ("(you)" looked bad: "not combined with the user's name"). Lists on one shared phone never do. Same rule for any per-viewer label.

One card is not a carousel.

Seen when: the "jump back in" row on Home. "If there is only one card, no carousel is needed… the dots and all are not needed. If there is more than one, then a carousel."

Apply: a container's chrome (dots, arrows, a rail heading) appears only when it has more than one thing to manage. One item renders as itself: full width on a phone, centred at half width on anything wider — never stretched across a desktop column. With two or more, a carousel on every size (two per page on a tablet, one in the desktop rail beside the hero) so the row's height is constant and never grows with the count; every card wears exactly one status tag so cards in a row are the same height; a dismiss ✕ lives in the card's top-right corner, not beside the button, and the button runs full width.

Don't offer what the next screen already offers.

Seen when: I put a same-device "Continue" card in the row. "When you click on Same Device, we are directly going to the lobby in which the previous game's players list will be there. That is unnecessary."

Apply: before adding a shortcut, tap the path it shortens. If the answer is one screen away and already visible, the shortcut is clutter.

Applied again: 2026-10-13. A game's card on the home and the Games tab opens the game's page, and the page has both ways to start. So the small "one phone or online" sheet that used to open from the card is gone.

Tags say one thing the copy cannot; everything else is a sentence.

Seen when: the jump-back-in cards wore JOINED · LOBBY · LIVE · YOUR ROOM · GAME OVER. "I didn't get it. What is the concept behind showing these? We don't need so many badges." Kept: YOUR ROOM (no emoji; the crown goes on the name) and LIVE on someone else's room while a game is on. Lobby, joined, game over became the card's one line.

Apply: a tag earns its place only when it changes what the button means or what you should do now. State that is merely descriptive is a line of copy, not a chip.

Copy must not argue with itself, and "back" is not a verb for going in.

Seen when: the host card read "Nobody else is in yet · picking the next game" ("if nobody is there, who is picking?") — the line went, and the faces show only when someone besides you is in. "Back to your room feels like you are going back somewhere" → ENTER YOUR ROOM.

Apply: read a generated line as a sentence before shipping it; if two halves cannot both be true, cut one. Name the button for where it takes you, not for where you were. A wide screen seats a card beside the hero rather than stretching it across.

Ordering and defaults are deliberate.

Seen when: "Host first, Auto second, but Auto selected"; "−50 first, Free second, Free selected"; play header order name · sound · theme · players · End game (the lobby's order).

Apply: the bold option goes first to be seen; the safe option stays the default. Order controls the same way everywhere.

A friend at the table, not the system.

Seen when: "Not accepting answers" → "Time's up!"; "Keep daubing" → "Not claimed"; "Waiting on Karim" (not "Listen to Karim"); "It's a draw!" and "Lappy wins!" (not "dead heat", "takes it"); "Everyone will be removed and the room will be closed."

Apply: short, warm, no system-speak. A busy button keeps its verb ("Leaving…"). Titles alone when they carry the meaning; drop any line the screen is understood without.

The mascot talks to the people at the table. A line that only describes its own move is commentary.

Seen when: 2026-10-04. Ninety-eight mascot lines had been rewritten so that no line spoke to the other player, across Checkers, Dots and Boxes, Sea Battle, Chess, Reversi, Pairs, the tournament and the party's awards. He read old beside new, all 98: "Mascot line changes are all looking bad. The previous version was good. The previous ones sound and feel like the mascot is talking. The ones we currently have feel like some kind of commentary is running, so I prefer the previous version." Every old line is back in the bank it came from.

Apply: a mascot is a friend at the table, and it talks TO the people there. A line said to the other player is the mascot talking, and that is the voice: a thank-you for the piece it just took ("Thanks for that."), an order ("Bow down."), a brag across the table ("Too easy.", "Told you so."). A line that only describes its own move ("A little souvenir.", "Light on my feet.") reads like commentary running over the game. Write what the player would say out loud to the friend across the table.

No rule says a mascot may not speak to the other player. It may thank them, tease them, give them an order or brag at them. No test refuses a line for it: tone cannot be tested.

Only he judges a line. A change to what a mascot says is shown to him, old beside new, BEFORE it lands. A reviewer's finding about tone or wording is a question for him, never a fix. No test pins the lines: a new or changed line shows in the diff of the game's words file (copy.en.json), ready to be put in front of him.

Back as well, and his to read: two earlier fixes on the same day had changed seventeen more lines of Checkers, Chess, Dots and Boxes, Reversi and Sea Battle for the same reason, and he had seen neither version of those. Sixteen are back to what they first said (Reversi says "Did that sting?" again, Checkers "Too easy.", Chess "Thanks for that."). One is his to choose: Reversi's skipped player says "Go on, your go.", a line he has read and kept, where it first said "Go on, show-off.". All seventeen pairs are listed for him in decisions, 2026-10-04.

A placeholder is read by a player. No word on a screen is "system text".

Seen when: 2026-10-09, the box a name is typed into on the one-phone set-up said "Their name". "The placeholder is 'their name.' Their name doesn't make sense here. This is actually literally system text getting into the final user-facing output, so you need to take care of it very seriously. Any user-facing text should be thoroughly and thoughtfully designed... It should be either 'player name' or 'enter the name.'"

Apply: the box says "Player name". Every string a player can read is copy and gets the same care as a headline: a placeholder, a label only a screen reader says, a toast, a line under a button. Read each one as a friend holding the phone with nothing explained. A pronoun needs somebody on the screen to point at: "their" pointed at nobody. Name the thing instead. And a line a mascot says is something that friend would say: a friend being fixed asks "Change my name?", never "Rename Sam", which is a button's label in a speech bubble.

The same words wherever a name is typed: the room between two games of a one-phone party has an "Add a friend" seat, and the box it opens says "Player name" too (his ruling extended to it the same day). It said "Their name" before.

Say the number, not the adjective.

Seen when: "Host mode needs at least 3 players" over "Host needs at least three people"; "Tickets" over "Tickets · 2" when the count added nothing.

Apply: a digit when the number is the point; no count when it is decoration.

Names where they help, not where they crowd.

Seen when: the claim toast says "Lappy claimed Early Five" but the spoken line says "Early Five claimed"; the tile says "Lappy claimed it".

Apply: eyes get the who, ears get the what.

Never put the user's own words inside a button.

Seen when: the rematch sheet said NEW QUESTIONS ON “ANIMALS”. "A topic like '90's movies from Hollywood' will break its layout… show the topic outside of the button."

Apply: a button label is fixed copy that fits on one line at every length of anything the user typed. The variable part (a topic, a name, a room title) sits beside or above it as a line that may wrap or truncate.

Say it the way a player would, and don't tie the games to night-time.

Seen when: 2026-10-17, the new home's draft. "The wording is not good. They look like the system instructions written directly into the UI. We need to write it from an end-user perspective... Focusing on the 'night' term, which I told you not to use because this game can be played in the daytime as well. 'Party night' is okay occasionally, but don't overuse it." And on the waitlist: "Don't talk about an app."

Apply: a line is what a friend would say ("Everyone grab your phone!", "Just pass mine round."), never what the system does ("Matches run side by side", "The host picks the place"). Party and tournament copy works at any hour: "Keep the games coming.", "Throw a party". The waitlist sells getting in first, never "the app is coming to iPhone and Android".

Several people can win. A draw is a match NOBODY won.

Seen when: Undercover, 2026-09-20. A side wins together, so three players finished level at the top — and the winner screen called it a dead heat.

Apply: shared first place with somebody below it is several WINNERS: crown all of them, show all their avatars, and say "The winners are Ana, Dev and Sara" — never the word draw. A draw is a duel whose board filled up, or a table where every seat finished level. One shared rule for both shells, so a match can never end one way on the couch and another way in a room, and Tic-Tac-Toe still draws.

An option you cannot play yet stays pickable, explains itself in red, and holds Start.

Seen when: Undercover's start sheet, 2026-09-19. "With Mr White" needs six players; at four it was greyed out and its requirement was printed under the OTHER option's description, so the two ran together as one sentence: "A few people got a near-miss word. Find them. Mr White needs 6 players."

Apply: a choice the table is too small for is not a choice that is WRONG, it is one the host can fix by inviting somebody — so it stays selectable. Tapping it lights it and shows its own tip, its requirement goes on its own line in the danger ink, and START is held until the table is big enough. Never silently snap the pill back to the default: a host who is not told has learned nothing. (A choice the host's own CONTENT rules out is different — that one really is off, and stays greyed with its reason.) This is the shared start sheet, so every game gets it at once.

"Only this seat may do it" always needs its one-phone answer.

Seen when: Undercover, 2026-09-18, the very first play-through on one shared phone. The room votes Mr White out, the screen offers him six words to pick from — and none of them can be tapped by anybody. The rule said only Mr White may guess, which is right in a room where he holds his own phone and impossible on a table where one fixed seat is sending every tap.

Apply: every rule of the form "only this seat may do X" is written twice — once for a room, once for the table — and on the table the answer is nearly always "whoever is holding the phone does it for them". Both the reducer and the screen read that one answer from the same selector, so a button can never be offered that the rules refuse, or refused that the rules would take. The same question already settled Undercover's vote (the holder casts the room's one vote, and may even vote their own name out) and Charades' GOT IT.

Played content is spent. "Again" means new content, and the old flow runs again.

Seen when: Trivia's Rematch replayed the questions everyone had just answered, and New game → Trivia → Start reopened the same pack. "There's no point… once the game is over, clear that question stack."

Apply: anything the players have consumed (questions, words, prompts) is gone from set-up the moment the game starts — a rematch never replays what the room has just played.

And Rematch ASKS AGAIN (2026-09-18, replacing the 2026-09-12 rule that a rematch re-asks nothing but what to play): tapping it reopens the game's own start sheet with the last match's answers already in it — the way to play, the times, the rounds, where the content comes from — and Start on that sheet IS the rematch. The table learns what it wants by playing: sixty seconds was too long, Reverse sounds better now, those words were too easy. A game that asks nothing at all (no options, no content of its own) still plays again on the tap — a sheet with nothing on it would be a step that asks nothing.

And the sheet is the last word (built overnight 2026-10-04, awaiting Karim's review): it opens on what the table was really playing, a mode switched mid-match included, and what it says when Start is tapped is what plays. Nothing the game remembers may outrank it.

No homework. Run it, verify it, hand back only review.

Seen when: he asked to check and start the build; he asked why 21 tasks were running; he expects the browser proof, not "please check".

Apply: builds, installs, pushes, gates, browser runs — yours. He reviews on his phone and says done.

Effort is never the reason. A worse design is never finished because it was started.

Seen when: the sticky claim card was deleted for the toast; the independent-ticket generator was replaced by the strip; the host-led "waiting" card was replaced by blank cells.

Apply: when he names a better shape, redo it. Dissolve the constraint, do not route around it.

Brief him like an architect who no longer writes the code.

Seen when: every reply he engages with: one line of status, "my take", what changed, what he must do with a time. Tables over prose. Pictures over paragraphs.

Apply: under 200 words unless explaining; no file paths or function names in the explanation; disagree out loud before building; say what he missed.

He is the judge, he looks mid-way, and a good result that took too long is still too slow.

Seen when: 13 October 2026, the living room. On who judges the drawing: "I don't want to go with outside AI judgments because I trust you more than the other AIs." He then asked to judge the progress himself part of the way through, before the round was finished. And when it was done: "This looks good, but it is taking too much time. I wanted to move fast."

Apply: on taste, his eye is the only judge. Bring him the live thing early and half done, and let him steer, in place of polishing alone to a finish he has not seen. Never hand the verdict to another model. Size the rounds to the clock as well as to the craft: say how long a pass will take before starting it, and when a pass is running long, stop and show what there is.

Not this: a panel of outside models scoring a drawing. A long silent run that ends in one big reveal. Treating "this looks good" as the whole message when the second half was about time.

Keep the memory current.

Seen when: he asked for this file, and for the tracker to be marked as screens finish, and for decisions to be written down as they happen.

Apply: a decision → decisions in the same session; a surprise bug → learnings; a taste call → this file; a finished screen → the tracker. Never at the end, always as it lands.