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simulators/: persist the survey, and let it shrink two of the three tracks

Eight profiles on a common schema, each marking what was checked against a
source this session and what is background recollection. Three are marked
unverified in full — Machinations, the play substrates, most of RBG — and
say so rather than reading as evaluations. Written straight after three
review rounds whose entire yield was claims outrunning what had been
checked, so the confidence rule is the first thing in the README.

The survey changed the plan, which is what a survey is for.

Track C was described in Positioning as open ground. It is not: Browne
published 57 criteria for game quality, and Ai Ai already computes
designer-facing measures — drama, lead changes, branching factor,
completion, duration — from played games. The track becomes adopt, credit
and find the gap. The gap looks real: those measures presume a leader, and
SHARED GROUND has none — Modes.csv gives its tiebreak as "Not applicable".

Track B probably adopts rather than builds. OpenSpiel implements CFR,
best-response and exploitability over games that are simultaneous-move,
imperfect-information and co-operative, which is all four of GROUND's
awkward properties. "Does ATTACK ever pay" is a best-response question,
and we spent three review rounds refining a two-policy sweep for it. The
first Track B task is now one question — is exploitability meaningful for
a co-operative game with a shared threshold — not a build.

The cost of not surveying earlier is therefore measurable, and is recorded
rather than glossed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-08-08 11:56:27 +02:00

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Play substrates — Tabletop Simulator, boardgame.io

unverified throughout — background knowledge, not checked this session

What they optimise for

Playing, by humans, over a network. Tabletop Simulator gives a physics sandbox with no rules enforcement; boardgame.io gives a JavaScript framework for turn-based games with state management and a networked client.

How a game is defined

TTS: assets plus optional scripting; the rules live in the players' heads. boardgame.io: JavaScript moves and turn order.

What they can analyse

Nothing. The rules are a script, not a claim.

Relevance to clay-borg

None for analysis, and one thing for the interface. Our own cb-play page and ../specs/Ornamentation.md occupy this space, and the future clay-animate is squarely in it.

The useful contrast: TTS proves that a table with no rules enforcement is still fun, which is an argument for taking ornamentation seriously and against assuming the mechanism is the whole game.

Open questions

Whether boardgame.io's state model is worth borrowing for clay-animate.

Sources

None fetched. Marked unverified in full.

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