clay-borg/evidence/CB-EV-0026-the-table-you-sit-at.md

CB-EV-0026 — the table you sit at

CB-WP-0028 T08. Tier M (structural M — imports more of an external dataset under AM-4's budgets; chaos d8=1 → no override). Declaration 11 of chaos window 2. Closed 2026-08-06.

Delivered: ADR-0015, three vendored edition files, a generic reader, the cards' own words on the page, one overhead table replacing three diagrams, controls and log in the meta column, "game solved", and rankings that cite their source.

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1. Nine observations, and where they actually came from

Seven of nine were engine defects. One was a design finding. One was already true and nobody could tell.

#	observation	what it turned out to be
1	no incentive to attack	a design finding (F17), and still a note
2	"I don't understand the GROUND card"	a data-import gap — the card explains itself and we never read it
3	overhead view	three diagrams the player had to assemble
4	click the deck to draw	not a legal move; built nothing
5	auto-draw option	already automatic, and always was
6–7	controls and log on the right	layout
8	"Game Over" on a win	wrong vocabulary for a co-operative game
9	rankings	a place where the game defines not to rank

Observations 4 and 5 are the most useful pair in the set, because both dissolved. Clicking the deck is not a move — GroundCommand has no standalone draw, and the edition's INVESTIGATE text says "…reveal it. Then draw one Solution." Drawing is a consequence. And auto-draw was asked for a thing that has never been manual.

Both had one cause: nothing on the page said how drawing works. The INVESTIGATE card's own words were in a file we had not imported. So a player invented a mental model to fill the gap, and reported the gap as two feature requests.

No finding was raised. An instinct differing from a legible rule is a comprehension gap; an instinct differing from an invisible one is our defect. Whether it recurs now that the card says it is a testable question and was not before.

2. The import gap was worse than "one file of nineteen"

Measured before deciding:

edition files upstream	19
vendored	1
columns in that one file	13
columns the engine read	5
scenarios in the file	4
scenarios the engine deals	1, hardcoded

title, problem_text, front_rules, reveal_effect and unresolved_effect were vendored on 2026-08-04 and discarded at parse time for eight days. The page showed Repair 2 for a card that reads "Missed Deadline". Fixing that cost no new bytes, no dependency and no budget — it was the cheapest thing in the pass and the one nothing had found.

Rule coverage was 59/59 throughout. The gate measures whether rules are exercised, and every rule was. Nothing measures whether a player can read the game, and nothing cheaply could — which is why the person playing it is the instrument.

3. The dependency question was answered by measurement, not preference

ADR-0011 refused the csv crate and named its own revisit condition: "nested quoting, embedded newlines, multiple dialects."

Across every candidate file — Actions, Solutions, Modes, Scenarios — zero doubled quotes and zero embedded newlines. The hand reader's only job is comma-in-quoted-field, which it already did.

So the argument was not re-run, and the reason is a measurement rather than the inconvenience of re-running it. edition-check now asserts that condition on every vendored file, so the day it stops being true the gate says so instead of a parser mangling a card.

One reader, four callers. A per-file copy is how a parser acquires four subtly different bugs.

4. Two gates were written for a smaller world

edition-check compared the first recorded digest against Problems.csv regardless of which file that digest described. With one vendored file it was correct; with four it was comparing across files. It now checks both directions — a vendored file with no digest fails, and a digest naming an absent file fails.

A cb-play test asserted the literal string "game over" and went red when a won game began saying "solved" — the feature working. Fixed by asserting the heading against the outcome rather than against a word, which also covers the no-outcome case the original never touched.

Both are the same shape: an assertion that encoded a world with one file, or one ending. Neither was wrong when written.

5. What T07 decided not to do

Modes.csv gives scoring_tiebreak per mode. For SHARED GROUND it is "Not applicable" — the table succeeds or fails together.

So the co-operative mode shows contributions and refuses to order them, and says why on the page. A leaderboard would have been easy, looked good, and invented scoring the game does not have — the same defect class as canonising a provisional default, which this project has already committed once.

Where a mode does rank, the ordering is the game's own words. The single derived superlative is labelled "clay-borg's reading, not a rule."

This is the first time the project has had the game's own tiebreak to cite, and it only had it because §2's import brought Modes.csv in. The alternative was inventing one.

6. The overhead view cost no coverage probe

All existing probes passed through a restructure that deleted two renderers (relations_svg, piles_svg) and merged three diagrams into one.

Second confirmation of CB-WP-0027's finding: a probe that names a fact survives a reflow; one that names a presentation does not. CB-WP-0024's 17 remaining probe broke on a rendering change; CB-WP-0027's and this pass's did not, and this reflow was far larger.

The new control is per-seat-count: 2 through 6 seats all lay out with no two seat circles closer than 70px, asserted rather than eyeballed at three — which is the only count anyone ever looks at.

7. Chaos window 2 — closed

CORRECTED 2026-08-07 — this section is wrong. Window 2 produced one override: declaration 3 (CB-WP-0020) rolled d8 = 8, drew S against a structural S, and changed nothing — which CB-WP-0020 recorded correctly at the time as "One." Eleven rolls at d8 (declaration 1 opened the window at d4) against an expectation of 1.375 eights. The rate was working; I asserted "zero" without counting, and each later evidence file cited the one before it. See ADR-0017 and F23.

Declaration 11 of 12, structural M, d8 = 1, no override.

The window has now produced zero overrides in eleven declarations at d8. Its retirement condition — retire if an override changes nothing twice running — was never testable, and CB-EV-0024 and CB-EV-0025 both said so. This is the third and final statement of it.

The window's verdict should be that d8 bought rarity by spending evidence. Window 1 at d4: two overrides, both changed the outcome. Window 2 at d8: none. A mechanism that produces no data across a full window cannot be evaluated by that window, which is a stronger conclusion than "the rate is too low" and belongs in whatever closes it.

Open after this pass

• F17 needs an artifact. Counting ATTACK selections across the policy panel against hand quality is cheap and nobody has done it.
• Three of four scenarios have never been dealt (ADR-0015 D5). Now visible, still true.
• Relations, DARVO, Tokens, Glossary are deferred, not refused. If a seat's DARVO stage needs its own words, that is the trigger.
• Nobody has written a trial note in anger — carried forward from CB-EV-0025, and the note channel only started working today.
• Whether the card text changed what the maintainer understood is this pass's real acceptance test and has a person attached to it.