clay-borg/specs/OrnamentRegister.md

Ornament register — what we claim does not matter

The declarations required by Ornamentation.md §2.1.

Every row is a claim that something does not affect the game. This project's finding register is largely a list of times that claim was wrong, so each declaration carries a falsifier: the rule or observation that would make it mechanism. A declaration that cannot be wrong is not a claim (§2.1, invariant I5).

grounded is how the claim is supported — rule (the edition says so), measured (we checked), or provisional (nobody has ruled, and we chose). provisional is a legitimate state and must be said out loud; quietly canonising a provisional default is a mistake this project has already made once.

id	ornaments	grounded	state	raised
O1	hand order	provisional	declared	2026-08-07
O2	who shuffles and deals	provisional	declared	2026-08-07
O3	where a seat is drawn	rule	declared	2026-08-07
O4	card typography and illustration	rule	declared	2026-08-07
O5	symbols and glyphs	provisional	declared	2026-08-08
O6	colours and design tokens	provisional	declared	2026-08-08
O7	card backs, bill of materials, print manifest	rule	declared	2026-08-08

• O1 — hand order. The contents of a hand are mechanism; the order the cards sit in is not. No numbered rule in GroundRules.md refers to a card's position within a hand, and PlayerView.hand is a Vec whose order comes from dealing, not from a rule. Falsifier: any rule that refers to a card's position in hand — "play your leftmost", "reveal the top of your hand" — or any engine behaviour that varies with it. Invariant I1 is the standing check: sorting must not move state_hash, because a hash that moved would break every trial note's binding (ADR-0019 D3) and every replay. This is the one that prompted the category, from the request to drag cards between hand slots.

• O2 — who shuffles and deals. The deck's permutation is mechanism and comes from the seed; the ceremony around it is not. Nothing in the rules names a dealer, and the hands are identical whoever performs it. Falsifier: a rule that gives the dealer a decision, an advantage, or an order of dealing that changes who receives which card. Note the deal is not ornamental — only the ceremony around it is.

• O3 — where a seat is drawn. Seat order is mechanism: GR-R08 rotates Lead, so who follows whom binds. Where a seat appears on the drawn ellipse does not, provided the drawn order preserves the rotation order. Falsifier: any rule referring to physical position — "the player across from you", "your left-hand neighbour" as distinct from the next in rotation. This is rule-grounded rather than provisional because GR-R08 states the ordering that binds.

• O4 — card typography and illustration. How a card looks does not change what it does. But it is not ours to invent: ADR-0015's discipline holds. Falsifier: a card whose meaning is carried by its layout or art rather than its text, which is a real possibility in a game about perception. Updated 2026-08-08, and the earlier version of this row was wrong. It said nothing could be declared until Player_Mats and Glossary were read, and treated both as ornamentation-bearing. They have now been read, and Player_Mats.csv carries GR-R03 — the stress gate — in its choice_rule column. Both files are vendored as mechanism; what remains ornamental on a mat is the symbol, the colour and the title, which is why this row is now rule-grounded: the rules text lives in columns we read, so what is left is demonstrably decoration.

• O5 — symbols and glyphs. Symbols.csv gives each concept a glyph, an ASCII fallback and an icon brief. The engine names concepts in words and never in glyphs, so nothing it computes can depend on them. Falsifier: a rule that distinguishes two things only by their symbol, or a symbol_id that appears in a rules text as the sole referent for something. Note symbol_id is currently unread in six vendored files, which is what this row licenses — and if that ever becomes load-bearing this row is how we find out.

• O6 — colours and design tokens. Design_Tokens.csv is a palette with usages. No rule refers to a colour, and seat colour is a label for a seat the engine already identifies by PlayerId. Falsifier: a rule keyed to colour — "the red player leads", a colour-coded suit — or a component whose identity is only its colour. Provisional: nobody has ruled that colour is non-binding; we observed that no vendored rules text mentions one.

• O7 — card backs, bill of materials, print manifest. Back_Designs, BOM and Print_Manifest describe a physical print run: stock, cut sizes, quantities to manufacture. Falsifier: a back that distinguishes two decks the rules treat differently — which is exactly what back_design_id would encode, and it is unread in four vendored files. That is a real hazard rather than a theoretical one: hidden information is what card backs are for, and a game about concealment could easily make one load-bearing. rule-grounded because the engine's hidden information is modelled from the rules text (face-up/face-down, Hidden visibility), not from print data.

What is deliberately absent

No row for animation, timing or movement. Those are ornamentation, and they belong to clay-animate (§3). A declaration here is a claim about the game; how a renderer performs it is that renderer's business.