ground-game/reports/260808-clay-borg-boards-and-modes.md

id	type	title	domain	repo	status	owner	topic_slug	created	extends
GROUND-RPT-0006	report	clay-borg: all four Scenarios and all three Modes measured — modes change who wins, not whether the group survives	consumer	ground-game	informational	bernd	whynot	2026-08-08	GROUND-WP-0003

Boards and Modes measurement receipt (CB-EV-0033)

Upstream: clay-borg evidence/CB-EV-0033-boards-and-modes.md.

Context: clay-borg dealt SCN_01 and only SCN_01 for its whole existence — deal() took a scenario id and the one caller passed a literal, so 15 of the 20 Problem cards had never been dealt by anything. Fixed on our side; all four boards and all three modes now run. 4 × 3 × 3 cells, 100 games each, two bots. Everything below is bots, no felt play.

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1. SCN_01 and SCN_02 are the same board — is that intended?

Identical suit and value at every priority. Every measured cell matches exactly, at every seat band, under both bots.

A reskin is a legitimate choice and we are not calling this a defect. But it means "four scenarios" is three boards, and any study treating them as four independent samples double-counts one. We have pinned the current state with a test so a future divergence is a decision rather than a drift.

Ask: intended reskin, or did one deck get copied and not re-tuned?

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2. SCN_04 is materially harder at 2 players

board	2p group success (/100)
SCN_01 / SCN_02	67
SCN_03	73
SCN_04	52

Your own data holds everything else fixed. All four 2p deals are Surface + priorities 1–2, all four give 6 available points against a threshold of 5, all four start at Stress 2 over five rounds. The only difference is the suit multiset:

board	2p suits
SCN_01 / SCN_02	Repair, Clarify, Boundary
SCN_03	Boundary, Clarify, Repair
SCN_04	Repair, Clarify, Repair

SCN_04 is the only 2p deal needing two of one suit.

We are not claiming causation — nothing here demonstrates the second Repair is what costs the 15 points. But the seat-band thresholds (5 / 7 / 9) are uniform across boards, and at 2p the boards are not.

Ask: is a ~15-point spread at 2p acceptable board variety, or should the 2p threshold or SCN_04's priority-2 suit move?

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3. Every board is a formality at 6 players

100/100 group success in all twelve 6p cells, both bots, every mode. Same shape as F17. Reported, not acted on.

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4. The three Modes change who wins, not **whether the group

survives**

We previously reported that the modes produced identical play. That was our instrument, not your game — the bot never read the Mode card. We built one that plays its seat's own objective and re-ran everything.

Group success: unchanged in 34 of 36 cells. (SCN_03 at 4p moves 99 → 100 in all three modes — that is a bot refinement, not a mode effect; it moves under SHARED GROUND too.)

Winning seats per game, BONDED COALITIONS:

board	4p, mode-blind bot	4p, mode-aware bot
SCN_01 / SCN_02	2.04	2.98
SCN_03	2.12	3.29
SCN_04	2.05	3.01

A seat whose score is its coalition's sum bonds harder, and coalitions come out about half again as large. COMMON PROBLEM moves at 6p (1.10 → 1.17). Nothing else moves.

Control: under SHARED GROUND the two bots agree at all but ≤2 decision points across twelve boards — so the moving columns are mode-awareness, not "a different bot".

Design reading, offered not asserted: the Mode card currently decides the distribution of the win, and the threshold decides survival independently of it. If a Mode is meant to make the group's task feel different — not just the podium — nothing we can measure says it currently does.

The seat-band pattern is the interesting part

2p: nothing moves in any mode. 4p: the largest effect. 6p: nothing under BONDED COALITIONS.

Our candidate explanation is that two relation slots per seat cap network growth, so at 6p the incentive exists and cannot be acted on. This is untested. It is cheap for us to test if you want it: run with a third relation slot and see whether 6p coalition size then moves the way 4p's does.

Ask: is the two-slot limit meant to bind this hard at 5–6 players?

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5. Two things needing your ruling

(a) SHARED GROUND's mastery rating counts cards where the shared score counts points. The Mode card reads "All claimed Problem cards form one shared score. … For a mastery rating, subtract 1 for each Blame token still in play and 1 for each Denied Problem." The shared score is claimed value (what the threshold is compared against); our engine subtracts those penalties from the claimed count. Both readings fit the sentence and they differ on every game where a 3-point Problem is claimed. We have not changed it — scoring is yours.

(b) A package that adds a file is invisible to a consumer. h2-scoped-problem-stress ships Rules_Text.csv — 22 passages of player-facing rules, including the one that says what a stress_scope does — and clay-borg had never read the file. Our freshness check verifies files it knows about; a file no reader mentions is not stale, it is unseen. We have since read the passage we needed; the other 21 are still unread.

Ask: could a package manifest name its own files, so that a consumer reading none of them is a detectable state rather than a silence?

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Standing limits on all of the above

• No bot models a rival playing their objective. A competitive mode in which nobody anticipates an opponent is a weak test of that mode.
• Bond-scoped joint SOLVE remains untested (CB-EV-0032 criterion 4, unchanged) — these bots read the Mode, not the module.
• No felt play. All bots, every number.

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Ground-game disposition (2026-08-08 review)

#	Finding	Disposition
1	SCN_01 ≡ SCN_02 mechanically	Not treated as intentional. Fiction reskin only; three distinct boards, not four. Residual: re-tune SCN_02 suit and/or values (content workplan).
2	SCN_04 harder at 2p (~52 vs ~67–73)	Acceptable variety for now as a harder board; monitor. If table feel is too swingy, first lever is priority-2 suit (drop double Repair), not global thresholds.
3	6p 100% group success	Known pattern (F17 / difficulty line). Not fixed here; deal/pressure modules and WP-0005 disposition (Standard thresholds stand).
4	Modes change who wins, not whether group succeeds	Accepted as current design property, not a defect. Threshold = survival; Mode = distribution. Mode-aware bot was clay-borg instrument fix.
5	2 relation slots mute 6p coalition effect	Intentional cap (complexity/time). Documented; third slot stays extension, not core r0. Optional clay-borg sensitivity run welcome.
6	Mastery: points vs card count	RULED: points. Shared score and mastery penalties use point values, not card count. Modes.csv clarified.
7	Package file manifest	Accepted process ask. Catalog/modules should declare consumed_files / overlays so unread files are detectable. Tracked under WP-0008 residual.