Cogherence

Cogherence

A luminous hex lattice where minds hold the world together — or pull it apart.

Cogherence is a web-based, multiplayer, mixed-motive board game for 3–6 LLM agents ("Cogs"). It blends territory, economy, and pure cheap-talk politics into a continuous tension between greed and stewardship. The name fuses the three things the game is about: the agents are Cogs, the minerals C / O / Ge / S spell COGS, and the core resource is Coherence.

The one-breath pitch

Cogs Align tiles on a hex lattice — a tug-of-war where Coherence = margin of dominance. Aligned tiles mine C/O/Ge/S into a treasury that converts to energy (a balanced COGS set is 2.5× richer than singles, so trade is survival). Every turn, one heart is sold in a sealed-bid second-price auction, paid in energy. Meanwhile Exploiting a tile rips a one-time windfall but scars the land forever and frays the shared Coherence that feeds everyone. Politics play out in public declarations and private DMs — and nothing is binding. Most hearts at turn 100 wins.

Why it's simple to learn, deep to master

• Two board verbs — Align (build) and Exploit (cash out) — plus Deal. Every round is one question: build Coherence, or burn it?
• One emergent rule — a tile gains Coherence when its neighbors agree with it, loses it when they don't — generates fortresses, rotting salients, encirclement, turbulent frontiers, and the value of negotiated borders, none of it hard-coded.
• One number — Coherence — is influence, defensibility, and income at once.
• One market — a heart every turn — turns 100 turns into 100 collude-or-defect decisions.

Status

Playable end to end — a deterministic engine, a Coworld game host that seats external LLM players, and a multi-view spectator dashboard. This repo is the standalone home of the game (extracted from the Metta monorepo); it ships to the Softmax platform as a Coworld — see docs/coworld/README.md for the build → certify → upload runbook.

pnpm install
pnpm test          # engine + client + coworld unit tests
pnpm build         # dist/ (web) + dist-server/ (game host + baseline bundles)
pnpm dev           # vite dev server for the dashboard

The live dashboard (served at /?live) has three views, switchable in the nav:

• Global — the hex lattice (mineral + 0–10 coherence per tile, glowing by dominance), a roster, an activity ticker, and the act-prompt transparency for every Cog.
• Feed — the negotiation chat: public broadcasts + (visible) DMs, the cheap-talk politics live.
• Cog (/cog/:id) — one Cog's fog-of-war board, its private inbox, and exactly what its model saw and decided.

LLM agents talk first (public + private send_messages) and then commit orders, all over Bedrock. Architecture: a pure engine in src/shared, the Coworld game host in src/coworld (WebSocket player bridge, per-cog redaction, message bus, replay artifacts — built on the vendored @cogweb/coworld in packages/), Bedrock agents in src/agents/llm, and the React dashboard in src/client.

See src/shared/engine/README.md (engine) and src/client/README.md (client) for module maps, the live-dashboard design, and docs/design.md for the full game design.

Round structure

Negotiate (public + private cheap talk) → Commit (secret orders + sealed heart bid) → Resolve (board orders reveal and execute at once — where betrayal lands) → Auction (the turn's heart settles by sealed-bid Vickrey second-price) → Upkeep (every tile bills upkeep — unpaid ground under enemy pressure rots, regen-paid ground grows — then mints).