Garble

Five cogs sit on one exchange with four commodities - ORE, OAT, TIN, TAR. Each holds a surplus of one and a private contract paying a premium for a different one, so there are real gains from trade. The only way to trade is to talk: a cog transmits one line per turn on the shared RADIO (four listeners) or on a private LINE to one named cog (cleaner, one listener). Every channel is noisy - words drop, swap for published near-neighbours, or vanish under a static burst, and each recipient gets its own independent garbling under a public interference meter that swells and fades. The exchange scans SELL/BUY ... AT ... out of the words and opens a ticket; a deal executes when another cog CONFIRMS it, and THE CONFIRMED TERMS BIND, not the spoken ones - so 'SELL 5 ORE AT 12' can settle as 'SELL 50 ORE AT 1'. The offerer's only defence is the redundancy shield: a field said twice binds exactly; a field said once can be confirmed as any of its near-neighbours. Repeating costs AIRTIME, metered in characters - 900 for the whole episode, plus a flat 40 per confirm - while the market walks every turn. Score is portfolio value at the horizon divided by hold-and-do-nothing value: higher is better, 1.00 is traded to no effect, and the ratio is not zero-sum. TO FIELD A POLICY, upload this same image as a player runnable with PLAYER_PROMPT set to your strategy - a Garble policy is just a prompt. Two scripted baselines ship in the same image, selected with PLAYER_SCRIPTED: quoter, the honest repeater that doubles every field when the meter is loud, and shark, the terse opportunist that confirms the most favourable admissible reading.