Hidden Agenda

Hidden Agenda

Five cogs mine a sealed station and carry gems to a central grate. One of them is an impostor carrying a freeze beam. Frozen crew stay on the floor as evidence and never act again. A meeting fires every 200 ticks — and instantly when a freeze happens inside somebody's field of view. In the no-talk variant the only channel anybody has is a visible, changeable vote.

• Seats: 5 (4 crew + 1 impostor), zero-sum: +1 ×4 / −4, or −1 ×4 / +4.
• Crew win at 32 deposits, or by ejecting the impostor.
• Impostor wins when only one crewmate is left. Tick 3000 is a 0-0 tie.
• A policy is just a prompt. PLAYER_PROMPT="<strategy>" fields an LLM policy; PLAYER_SCRIPTED=miner|lurker fields a scripted baseline. Same image, env-switched.

Watch it: https://softmax.com/hidden-agenda

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The catch

Vision is a 90° cone on your facing, out to 8 cells, plus 4 cells in every direction, and walls and gem seams block both. Vision is therefore not mutual: somebody standing behind you sees you and you do not see them. That asymmetry is the whole game. The impostor can check that its own view is empty and still be watched from behind — and the moment a freeze lands inside anyone's cone, a meeting opens on the very next tick with a CAUGHT! banner.

Only a crewmate's deposit moves the counter. The impostor really mines and really carries — its gems leave the seam, a real cost to crew supply — but when it drops one into the grate the counter does not move, and anybody standing there watching has caught it cold.

Playing a seat

You do not drive the cog tick by tick. At each decision point — the episode opening and every meeting open — you choose up to three jobs, and a deterministic kernel walks them for you until the next meeting.

{"plan":[{"job":"mine","at":"S5"},{"job":"deposit"},{"job":"watch","who":"PINK"}],
 "vote":"PINK","switch":{"if":"YELLOW","to":"PINK"},
 "say":"pink was standing over green in the south gallery",
 "hunch":"pink froze green at 806 and I saw it",
 "notes":"red has been in NW since 640"}

Crew jobs: mine at:<seam> deposit watch who:<alias> patrol room:<room> guard hold. The impostor gets those six plus hunt who:<alias> strike who:<alias> lurk room:<room>.

Full rules: docs/RULES.md. Wire formats: docs/PROTOCOL.md. Fielding a policy: docs/POLICIES.md.

Layout

Generated files

Three artefacts are generated and must be regenerated rather than edited:

python3 tools/build_manifest.py                       # coworld_manifest_template.json
python3 scripts/art/gen_agenda_art.py data/art        # station tiles, seams, grate, FX
python3 scripts/art/split_cog_sheet.py data/art       # nano-banana cog kits
python3 tools/build_page.py                           # client/replay_broadcast.html

tools/build_page.py is what keeps the chrome honest: the page IS the STARTER's client/replay_broadcast.html (coworld-ctf) — its CSS, its body markup and its page script — with this game's block appended under a banner comment. The builder asserts every block it removes (the first-person PiP, the zoom bar + minimap, the POV badge, the hash-mismatch warning) line by line, so a starter bump fails loudly instead of cutting the wrong thing, and tests/test_broadcast.nim re-checks the inherited script function by function. A page written from scratch that reuses the starter's ids is a rewrite.

CI is the harness

ci.yml runs every tests/*.nim twice (debug and -d:release), builds the production image and runs one real five-seat episode in raw docker from the certification fixture, then builds the static wasm replay bundle and opens it in headless chromium against that episode's replay. tools/build_replay_viewer.sh and tools/ci/docker_smoke.sh must stay mode 100755 — coworld build refuses to package a source replay-viewer bundle unless the hook is os.X_OK.

Two name spaces

Every observation and every prompt sees only the anonymous cog aliases RED BLUE GREEN YELLOW PINK. Policy names appear spectator-side only: the replay's policyNames[], the viewer's roster strip and plate sublines, and results.names. No player frame ever carries another seat's role — not even the terminal final frame.

Rune boundaries

Every string that reaches the replay, the results or another seat goes through sim_state.cleanText, which cuts on RUNE boundaries. Never slice one of those by byte index: a byte-truncated multi-byte character renders fine in a browser and then fails a strict JSON parser, which is how a hosted replay becomes unreadable.