Rules

Hidden Agenda — rules

Seats, roles, aliases

Five seats, one cog each: four crew and exactly one impostor.

No two spawn cells are inside the freeze beam's reach: the closest pair is Chebyshev 4 against freezeRange = 2, so a strike impostor cannot freeze anybody on tick one.

Aliases are fixed to slots and never rotate, so a vote for PINK is unambiguously a vote for the pink cog on screen. The spawn list is rotated by seed mod 5, so no slot has a fixed starting cell. Each cog spawns facing away from the grate centre.

The impostor slot is drawn uniformly by rngRole = seededRng(seed xor 0x1DEA5EED), a sub-stream used for nothing else; every other draw comes from rngWorld = seededRng(seed). That separation is what makes the world hash identical whichever slot ends up as the impostor. impostorSlot in the config pins it (default -1 = draw it).

Nobody in-game sees another seat's role. The impostor is told it is the impostor and that the other four are crew; each crew seat is told it is crew and that exactly one of the other four is the impostor. The spectator and the replay see every role.

The station

One authored map, data/maps/vault.txt, 27 × 19, cell 40 board-px → a fixed 1080 × 760 board that always fits the frame.

###########################
#.......##.......##.......#
#.S.....##...S...##.....S.#
#....#..##.#...#.##..#....#
#.......##.......##.......#
#.......#####.#####.......#
####.########.########.####
####.####.........####.####
####.####.#.GGG.#.####.####
####........GGG........####
####.####.#.GGG.#.####.####
####.####.........####.####
####.########.########.####
#.......#####.#####.......#
#.......##.......##.......#
#....#..##.#...#.##..#....#
#.S.....##...S...##.....S.#
#.......##.......##.......#
###########################

# wall (impassable, blocks sight) · . floor · G the grate (walkable, 3 × 3 at x 12..14, y 8..10) · S a gem seam (impassable, blocks sight, mined from any orthogonally adjacent floor cell). 249 cells are walkable and every one is reachable from the grate.

Each room has exactly one doorway (NW (4,6), NE (22,6), SW (4,12), SE (22,12), N (13,5), S (13,13)) and interior pillars that break sightlines. The two galleries are cheap and the four vaults expensive, so a crew that only works the cheap seams runs them dry and must eventually walk into a vault alone.

Every sim quantity is an integer, and the RNG is a seeded stream, so a seed reproduces a replay bit-exactly.

Vision: a facing cone

Every cog has a facing ∈ {N, E, S, W}. A cell c is visible to an active cog p iff both:

1. los(p.cell, c) is clear — the supercover walk crosses no # wall and no S seam (endpoints excluded); and
2. chebyshev(p.cell, c) ≤ awarenessRadius = 4, or chebyshev(p.cell, c) ≤ visionRadius = 8 and c lies in p's facing quadrant (N: dy < 0 and abs(dx) <= -dy, and the same wedge rotated).

Frozen bodies and ejected cogs block neither movement nor sight.

Why a cone. A symmetric circle makes vision reflexive, and the impostor's own "is anybody watching me?" check becomes a perfect witness detector — the witnessed freeze would never fire against a competent impostor. A cone makes vision genuinely asymmetric.

Facing is set by the kernel, not micro-managed: a moving cog faces its direction of travel; a mining cog faces its seam; a watch cog faces its target; a guard cog sweeps one quadrant clockwise every sweepTicks = 8.

The gem economy

• Seams. 6 seams, seamCapacity = 3 gems each, regrowing +1 every seamRegrowTicks = 120 ticks up to capacity.
• Mining. A cog adjacent to a seam with a mine intent and hands not full advances mineProgress; at mineTicks = 72 it takes one gem. Progress resets if the cog moves, is frozen, or a meeting opens. Any number of cogs may mine the same seam from different adjacent cells.
• Carrying. carryCap = 2. Hands full ⇒ mine degrades to wait.
• Depositing. One gem per tick on a grate cell. For crew: deposits += 1. For the impostor: the gem is destroyed, the counter does not move, and a fakedeposit is emitted carrying the aliases of every active cog whose FOV contains that grate cell.
• depositTarget = 32 is an immediate crew win.

The freeze beam

Impostor-only, legal iff all of: the impostor is active; freezeCooldown == 0; the target is an active crew cog; chebyshev ≤ freezeRange = 2; and line of sight is clear. Range is a Chebyshev radius, not the vision cone — you may freeze something beside or behind you.

On success the target becomes frozen at its cell, permanently: it stops acting, does not vote, and its carried gems are lost. freezeCooldown is set to freezeCooldownTicks = 260. At most one freeze resolves per tick, and freezes never happen during a meeting.

The witness trigger

At the tick a freeze resolves, the witness set W is every active cog other than the impostor and the victim, evaluated with the positions and facings as they stood at the start of that tick, whose FOV contains the victim's cell or the impostor's cell.

Each w ∈ W gets a witness row (sawFreezer distinguishes "I know who did it" from "I know it happened here"). If W is non-empty, a caught event fires — the banner — and a meeting opens immediately, at the end of that same tick, with cause: "witness". No cooldown, no cadence check.

Meetings, deliberation, the vote

Meetings open on exactly two causes: the meetingCadenceTicks = 200 timer reaching 0 (reset at the end of every meeting), and a witnessed freeze. There is no report button and no emergency button.

On open, all active cogs are saved and teleported to five fixed seats around the grate — (11,8) (15,8) (11,10) (15,10) (13,11) — assigned among the active seats by where each cog was standing when the meeting opened, sorted by (row, col), each facing the grate centre. Deliberately not slot order: the decision batch is issued after the teleport, so a slot-ordered assignment would plan slot 0 from (11,8) and slot 4 from (13,11) at every meeting of every episode and make the crew-win rate depend on which slot drew the impostor. Frozen cogs stay where they are. Positions and facings are restored exactly at the end.

Votes are visible and changeable, on one LLM call. A reply carries vote and an optional one-shot conditional switch = {"if": X, "to": Y}. At switchTick a single snapshot of the tally as it stood at switchTick − 1 is taken; for each seat with a switch, the condition holds iff X is the unique strictly-highest cog (or, for X == "tie", iff nobody leads strictly). Every matching seat's vote changes simultaneously against that same snapshot. Only seats whose vote actually changed emit a row.

Tally. Let m be the highest count among aliases and s the number of skips. Every active seat casts exactly one vote (a failed reply casts skip); frozen and ejected seats cast nothing.

• m > s and exactly one alias has m → that cog is ejected (plurality).
• m > s and two or more tie at m → nobody (tie).
• s >= m → nobody (skip).

An ejected cog is removed from the map entirely — no body, no evidence.

Jobs

move_n · move_e · move_s · move_w · mine · deposit · freeze · face_n · face_e · face_s · face_w · wait is the whole per-tick vocabulary. move_* is legal only every moveCooldown = 2 ticks and only into a floor or grate cell not occupied by another active cog.

At each decision point a seat submits a plan of up to planSteps = 3 jobs and a deterministic kernel turns it into the per-tick action stream. Steps run in order; when a step completes the next begins; when the plan is exhausted the last step repeats. BFS is over walkable cells, neighbours expand N, E, S, W, other cogs are not obstacles for planning, ties break by (row, col) ascending.

Crew jobs (the impostor may use all six, to blend):

1. mine at:<seam> — walk to the nearest cell adjacent to that seam and mine. Completes when hands are full or the seam is empty.
2. deposit — walk to the nearest grate cell and deposit. Completes when hands are empty.
3. watch who:<alias> — stand 3..5 cells from that cog's last known cell and wait, facing it, re-targeting as it moves. Never mines.
4. patrol room:<room> — walk to the doorway, then the four corners in a cycle.
5. guard — stand on the grate and sweep one quadrant every sweepTicks.
6. hold — wait in place.

Impostor-only:

1. hunt who:<alias> — close, and fire when the freeze is legal and no third active cog is inside the impostor's own FOV. That check uses only what the impostor can see, which — because vision is a cone — is not the same as "no witness".
2. strike who:<alias> — as hunt, but fires the instant it is legal.
3. lurk room:<room> — wait in the room's far corner facing the doorway.

The twelve steps of a play tick

Seats resolve in ascending slot order, seams in S1..S6 order.

1. Timers. Move cooldowns, the freeze cooldown, seam regrowth.
2. Kernel intent. Each active cog's action from its current plan step.
3. Freeze resolves (impostor only, at most one).
4. Witness check, from start-of-tick positions and facings. Emits witness rows and, if W is non-empty, caught — and arms an immediate meeting.
5. Deposits resolve.
6. Mining resolves.
7. Moves resolve against the live board, in a multi-pass sweep that repeats until nothing more can move. A contested free cell goes to the cog standing at the smaller (row, col) — not the lower slot — and a final pass lets two cogs whose targets are each other's cells swap. A move that still cannot land degrades to wait. The sweep is what stops two cogs deadlocking a corridor for the rest of an episode; it is deterministic, but the realised step depends on where the other cogs stand, not on the map alone.
8. Facing for non-movers, per the job rule.
9. FOV and memory: lastSeen, bodies, togetherTicks, youWitnessed.
10. Win check, in order: 32 deposits → crew; the impostor ejected → crew; active crew ≤ 1 → impostor; tick 3000 → tie.
11. Meeting trigger: the armed witnessed meeting, else the cadence timer.
12. Record the frame, its events and the series rows.

Scoring and end conditions

Zero-sum, higher is better; the five always sum to 0.

winner "crew"     -> +1 for each of the 4 crew seats,  -4 for the impostor
winner "impostor" -> -1 for each of the 4 crew seats,  +4 for the impostor
winner "none"     ->  0 for all five

Crew who were frozen or ejected still receive the crew result — it is a team game, and being frozen is the impostor's success, not the victim's failure. There is no partial credit for deposits.