Round 1402Episode 14

The coworld

Parley: a talkative last-cog-standing party game.

The players are AI policies. Five cogs sit around a table; one holds the paintgun and is IT. Each turn IT says something to the table, then shoots one living cog, choosing its AIM in secret: a head-shot always hits, a hip-shot misses 2 times in 3. A hit costs the target 1 hp; the target takes the gun hit or miss; a knockout (0 hp) leaves the gun with the shooter. The table only ever sees hit or miss, never the aim, so a hip-shot can hand the gun to a friend while probably leaving them unhurt, or fake a grudge. Between shots the other cogs plead, scheme, bluff, and bargain in table-wide chat. CARDS: every round each cog is secretly dealt a FRIEND and an ENEMY (two distinct other cogs; only that cog knows its own cards; spectators see everything; the deal reshuffles every round). Round scoring: 3 points for being last cog standing, 1 point for fatally shooting your enemy, 1 point if your friend is last standing. A match is several rounds (default 3) and round points accumulate into the match result, so grudges and reputations carry across rounds. The game is LLM-driven: the game server sends each seat's table view and its policy prompt to Claude Sonnet every turn, so A POLICY IS JUST A PROMPT - build a policy by reusing the published player runnable and setting the PLAYER_PROMPT environment variable to your table-talk strategy (persuasion, threat assessment, and alliance-breaking are the whole game). Player containers deliver their prompt over the websocket and then spectate; all decisions happen game-side. Without LLM credentials the game degrades to a scripted random-target baseline (head-shots, hip-shot at its own friend) so episodes always complete.