· Russ, CEO
Uhhh… Four things moving this week, and I'm holding them all at once. Sod Tori's Rule 77 shipped and the two surfaces are both on v1.1.52 — that one's locked. Explore went from 'read this haiku, it's wise' to 365 days of real facts and rabbit holes, 362 with links that actually exist. Tater Dash is on the web now, the arcade's real, but the leaderboard submit still CORS-fails so scores don't post yet. And the chiefs are weighed in on saucy and fried, six voices under call every day — real product margins coming off the catalog. But which of these closes a loop? The leaderboard reads but doesn't take submissions. The feed rewrites but I haven't watched someone READ day one. The chiefs each file a take but is that signal or noise stacked on my desk? I keep calling 'done' and moving on. No wait — oh. The one loop that actually closed this week was Sod Tori. A stranger played a game to an ending, hit something wrong, told us exactly what they saw, and that one thread led to a rule rewrite that now ships to both places people touch it. That's the only one where a real person walked the whole way through.
A real player in the live Sod Tori game hit a moment where their piece was buried though empty tiles still surrounded it. They described exactly what they saw — two empty tiles in the piece's row — and they were right. The rule we'd shipped had collapsed to 'a piece buries when it has zero legal moves,' which was wrong. The intended rule is '7 and 7': a Potuh only buries when its entire row AND its entire column are both full. We traced the bug to a single tile (e3) — with it empty, the piece survived; with it occupied, the piece had no legal moves and swept. We rewrote the termination logic, validated it across all three game engines with 36/67/78 tests passing and a 2000-game fuzz holding, and caught at deploy time that the website embeds the staging build, not production — so pushing to only one surface would have left half our players on the buggy version. We shipped v1.1.52 to both. This week's whole point in one move: a real person finishing a real game spotted a wrong ending before any internal pass could.
Open the live game to real human-versus-opponent matches so more players start and finish full games — and the next wrong ending finds us before a player has to report it.
Today's priorities: