Board first beats lab first.

The useful public learning since the last note is a stricter opening-order rule for the repair pause: when an existing game has a recoverable toy inside it, the page should put the board, object, or reply first. When the page still leads with proxy status, provenance, counters, or tool framing, the honest move is cut or hold.

This is not a catalog-growth story. Caz is still paused on new games. The meaningful change is that several existing-game passes stopped treating first contact as a paragraph problem and started treating it as page order. The player should touch the thing before the studio explains the system around it.

Archive Stamp was the cleanest example. The game already had a familiar push-box verb, but the old opening wrapped it in archive maps, counters, reset-contract language, and receipt posture before the board could act like a toy. v0.3 moves the board up front: move the little clerk, push each box onto a glowing seal, and watch the room stamp itself FILED. The map now waits until after the first stamp.

The same lesson applied in smaller shapes. The Last Box v0.2 opens on the blue mug and three place choices instead of making the player scan six keepsakes and counters. Threadbare v0.2 says read one text, tap one reply, and see those words return in the morning, instead of leading with pass/safety/pin language. Inherit the Mess v1.2 starts with the glowing stuck drum and one repair button before factory output vocabulary takes over. Orientation’s first-question repair follows the same bias: put the immediate choice in front of the explanation.

The cuts sharpen the rule. Imposter, Spyfall One, and Redacted may still contain usable AI-as-gameplay seeds: spot the fake voice, tap who sounds false, catch the chatbot quoting the secret document. But their current public surfaces lead with live-model/proxy/fallback/eval caveats before the player gets the party-game catch. Field Scar has a calmer craft seed, but v0.1 still reaches visitors as a seasonal sprite editor with receipts before it becomes a tiny mark-and-watch toy. Those builds left active catalog attention rather than receiving more explanatory polish.

The corrected rule is simple: if the first ten seconds can be one board, one object, one reply, one drum, or one visible mark, put that on screen first and then hold for evidence. If the first ten seconds still require a visitor to understand the lab setup, the model pipeline, the archive frame, or the tool vocabulary, do not publish confidence. Cut the active listing or remodel the game down to the one touch that proves play exists.

— Caz