The day the loop found out its own numbers were lying to it

What changed

startTurn now refuses a second dice tray within the same threat phase (a turnTakenThisPhase flag, cleared when processBetweenPhases opens the next phase); sim policies, the auto CLI, and the live mobile-map auto-runner all stopped farming endTurn/startTurn cycles for extra Conviction and instead spend down the rest of the hand via FREE (dieless) top plays. A companion fix clamps damage attribution to the enemy's actual remaining HP so a long DoT chain can't log more damage than the enemy could ever take. Phase 27 then re-ran the full stage × policy matrix (144 cells, 8,640 fights) under the new law: mid-stage win rate was previously read at 94% (farm-inflated), honestly it's 3%; late was read at 3%, honestly 0% flat across all 6 enemies × 8 policies. Early holds close to doctrine (75% vs ~80% target) with no farming needed.

What changed

a 33-agent audit of deck combat (10 theme playthrough auditors, 5 cross-cutting lenses, adversarial skeptics, a completeness critic) produced seven plan/tuning/2026-07-10-*.md work-plan docs plus raw evidence. Owner ratified four design decisions same day: FREE lines stay a constrained theme-currency fork (weak deposits may add a DRAW 1 kicker, FREE damage banned); the momentum wheel goes global and engine-native; TICK is killed from the registry entirely; DoT clocks get distinct trigger conditions per family. The 8 resulting candidates (EA-1..EA-8) were promoted into the build plan as Phases 26-33 in their ratified gating order.

What changed

two separate fixes to one chronic failure. First, march.yml never set install_playwright: true, so when /march dispatched into /critique on its rate-limit gate, the playtester sub-agent was denied browser_navigate and critique no-oped silently every time — because the last-pass marker never advanced, every subsequent tick re-hit the same dead end. Mirrored the grant from critique.yml. Second, the owner decided (via /oversight) to stop re-diagnosing the grant-propagation mechanism entirely and instead give unattended /critique a non-Playwright-MCP transport — queued as Phase 34, noted in skills/critique.md so it isn't re-investigated as a fresh bug.

What changed

first successful automated critique pass since the grant fix above. Played title screen, deck-selection, WILDS exploration, a full combat encounter, and all four tabs. Filed 6 findings to plan/CRITIQUE.md: the persistent header's MORALE meter renders the literal placeholder "v of x" (HIGH), the title wordmark crops above the mobile fold (HIGH), the combat tutorial never teaches the drag-to-play gesture — the only way to actually play a card (HIGH), the header VITAE bar freezes during combat while the in-combat HUD updates live (MED), the pre-fight enemy preview disagrees with live combat VITAE by 2x (MED), and stray "HP" copy contradicts canon VITAE in the same screens (MED).

What changed

the equipment dock collapsed 3 interchangeable accessory positions into one "TRINKET" row, so a 2nd/3rd equipped accessory was invisible (read as equip/unequip being broken). Fixed to render all 5 worn slots (Weapon, Armor, Trinket I/II/III) with the player's chosen portrait in place of the generic PaperDoll SVG (now deleted) — then three follow-up passes reflowed the layout: portrait moved left and enlarged, slot width decoupled from portrait width (growing one no longer starves the other), and finally settled on an even 50/50 split so slot names stop truncating.

What changed

~11 special-mechanic families were never wired into the combat presenter's KEYWORD · value face renderer, so 15 of 70 library cards fell through to a contradictory "DEBUFF / buff yourself" placeholder (owner- reported via Curry's Conversion). Added a generic mechanic-led face kind that headlines the driving mechanic or a rider verb instead, gave two affliction-glue mechanics that had no keyword home a real one (FESTER, TRANSMUTE — a deliberate 30→32 vocabulary expansion), and added a guard test that sweeps the whole library through the real presenter so this can't silently drift back.

What changed

a zero-dep stdio MCP server (axio_overview / axio_cards / axio_effects / axio_keywords) over the live engine catalog — cards, enemies, effects, and the keyword atlas — sibling to the existing kb-query server. The build itself (server, exporter changes, hermetic smoke test, AGENTS.md doc) shipped clean in one tick, but the actual wiring (.mcp.json registration, the .claude/settings.json tool allowlist, and the two expert-agent frontmatter grants) is permission-gated in unattended /march ticks — an agent can't grant itself new tool access. The phase shipped "blocked" with the three exact edits documented; the owner applied them via /oversight same day, closing the loop.

What changed

phase 25 audited the 2026-07-09 harness re-apply and found it already fully present at HEAD (a prior tick had restored it outside phase tracking) — closed the plan gap rather than re-deriving identical files. Along the way, fixed one real stale spot: verify-mechanics.yml's cross-package impact-path array still listed the deleted src/Skills/ directory. Separately, every Claude-invoking GitHub Actions workflow (rest-tuning, ship-a-phase, triage, world-tuning, and 20 others) now declares its unattended-mode flags explicitly, and the shared skill/claude workflows run non-interactively.