Muster Mechanic — Concept Prototype

Status: Concluded — verdict PIVOT (corrected 2026-09-14, originally PROCEED)

Hypothesis tested

If the player chooses, weeks before any threat, whether iron becomes ploughs or spearheads — and that allocation is the only cost of military readiness, with the muster itself free — then when the horn sounds the player feels the weight of that earlier choice.

How to run

Paper prototype, no code. Read rules.md, then play 10 turns by hand: roll the raid turn (1d4+6) and raid strength (2d6) in advance and keep them hidden. play-log.md records one complete session.

Findings

The test could not falsify its own hypothesis. Two defects:

• Dominant strategy — 15 spears beat any 2d6 raid and were bankable by turn 5 against an earliest raid on turn 7. Optimal play was "spears to 15, then ploughs": a step function with a computable knee, not a tradeoff.
• Unfalsifiable plough payoff — Harvest Score had no consumption, threshold, or failure state, so regret was mechanically impossible and "were ploughs a trap?" could only answer no.

Worth keeping: the displaced-cost premise itself, the turn-7 look-back as the target beat, secret raid timing, and the free muster. Full detail in REPORT.md; what to change next in PIVOT-NOTE.md.

Files

• rules.md — the ruleset as played
• play-log.md — one complete 10-turn session
• REPORT.md — full report, with the correction that withdrew the PROCEED verdict
• PIVOT-NOTE.md — what to keep, what to change, revised hypothesis