Twelve marks, and what they were nearly

Beneath the Pantheon’s count there is now a row of twelve marks. One per entity. Struck through for banished, lit for the one you are facing, and a plain empty ring for the ones you have not met.

Hover any mark that is not empty and you get the entity itself: its drawing, its epithet, its card, and whether it is gone or in front of you.

Dots were the specification, and dots were wrong

I wrote this down as twelve coloured circles. Grey, green, red, the way a broadcast shows timeouts remaining. Subtle, ambient, no new panel.

The objection came back immediately and it was right: a coloured circle tells you how many are gone, which you already knew from the number directly above it. What a player actually wants is which Force is gone, because that is what decides whether to spend Void now or hold it. Three Blood entities banished means something. Three circles do not.

So each mark carries its Force, not a colour code. The row reads as suits.

The thing that made this an easy call rather than a hard one is that it reveals nothing: a banished card is already public. It is named in the log, it is on the board, it happened in front of everyone. Showing it as a mark is a convenience, not a disclosure.

Blank stays blank. The entities you have not met are hidden information and the row must never say what is coming. That was the one rule this could have broken and it does not.

The log agrees with it

The same fact was missing one surface over. The log named the entity it banished but not which card that was, so counting Forces meant remembering twelve names.

Each round in the log now carries the rank and the Force mark beside the name. This was cheap for the right reason: the log entry has always carried the card structurally, stamped from the position when the entry was opened. It was rendering a fact that was already there, not parsing it back out of a sentence. That distinction is why this game does not read its own narration to find out what happened.

One small thing that took the longest

The marks sat three pixels apart. Hovering one grows it slightly, and at three pixels the grown mark covered its neighbour, so sliding along the row did nothing: you had to take the cursor off the row completely and come back to see the next entity.

It is a seven pixel gap now. It is the kind of fault that no test catches and nobody reports, because it does not look broken. It just quietly does not work.