Your Cycle survives an update

Until this week, every time I shipped anything, every game in progress ended. Tables mid-descent simply vanished. If you were forty minutes into losing to an Ancient and I pushed a change, that was the end of it, and you had no idea why.

That is a poor way to treat people who are playing your game, and it was about to become an unacceptable way, because campaign mode is coming and a campaign spans days.

What changed

• Games are kept safe outside the server now. An update drops you back into the same fight, the same hand, the same turn, with the same cards left in the Gathering.
• If your tab is gone entirely, your seat is still there. Type your sigil on the entry screen and pick yourself out of the list. The four characters your table already shares are the only thing you need.
• Nothing about a normal game changed. If your tab is still open you will not notice any of this, which is the point.

The part I want to flag

Restoring a game restores its exact shuffle position, not just the number it was shuffled from.

That distinction sounds like pedantry and is not. A game rebuilt from its seed looks completely identical: same cards, same hands, same enemy. It stays identical right up until Blood pulls cards back out of the Grave and reshuffles them, and from that moment on it is a different game. Nobody at the table could ever tell that happened. You would just quietly be playing a game that was no longer the one you started.

I would rather drop your game than silently replace it with a different one, so I tested this by killing the server outright, mid-fight, and checking that the hand that came back was the same hand card for card.

The trade I made

Your seat is protected by the sigil, which your whole table shares. That means anyone holding those four characters can claim any seat in the room.

For a cooperative game with nothing at stake, being able to get back in beats being able to prove which of four friends you are. I want to be straight that it is a deliberate trade rather than an oversight, and it is the right one for now. It stops being the right one when a campaign is four evenings old, which is when accounts start to matter.