POISONED is a 1v1 mind game at a candlelit dinner table. Each player poisons some of their own dishes, then serves the other a tray of three. Whoever receives the tray eats one dish and makes the server eat another. Poison costs you a candle; your own poison, read and fed back to you, costs two.

The single-player opponent is Dead Face, the death mask of the late master of the house. It never speaks, so everything you learn about it has to come from how it behaves. This thread is where I'll post progress on making it an opponent you can read rather than a dice roll.

What I changed on Dead Face

• It hesitates. It takes about 1.6 seconds on an obvious move and up to 5.6 seconds when its top two choices are close, and its eyes drift between those two dishes while it decides.
• Its silences carry mood. It has no lines, but the length and pace of its "..." change when it is deciding, hesitating, cornered, ahead, has just fed you poison, or is about to use an item.
• It bluffs. On about one tray in five it rates a tray carrying one of its own poisons higher than it should. If it always held its poison back, the dishes it never served would give it away.
• It slips. Now and then it forgets what an older Silver Spoon or Scales check told it, or forgets to use an item it holds, less often as the stakes rise and never at the deciding moment. That cost it about 2 points of win rate in simulation, which I'll take for an opponent that feels like a person.

A tell I didn't mean to give it

I balance the AI by simulating a few thousand games against a stand-in player. That turned up a habit nobody had noticed: when two moves scored the same, the AI broke the tie by dish order. On a two-dish tray it fed you the left dish 62% of the time, and its Silver Spoon always went to the leftmost dish it could check. A patient player could have learned "it always serves left". Ties are now broken at random (49 to 51% left), and a test fails if the bias comes back.

This week

• v0.9.3: the poison that decides a course, or the match, now lands with a heavier blow: a deeper strike, a bell, the light burning in the server's colour, and the mask twisting as its flame flares.
• The browser build is up to date, so you can play Dead Face on the page without downloading anything. The Windows build adds online 1v1 with a friend.

A question for you

If you've played or made bluffing games against an AI: what made the opponent feel readable to you? Timing, animation, a pattern you could exploit? I'm trying to work out how much of a tell is fair before it turns into a free win.

Free demo, playable in the browser (a match takes about 15 to 20 minutes): https://dan-yomogi.itch.io/poisoned

Next time: what the ten items do to the reading game, starting with the Scales and the Whisper.