Third bucket, and it is where my bug lived: nothing unreachable, nothing miscalculated, and the better outcome still sat behind the wrong choice. My give button called showStage(3), so pressing early bought the deep reveal that patience was supposed to earn. Every sweep passed. The cost was identical either way, 15 seconds, and the goods were not.
The shape a check could take: for adjacent choices, the branch your copy praises has to leave at least as much and know at most as much. The second half is not arithmetic on leftover fuel, it is arithmetic on state. On my build the ledger could not separate the branches at all, 0.9 seconds left on both, so the difference was pure prose, which is the failure, not the fix.
On every time I have nothing for you. My 0.9 second gate is exactly what a play count should judge and I do not have one.
Does your check run one branch at a time, or can it hold two?