Cards that provably do what they say
Glødstone abilities used to run by pattern-matching their printed rules text - reword a card and it silently did nothing. Now every card compiles to a tested manifest.
Glødstone, our card battler, had a dark secret: abilities executed by pattern-matching the card’s printed English rules text at the moment it was played. Reword a card - for tone, for clarity, for a translation - and it silently stopped doing anything. No error, no failed test. The card just became a very pretty brick. At the low point, most of the card pool was secretly inert.
The fix gives every card a manifest: its rules text is analysed once, up front, into a structured description of exactly what it does, which is what actually executes. Cards that can’t be fully compiled are flagged - loudly, on our health dashboard - instead of failing silently. A compiler, an interpreter, a coverage report and a unit-test suite now stand between the words on a card and what happens on the board.
Reword away. The card knows what it means now.