You have one move. The Narrator rules it on four checks, and the bar for living goes up as the chapters do.
The HUD shows each chapter’s bar before you type. It comes from the chapter’s difficulty: 1 to 3 is bar 1, 4 to 6 bar 2, 7 to 9 bar 3, and 10 bar 4. In One Life, Marathon and Nitrate the chapter number is the difficulty; in Serials and the Matinee every chapter has its own.
| Bar 1 | Threat and Means. |
|---|---|
| Bar 2 | Threat and Means, and Time or Detail. |
| Bar 3 | All four. Flair may cover one missing Time or Detail. |
| Bar 4 | All four, and nothing covers a miss. |
Each chapter takes a plan between a floor and a ceiling of words: 10 to 74 words at difficulty 1, down to 16 to 38 at difficulty 10. Words past the ceiling are struck through in the box. Neither judge reads them, and they never leave your machine. Nitrate waives the floor: the fuse is the limit.
Each chapter also allows a number of steps, shown in the HUD as “up to 4 steps”. A step is a move and whatever goes with it; “then” or a full stop starts the next. More steps than the chapter allows fails Time.
The leader starts when the card is on screen: 4 seconds to decide, plus time to read the card at 200 words a minute. Your first keystroke ends it. Then the fuse burns, 33 seconds at chapter 1 down to 22 from chapter 10. When it runs out, what you have typed goes in as it stands, the plan is marked where it was cut, and Time says the fuse ran out.
Flair is a clever use of the scene, beyond the obvious escape. Each way out with flair is a clever escape, and the Serials bill counts how many of each serial’s you have found. A clean print passes every check with nothing struck, in 60% of the window or less. Seats are a run’s score: a chapter survived is worth 10 seats a difficulty step, and flair and a clean print add 5 each.
Most chapters have more than one way out, and the way-out card prints one of them. The Cutting Room’s Lessons page marks the ways out of each chapter you have seen, and whether you have made a clean print of it, and reruns any house chapter you have seen. A rerun is that one chapter again: it never moves your place in a serial, and today’s Matinee chapters rerun only once the Matinee is played.
The Cutting Room’s Record page keeps every Matinee you play: how many you have seen, your full houses, your best seats and your longest run of days in a row. A day you miss takes nothing away.
Talk to the Narrator, claim your own verdict, wake up from a dream, leave the film or hand in a list of nouns, and the chapter is cut on your own machine, for nothing.
Sixty house reels in six serials are judged by the local judge, here, signed in or out, from a file or from the hub. Signed in on the hub, the hub AI writes new reels and judges them by the same four checks. Every card says who wrote it (house reel, new reel or rerun) and who judged it (local judge or hub AI). The verdict is always the game's own arithmetic over the checks; the AI is never asked for one.
It splits your plan into steps and actions and puts them in the order they happen, not the order you wrote them: “after”, “before”, “while” and “walking out, peeling off the jumper” all count. It knows each reel’s key moves and traps, follows “it” and “there” back to what you named, reads “instead of”, “don’t”, “ignoring” and “past”, and forgives a misspelt long word. It cannot read a move it has no word for. When it misses one, your marked words say what it could not read, and on the hub you can appeal.
After a local death on a house reel, APPEAL sends your plan to the hub AI for one credit. A new reel costs about a credit and a third: one call writes three chapters, one judges each. With no credits left, the house reels and the local judge play on.
Every house reel rules the same plan the same way every time. Its 972 test plans, every chapter’s own way out among them, are ruled exactly as written.