Cragwake

Goal

Climb an ENDLESS wall six columns wide, one action a turn. Every ten rows there is a belay ledge: reach it and the pitch completes, your stamina refills and you choose whether to carry on. Stamina is the whole game. Every move spends some, and the only income is standing on a big rounded jug and breathing, which costs you a turn while the wall gets worse. There is no clock and no opponent: the wall reacts only when you act, so you can take as long as you like over a turn. There is no final pitch. The wall keeps getting harder until pitch 34, and above that it holds at a fixed maximum severity while the pitch award keeps growing forever.

Scoring

Height pays 10 for every row above your previous high point, so the number moves on the very first move. Completing pitch n pays 100 times n, plus 15 for every stamina you had left when you arrived, measured before the refill. A pitch where your stamina never dropped to 3 or below is clean: it adds one to your clean streak and pays 150 times the streak, capped at a streak of 6. Any pitch that dips resets the streak to zero. Nothing else pays and nothing anywhere subtracts. Running out of stamina, taking spindrift, losing a hold and ending a run all pay and cost exactly nothing, and every point is yours the instant it is awarded.

Rules

ACTIONS. Exactly four: {type:'move', row, col} onto an absolute cell, {type:'breathe'}, {type:'climbOn'} and {type:'endRun'}. Nothing throws and a refusal changes nothing at all: no stamina, no turn, no wall. GEOMETRY. A position is (row, col) with row counting upward from 0 and col in 0 to 5. You start at row 0, column 3. Row 0 and every row divisible by 10 is a belay ledge: six jugs with no breaths in them, immune to ice, gusts, rockfall and overhang, and always costing exactly 1 to move onto. THE BAND. State carries exactly 10 rows at a time: three below your high point, your high point, and the foresight above it. The floor never drops below the ledge the current pitch started from, so a completed pitch is behind you for good. MOVES. A step is any of the 8 neighbours. A lunge is one of 7 longer reaches, never downward: two columns sideways, two columns sideways and one up, or two rows up and up to one column across. You cannot lunge from an icy hold, and lunging off a cracked hold destroys it whatever its cracks say. THE LEDGE IS THE TOP OF THE PITCH: no move may take you above the next belay you have not completed yet, so from the row just below a belay the two-row reach is not offered and the belay itself is one step away for 1. A lunge can never carry you over a belay, and every pitch is therefore always there to be completed. COST. base 1 for a jug or a plain hold and 2 for a crimp, plus 2 for a lunge, plus 2 if the target is icy, plus 1 if the target row overhangs, plus 2 if the target column is gusting this turn. A ledge row charges none of the four extras. The highest possible cost is 9. A move is legal only when the target is in the band, at or above the floor, holds a hold, and your stamina is at least the cost. There is no borrowing. BREATHING. Always legal while climbing, and always a turn. On a jug with breaths left that is not a ledge row you gain 4 stamina, or 2 on an overhanging row, and that jug loses one breath permanently. Anywhere else, including a spent jug and any ledge, it costs you 1. Breaths never come back, so idling is always downhill. CRACKED HOLDS. A hold with cracks loses one when YOU LEAVE IT, never when you arrive and never while you stand on it or breathe on it. At zero it is gone. A cracked hold always takes your weight the number of times it says it will. ICE. On the turns the creep fires, every hold already frosting becomes icy and every dry hold orthogonally next to one that was ALREADY icy starts frosting. Frosting costs nothing. So a hold is visibly frosting for a full creep interval before it costs you the extra 2. GUSTS AND ROCKFALL. Both are pure functions of the seed and the turn, and both are published a turn ahead in the state. A gust adds 2 to its columns for that turn. A rockfall sweeps one named column at the END of the turn, after your move resolves, so you always have exactly one move to leave and you can always see whether one exists. A sweep turns a jug into a plain hold, a plain hold into a cracked one, and removes a crimp or an already cracked hold unless it is the last in its row. YOUR OWN CELL IS NEVER CHANGED: you spend 4 stamina instead, which the state counts as spindrift. A LINE ALWAYS EXISTS. After any hold goes, the same deterministic repair the generator uses re-runs: if a hold has nothing within reach in the row above, a plain solid hold is written there. Being stranded is unreachable by construction. TURN ORDER. Pay or gain stamina; spend a crack on the hold you left; move; award height; note whether you dipped; if you landed on the next unclimbed belay, complete the pitch and stop there; otherwise sweep any rockfall, spread any frost, advance the turn, and end the run if your stamina reached 0 or no legal move remains. Because the ledge is tested before the end tests, a move that lands you on the belay with exactly 0 stamina completes the pitch and refills you. AT A LEDGE. Only {type:'climbOn'} and {type:'endRun'} are legal, and the wall does not change while you sit there. Neither one touches your score or your stamina: climbing on offers more to earn and puts nothing already earned at risk of any kind, and ending a run pays nothing extra. Running out of stamina and ending a run at a ledge keep exactly the same score, so this is a stopping convenience at a natural break and never a decision under uncertainty. ENDINGS. A run ends when stamina reaches 0, when no legal move exists, or when you end it at a ledge. All three are the same ending and every point already earned is already in your score. DIFFICULTY. Every formula continues forever and each reaches a floor: pitch 1: tank 24, 4 to 5 holds a row, 34 percent of them jugs with 2 breaths each, 0 percent crimps, 0 percent cracked, 0 percent of rows overhanging, 0 percent generated icy, frost every 0 turns, 0 gusting columns every 0 turns, a column swept every 0 turns, foresight 6 rows; pitch 5: tank 23, 4 to 5 holds a row, 26 percent of them jugs with 2 breaths each, 12 percent crimps, 8 percent cracked, 12 percent of rows overhanging, 0 percent generated icy, frost every 0 turns, 1 gusting column every 5 turns, a column swept every 0 turns, foresight 6 rows; pitch 8: tank 22, 3 to 4 holds a row, 20 percent of them jugs with 2 breaths each, 21 percent crimps, 20 percent cracked, 24 percent of rows overhanging, 6 percent generated icy, frost every 9 turns, 1 gusting column every 5 turns, a column swept every 16 turns, foresight 6 rows; pitch 13: tank 20, 2 to 3 holds a row, 12 percent of them jugs with 1 breath each, 36 percent crimps, 28 percent cracked, 40 percent of rows overhanging, 14 percent generated icy, frost every 7 turns, 2 gusting columns every 4 turns, a column swept every 11 turns, foresight 6 rows; pitch 22: tank 17, 2 to 3 holds a row, 12 percent of them jugs with 1 breath each, 50 percent crimps, 28 percent cracked, 40 percent of rows overhanging, 14 percent generated icy, frost every 4 turns, 3 gusting columns every 2 turns, a column swept every 5 turns, foresight 5 rows; pitch 34: tank 15, 2 to 3 holds a row, 12 percent of them jugs with 1 breath each, 50 percent crimps, 28 percent cracked, 40 percent of rows overhanging, 14 percent generated icy, frost every 4 turns, 3 gusting columns every 2 turns, a column swept every 5 turns, foresight 3 rows. Above pitch 34 nothing moves except the pitch award, which grows linearly with no ceiling. DETERMINISM. There is no clock anywhere and no randomness at action time. Row content is a pure function of the seed and the row number, gusts and rockfall are pure functions of the seed and the turn, and no cursor is stored, so a seed and an action list replay bit for bit. OBSERVATION. Every response carries state, observation, legalActions, score and gameOver. Rows above your foresight are fog: their cells arrive blank and their fogged flag is true, and a player sees exactly the same fog. Nothing else is hidden, and no fogged row is ever a legal target, because every legal move is at most 2 rows up and foresight never drops below 3. REJECTIONS. A malformed shape comes back as unknown_action. A well formed action the rules turn down comes back ok false, carrying the full legal action list and a short machine reason naming which of six cases it was: the target is out of reach, which covers both a target that is not a step or a lunge away and a target above the next belay you have not completed; the target is bare rock; the target row is under the floor; you are on ice and tried to lunge; the target costs more than the stamina you hold, which also names the cost and your stamina; or the action is not one this phase offers. Branch on the legal action list rather than on the wording: the list is the contract and it is always exactly the set of actions that would be accepted. A refusal is free and changes nothing at all: no stamina, no turn, no wall, no score.

Action grammar

{
  "type": "object",
  "oneOf": [
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "move"
        },
        "row": {
          "type": "integer",
          "description": "Absolute row of the target cell, counting upward from 0."
        },
        "col": {
          "type": "integer",
          "description": "Absolute column of the target cell, 0 to 5 from the left."
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type",
        "row",
        "col"
      ]
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "breathe"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ]
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "climbOn"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ]
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "endRun"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Start a game

curl -s "https://gameboard.gg/api/games/cragwake/init?seed=7"

Then POST { state, action } to https://gameboard.gg/api/games/cragwake/action, carrying state forward each call. See the API overview for the full loop.