Preview review notes · 1 October 2026

PROBATE sales page: what needs Tim before it goes public

This page was built by an unattended session. It's a preview on a pages.dev address, noindexed, with no domain and no DNS. Nothing below has been approved. Back to the page.

Blockers

  1. THEME Are you comfortable marketing a game whose subject is a dead father's estate and a family that sues itself? The page keeps it dry and never jokes about the death, but it is the pitch.
  2. STAGE PROBATE is internal on the arcade. This preview serves its own copy at /play/ (copied from ~/Programming/games/strategy/probate on 1 Oct 2026). It will drift if the game changes. Promote it on the arcade and point the CTAs there, or refresh the copy before any launch.
  3. NO PLAYERS Nobody outside development has played it, and the handoff's open question ("does losing a lot to a bid signed yesterday sting?") is unanswered. The page claims nothing about how it feels to play. "About five minutes" is the GDD's 4-6 minute target, not a measurement. Play one sitting, time it, and fix the number if it's wrong.
  4. PHONE The game scales its 1280×820 table down as one piece. On a 390 px phone it's about 30% size and hard to read. The page's demo works on phones, and every CTA says "made for a laptop or desktop screen". Decide whether that's acceptable for whatever channel you share it on.
  5. GAME TEXT Two string bugs in src/main.js: the contest line always says "She contests the will", including for MERCER, and the win line says "she takes the N" for any rival who wins. Mercer's own temper card says "the higher he goes", so these two lines are simply wrong for him.

Things the repo says that aren't true

  • GDD.md §1 and §4 say your sitting "becomes tomorrow's affidavit" and the title offers "YOUR SITTING OF <date>". In the code the bank is keyed by seed, and the seed is the UTC date, so tomorrow's estate gets the house affidavit. You only face yourself on the same estate (replay today, or the same ?seed=). The page says "the same estate".
  • The title screen and arcade blurb say June's bids "are a sitting that really happened". On a fresh profile they're produced by a bot playing that estate under the real rules when the page loads. True in a sense; the page's FAQ explains it plainly instead of repeating the line.
  • The three-star verdict says "Nobody does this twice." The game's balanced bot gets three stars in 44% of 200 estates. The page doesn't quote that verdict.

Where the numbers come from

  • Bot ladder over 200 estates: node build/ladder.mjs in the instance folder. Reads the game's own src/sim/.
  • The demo estate's story (take the letters with the 17, five June lines go void, she sues over the piano, the letters go back): node build/seed95.mjs.
  • 1,713 checks passing: npm run sim in the game repo, run 1 Oct 2026.
  • Screenshots: node build/shots.mjs drives the real game through its window.__probate harness. Lots 2-12 of the accounting screenshot were played by the game's bot.

Smaller review items

  • Footer credits "a Play Moehr Games prototype by Tim Moehring". Change if you'd rather not attach your name yet.
  • The page compares the rotating shares to Ra and For Sale (the GDD credits Ra's rotation). Fine for a fan page; drop it if you'd rather not name other designers' games.
  • The daily estate turns over at midnight UTC. That's 5 PM Pacific, which may surprise a West Coast player.