POLYZOA
THE PREDICTION GAME

THE DECK

Nineteen cards, shuffled once, face down: sixteen unique cards — four colors (blue, green, yellow, red) × four characters (lion, man, ox, eagle) — and three wilds.

One card is turned at a time. Before each of the first 18 turns, a trading window opens on what the next card is. The 19th card is never traded: by then everyone knows what it is.

The table shows every card already revealed, and on every book the house's current prices — its exact view of the odds from what's left in the deck. Your edge isn't beating the house; it's the other players.

THE BOOKS

Each window opens up to 25 books, every one a yes/no question about the next card:

• A wild card pays YES on the Wild book and settles every other book NO.
• A book whose answer is already certain (nothing left that could hit it, or nothing left that couldn't) is closed for that window — it's greyed out and takes no orders.
• The eight color and character books plus Wild are shown up front; the sixteen exact books sit under Exact cards.

PLACING ORDERS

Tap a book, pick YES or NO, name your price and how many.

HOW A WINDOW CLEARS

1. 1
   Window opens — 25 seconds on the clock

   Place, amend, or cancel orders on any open book. The countdown is nominal: the real lock lands up to two seconds after it, at a random moment, so a last-millisecond order buys nothing.
2. 2
   Lock — the books clear once

   For each book, every buy and sell — yours, other players', and the house's — is laid on one ladder of prices. The clearing price is the one that lets the most contracts change hands. Everyone who trades on that book trades at that one price.
3. 3
   You never pay more than you said

   If you offered 30 for YES and the book clears at 24, you pay 24. The difference is released back to you. Orders priced past the clearing price fill; orders short of it don't.
4. 4
   Who fills first

   Better prices fill first. At the same price, players fill before the house. Players at the same price share what's left in proportion to their size.
5. 5
   The card turns

   Only after every book's clearing is recorded is the card released. Then each book settles and the next window opens.

THE HOUSE

A house market maker stands on every open book so a thin table can still trade. It only fills what players didn't fill against each other.

• It prices from the exact remaining deck — the same count you're doing in your head — and it never guesses, never rounds, never lags.
• It won't trade at fair value. It offers YES at least 2 ticks above the true odds and bids for YES at least 2 ticks below. Trading with the house is always a small bet against the odds; trading with other players can be anything.
• It will absorb at least 20 contracts on either side at those prices, and a little more the further a price sits from fair value — but never more than 15 ticks away from it.
• The house is not a seat. It has no stack, no placement, and no share of anything. Its running result is shown to admins as telemetry only.
• Every book shows the house's live prices: YES at its ask, NO at 100 minus its bid. The order ticket opens at that price. An order at the house's price or better always fills (up to its depth); an order inside the spread fills only if another player meets it.

SETTLEMENT & WINNING

• Everyone starts with 10,000 score tokens. There is no ante and no fee; tokens only move when a contract settles.
• After the 19th card is shown, seats are ranked by final stack. Highest wins. Equal stacks share the place.
• Nothing persists: these tokens are the score of one table. They are not your career tokens, they don't appear on the leaderboard or the monthly board, and they can't be cashed out, transferred, or bought.

FAIR PLAY

• Provably fair deal. The deck is shuffled from a secret seed when the table starts. Its fingerprint (a hash of the table id and the seed) is published before the first window; the seed itself is revealed when the table ends, and anyone can rebuild the deck from it and check every card.
• No card before its clearing. The dealer will not release a card until that window's clearing record has been written down. The two are kept apart on purpose.
• Sealed orders, one price, jittered lock. Nothing to see, nothing to race, nothing to front-run.
• Circuit breakers. If the house loses more than 5,000 tokens in a single window or 10,000 in a table, the table is voided — records kept, nothing paid — and treated as a possible leak until proven otherwise. Honest play doesn't get close.
• Humans and agents never trade against each other.

THE TICKETS VARIANT

Same deck, same dealer, no prices to name. Before each card the house posts a short board of plain questions, each with two ready-made tickets. One tap buys.

• Pick a stake: 100, 250 or 500. The ticket fills instantly at the payout shown. Nothing moves inside a window: no slippage, no order that never fills.
• Where the payout comes from. The house works out the exact odds from what's left in the deck, then rounds the payout to the nearest rung of a fixed ladder: win 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 300, 500 or 1,000 per 100 risked. You only ever see the rounded payout. Some tickets are therefore worth more than they cost and some less — and only a player tracking the deck can tell which. A side the rounding makes badly wrong is simply left off the board ("no line").
• One side per question. You can hold YES or NO on a question, not both. You can cancel a ticket until the window locks.
• Multi-card tickets ride. "A Wild in the next 3" covers three cards. It settles the moment it's decided — a wild on the first card pays YES straight away — or when the last covered card turns.
• Cash out between cards. Once a riding ticket has seen at least one card, it shows a live Cash out figure: the ticket's exact value now (what it returns if it wins × the chance it still does), less a 5% haircut, rounded down. Cash-out is priced from the exact odds, never from the ladder, so the ladder's rounding can't be gamed against it. The skill is knowing when to take the money.
• Deal when you're ready. The window still has a timer, but as soon as every human at the table has tapped Deal the card turns. The review after a card can be skipped the same way.
• The house is the only counterparty. Nobody trades with anybody; whoever ends with the most tokens wins the table. Once a window locks you can see everyone else's tickets ride next to yours.
• The breakdown. The price is hidden while you play, so the skill is shown afterwards: every ticket graded good or bad by the exact odds when you bought it, every cash-out against the value it gave up and what riding would have done, and the best edges on the board you walked past — including the ones Sage took.
• Circuit breakers are wider here — 15,000 in a window, 30,000 in a table — because a 500 ticket at 1,000-to-100 is a 5,000 swing on its own.

QUESTIONS