What changed, and why
Everwhen's stake ("the last stand") is the final-turn wager: on your fifth and last dispatch, if the gap to the goal is past what a single turn can swing, you may double the resolved swing — both directions, up to the full meter. It is the reason no run is ever mathematically dead. But it was only ever explained at the instant it appeared, and playtests surfaced three legibility gaps (~50 mentions).
1. No advance tease. A player burning mediocre turns was ambushed by the stake on the final turn, never building toward it. 2. The downside was under-read. "both ways" was there, but players read stake = go bigger and missed that a loss doubles too. 3. The "behind but no stake" zone was silent. At 50–99% on the final turn the stake correctly does not appear (a normal throw can still win), but nothing said so — its absence read as defeat.
This change is legibility only. The trigger — the store's canStake getter — is untouched; every new line is read-only computed state plus copy. Blast radius is two components (the gauge and the compose dock) and their tests.
Tease it before the final turn
The gauge already prints an honest pace note ("need +N apiece", escalating to "critical territory"). The tease is a new, deeper rung of that same escalation: when even better-than-Success on every remaining non-final dispatch would still leave the final gap past the per-turn fuse, the staked finale is the likely endgame — so name it now.
The predicate reads the escape route directly: to avoid a staked finale you must close the gap to within the fuse (MAX_PROGRESS_SWING, 50) before the last turn, spread over remaining - 1 dispatches. If that required average tops the Success band's ceiling, you almost certainly can't, so the note flips to "your final dispatch can be staked". It is guarded by remaining > 1 (no divide-by-zero on the final turn) and sits inside the perMessage > ceiling branch, so it is strictly a subset of "critical territory" — never a contradicting message.
The pace note's new innermost rung, plus paceClass picking up 'staked' for the warn styling.
components/ProgressTracker.vue · 217 lines
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Sharpen the downside, show the range
The prompt copy is rewritten to make the wager two-edged on its face. It leads with doubles, both ways (highlighted), then shows the real best/worst swing once doubled, then states the exact gap to close.
The numbers come from stakeRead, which doubles the band table and formats it with the same fmtSwing helper the roll legend uses — so the legend and the stake can't drift. Crucially, the miss spans the full losing envelope: from a doubled Failure down through a doubled crit-fail (−70%), not just the gentle Failure band. The hit spans Success up through a doubled crit (+90%).
The stake prompt (template) and the projection it reads (stakeRead).
pages/play.vue · 661 lines
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Fill the 50–99% zone
On the final turn, when the gap is inside the fuse, canStake is correctly false — and now finalReach renders in the stake control's place. It is the exact complement: canStake needs gap > 50, finalReach needs gap > 0 and canStake false, so the two are mutually exclusive with no overlap (the only gap they both skip is the already-won need == 0). The v-else-if makes that structural.
The reassurance line and its computed; the v-else-if pairs it with the stake control.
pages/play.vue · 661 lines
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How it's verified
The branching logic — the tease — gets discriminating unit tests: it fires when the finale is likely staked, does not fire when a Success-band turn could still escape, preserves the existing final-turn messages, and never divides by zero on the last turn. The page-level surfaces (the stake copy and the canStake/finalReach handoff) are covered end-to-end, with the boundary pinned at exactly need == 50.
The tease fires when likely-staked; it stays silent when the stake is still escapable.