What changed, and why
The game already has a calibrated pre-send wager indicator: the wager-chip shows the real ⚡ anachronism tier for the idea you're sending. The catch is that it only appears after you run an Archive lookup. Until then you saw a fixed fallback line that stated the general principle and pointed nowhere.
In playtesting most players never ran a lookup, so the genuinely useful signal stayed hidden behind a step they didn't know to take. This change turns that dead fallback into a call to action: it names the asymmetric wager and tells the player exactly how to get the calibrated read — look an idea up in the Archive, which already sits a few lines down in the same compose dock.
The whole change is four lines in one file. The sections below show the two states of the wager indicator, why the fallback is the only honest pre-lookup read, and the two things the edit was careful not to break.
Two states: the calibrated chip, and the nudge
The compose dock renders one of two things before the roll. When the Archive has stamped a "known since" year and the player has picked a contact year, the wager-chip (v-if) shows the real tier. Otherwise the v-else fallback renders. That fallback is the line this PR rewrites.
The new copy keeps the asymmetric wager wording, then appends the nudge, with the call-to-action phrase wearing the ew-accent token so it reads as the actionable part of the sentence.
The refreshed comment (161–166), the calibrated chip (167–170), and the rewritten fallback (171).
pages/play.vue · 668 lines
⋯ 160 lines hidden (lines 1–160)
⋯ 497 lines hidden (lines 172–668)
Why the fallback is the pre-lookup state
The fallback isn't a generic default; it's the precise complement of the chip. wagerRead returns null whenever there's no Archive result or no chosen contact year, and null is exactly what flips the template to the v-else. So the nudge shows in precisely the situation it's written for: the player hasn't looked anything up yet.
wagerRead → null without a known-since stamp or a contact year; that null is what renders the nudge.
pages/play.vue · 668 lines
⋯ 336 lines hidden (lines 1–336)
⋯ 318 lines hidden (lines 351–668)
And the thing the nudge points at is real and close. The Archive lookup box lives in the same step-2 column of the compose dock, so "Look up an idea in the Archive" names an affordance the player can act on without leaving the dock.
ArchiveLookup is right there in the compose dock the nudge sits in.
pages/play.vue · 668 lines
⋯ 231 lines hidden (lines 1–231)
⋯ 436 lines hidden (lines 233–668)
What the edit was careful not to break
Two small things made this a safe one-liner rather than a quiet regression.
First, the data-testid="wager-line" stays. The coaching tour anchors its wager step to the calibrated chip and falls back to the wager-line when the chip isn't present, so dropping or renaming the testid would strand that coach mark.
The wager coach step: anchored to wager-chip, fallbackAnchor to wager-line.
stores/coaching.ts · 245 lines
⋯ 56 lines hidden (lines 1–56)
⋯ 180 lines hidden (lines 66–245)
Second, the wording matches the wager's existing voice. "gains gently, losses hard" is the same phrasing the dice legend already uses, and it preserves the asymmetric framing that issue #132 landed (the swing is not symmetric — a bold reach amplifies losses more than gains). Reusing the issue's ad-hoc "losses hardest" would have reintroduced wording drift across the line family.
The roll legend uses the same 'gains gently, losses hard' phrasing the nudge keeps.