Prototype v0 · One board: the junk drawer · working title — internal prototype only
🧦 The Junk Drawer 🔑
Warm glow = leaked clues. The longer a thing stays lost, the warmer it glows — and the easier it is to find.
Two sides play opposite games on the same messy drawer. Lost hides things in the clutter. Found spends attention searching tiles. Nobody gets hurt — a capture is a reunion: the thing is tagged and goes home.
You place 4 real lost things plus 2 decoys. Decoys are junk that leaks fake clues — the glow around a decoy looks just like the real thing, so the seeker wastes searches on crumpled receipts and dead batteries.
Every lost thing leaks clues that grow every round (the warm glow). The longer it stays lost, the stronger it gets and the easier it is to find. That race is the whole game.
Ferality points go to the hider each round a thing survives. A reunion pays the seeker 100, plus 20 per ferality stage of the thing found.
Attention is the seeker's budget: a fixed number of tile searches per round. The Finder Bot reads the clue-glow and sweeps the warmest tiles first — but early rounds are mostly guesswork, and decoys smell exactly like treasure.
Same game, kinder rules — the way hide-and-seek actually works with kids. The fog lifts: camouflage is visible (look for the little sparkle on a tile), clue-glow shows from round 1, and the bot plays a gentler helper who searches less and cheers every reunion. Framing flips to co-op: let's get them all home together.
Each leg has a winner (+75 bonus). After both legs, the higher total score takes the match — so a legendary sock that survives all 5 rounds (235 ferality points) can outweigh a lost leg. Every box score above is the real running total.
“Lost vs Found” is a working title for internal prototyping only — the name is crowded in games, so nothing here is a public lock, a listing, or a release. Prototype v0: one board (the junk drawer), placeholder art, no other projects mixed in.