Viewer's Guide

Congratulations. You are the freshest meat in the Main Character house — the flagship show of the Main Character Network, currently sponsored by nobody who returns our calls. Please initial each of the following:

• The cameras never stop. Once you Roll The Cameras, the soundtrack, the drama, and the surveillance all kick in. It only stops for a full reset or when you close the tab in shame.
• Your choices matter. Every tag you pick (DRAMA, CHARM, STRATEGY, LOYALTY, CHAOS, SAFE) is being tallied by producers who will use it against you in the recap.
• The house is alive. Eight rooms. Eight housemates. Everyone is moving. Where you stand decides who films you crying.
• People scheme offscreen. NPCs run their own seasons behind your back. The Meanwhile Ticker is their gossip column. Read it.
• You can break people. Poke a rival past 85 and they Crash Out on camera. Ratings applaud. HR files a report. The producers pretend they didn't see anything.
• Saves are local. Auto-checkpoints + up to 5 named slots, all in this browser. Clear your history and your legacy dies with it.
• This is a work in progress. Occasionally janky, always feral. Sprocket menu (bottom-right) has a debug log if things detonate.

By continuing, you waive: dignity, narrative consistency, a flattering edit, and the right to sue Larry from Legal.

1. Stage Name + Gender + Archetype — 1–20 characters, ♂/♀, and one of six lanes below. Cast auto-balances 4♂/4♀ around you; gender affects who flirts back (we didn't invent chemistry, we just film it).
2. Cast Draft — pick 7 housemates from a fresh candidate pool. Choose your enemies wisely; you'll be brushing your teeth next to them for ten weeks.
3. Nemesis & Crush — at cast lock the producers quietly assign your coldest starter as a Nemesis and your warmest as a Crush. Neither of you will ever be told about this in-universe. Enjoy.

• 💋 The Flirt — hot-tub strategist. Two contestants pre-crush on you. +charm, +popularity.
• 😈 The Villain — built for the edit. Start with a rival; producers salivate. +drama, +strategy.
• 😇 The Golden Child — cameras worship you. Two contestants like you on sight. +popularity, +charm, +stability.
• 🌀 The Chaos Goblin — no plan, big TV. Relationships swing wildly. +drama, +charm, −stability.
• 🧠 The Strategist — three moves ahead. Alliances form faster around you. +strategy, +influence.
• 🐺 The Underdog — America roots for you. Hard to boot early. +loyalty, +stability, +popularity.

The archetype is a starting hand. The Edit you actually earn is your fault.

Survive 10 episodes. Make Final 2. Win the jury vote. Your Edit — Villain, Fan Favorite, Mastermind, Chaos Goblin, or Underdog — is stitched together from your tags and slapped on a tabloid cover after every episode. You will be perceived. That is non-negotiable.

1. Producer's Briefs — 1–3 mini-objectives with a 3-stage ladder and concrete hints. Tap the BRIEFS strip to expand. Completing them pays clout + Moments.
2. Beats — Morning → Midday → Afternoon → Evening → Night. You can move rooms between beats. Scenes pull from whoever's in your room.
3. Scenes — 2–5 per episode, 4 choices each, tagged and pre-labeled with effect chips.
4. Exactly one scene per episode is a CHALLENGE — win it for a Perk pick next episode.
5. Rivals react and remember. Personality drives their votes.
6. Even episodes end in elimination. Odd episodes are pure drama.
7. From Episode 3 the "The Edit" card drops at recap — your dominant tag becomes tomorrow's headline.

Eight rooms, two floors: bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, front room, game room, pool. Each beat:

• NPCs migrate on personality, time of day, and grudges.
• You can change rooms — bedrooms invite confessionals, the pool runs hot for romance and fights, the kitchen is gossip HQ.
• The House Blueprint shows who's where right now, with intent glyphs when the cast is up to something.

• 📈 +ratings — good for the show, good for you.
• 💔 −rivals — burns a bridge. They remember.
• 🤝 +trust — bonds allies.
• 🧠 +clout — raises your strategic rep.
• 🎲 swingy / risk — high upside, matching downside.
• 🛡 safe — no drama, no ratings. Coward's brunch.
• ★ SUGGESTED — pinned by the Intent system to match what you've been chasing.
• 👁 sway — costs 1 Influence. Rigs the outcome in your lane.

Alliance pitches resolve four ways based on trust, traits, and existing webs:

• Accept — pact formed.
• Conditional — they're in, you owe them one first.
• Deny — clean no.
• Deny (harsh) — laughed out of the room. The kitchen already knows.

Non-player cards show a lean pill: 💙 Loyal · 👀 Wary · 🗡 Plotting · 🔒 Closed (already pacted).

Formed alliances have live trust + pressure:

• ROCK SOLID (≥70) · HOLDING (≥40) · ON THIN ICE (<40)
• 💥 UNDER ATTACK (pressure ≥60) or PRESSURE (≥30) — rivals are actively working your pact.

NPC sabotage is real: they poach members, plant rumors, flip pacts. The Meanwhile Ticker catches it. Fake alliances are powerful and explosive when exposed. Choose your betrayals like you mean them.

Every contestant has a hidden Crash Out Meter (0–100). Poke the same rival enough and the needle climbs. At ~85 the next poke triggers a takeover event:

• Throw Hands — physical fight. +1 strike each side.
• Trash The Room — destruction. +1 strike to the crasher.
• Say The Unsayable — instant DQ for the speaker.
• Storm Out — they self-eliminate.
• Sob Spiral — no strike, but stability and clout crater.

Strikes stack on the House Rule Strike badges. Three strikes = ejection. Ratings adore it; the lawyers do not.

The Crash Out system got a whole promotion. On every cast card:

• Stage chip: COOL · WARM · SIMMERING · BOILING · DETONATING with trend arrows (▲ climbing, ▼ cooling).
• Strike count and fracture marks (✕) — fractures are persistent damage that follow a contestant across episodes.
• The Crash Board panel in scene prep shows the full ward: who's boiling, who poked them, who's about to break furniture.

New event types:

• ☢ Nuclear Crash Out — 2+ strikes / DQ / repeat fractures triggers a full network intervention banner. The lawyers are typing.
• Public Cracks — mid-meter (55–80) NPCs will throw a small tantrum between scenes: a chair kicked, a plate broken, a confessional shriek. No strike, but the season remembers.
• Audience Read — every crash-out ships with an audience verdict: 🕊 sympathy (America pities them), ⚖ mixed, or 🔥 disgrace (career-erasing). This bends your edit.
• 🎯 Backlash — if you're the one who lit the fuse, you get producer-pressure heat. Serial pokers get cast as the villain whether they wanted the edit or not.

Counter-play:

• Defuse a target — pop their profile card and hit 🧊 DEFUSE (20 Moments) to cool the meter before they pop. Diminishing returns: use it too often on the same person and they stop believing you. Sometimes de-escalation is the villain move.
• NPCs remember pokes — repeated targeting triggers counter-cool: strategic NPCs preempt their own meter and start holding a grudge. If they suspect you, cast cards show 🎯 SUSPECTS YOU POKED THEM.

Your Defensive Toolkit (Crash Board panel):

• 🧘 Deep Breath — 15 Moments · drop your meter by 18. Costs 1 rating point because the audience finds composure boring.
• 🎯 Redirect Heat — 30 Moments · shove 12 meter onto a rival. Counts as a poke against them, so a Pressure Campaign spins up on you the moment you overuse it.
• 📰 PR Spin — 10 Clout · kills any pending Public Crack and shaves the most recent poke off every campaign currently aimed at you. The nuclear option, minus the actual nuclear.

Where to read the damage:

• Per-episode Crash Report in the recap — every nuclear, every fracture, every crack.
• Crash-Out Ledger on the finale — season-wide totals: nuclears, ejections, sympathy vs disgrace, worst offender, most fractured.

The producers hate a quiet week. The Producer Pressure meter (0–100) rises whenever ratings sit still. Threshold events escalate:

• Mid-range: a forced twist, an unexpected room reshuffle, a leaked confessional.
• Upper-range: the Producer Bomb primes multiple NPCs to crash out simultaneously. Peak television. Peak paperwork.

The Next Episode Forecast on the recap combines pressure + this week's ratings swing + the top crash meter and hands you a vibe check:

• DEAD AIR RISK — you're coasting. Do something.
• SIMMERING · SPICY · EXPLOSIVE — pressure building.
• UNHINGED INCOMING — buy stock in bleach for the pool. Next week detonates.

The game reads your last few moves and guesses what you're actually doing this beat. Four intents:

• 🎭 Chaos — you're picking scenes on fire for fun.
• 💋 Flirt — you're chasing someone into a room.
• 🤝 Ally — you're chaining trust plays.
• 🕵 Expose — you're hunting for dirt.

Consequences:

• Rooms on the Blueprint show intent glyphs when your target's headed somewhere useful (or dangerous).
• Choices matching your inferred intent get a ★ SUGGESTED badge.
• NPCs notice. Smart ones dodge you or deliberately drag witnesses into your target's room to spoil the scene.

Cast cards now wear a stance chip that summarizes what each rival is doing about you specifically:

• 🗡 PLOTTING — actively building a case to vote you out.
• 🛡 SHIELDING — pact/loyalty active, they'll take a hit for you.
• 💋 FLIRTING — heat is up; romance scenes will fire.
• 👀 WARY — burned once, watching for the second.
• · NEUTRAL — undecided. Movable.

Hover / tap the chip for the "why" line. Stances update per beat.

• Strategic Position Card — glance-friendly HUD: current threat level, vote math for tonight, alliance health, who'd flip on you first.
• Memory Feed — a running log of the plays that mattered (backstabs, saves, viral moments). "LAST TIME…" flashback chips paste the relevant memory right into scenes so you don't forget who owes you.
• Director Ray — a clapboard tips character who pops in with contextual coaching. Dismissable. Occasionally correct. Never subtle.

Every contestant has a secret. Learn one privately with the Secret Peek perk, then weaponize three ways:

• Crash — drop it in a scene. Huge Crash Meter hit + witness dogpile bonus.
• Rumor — plant it in confessional. Spreads for a couple beats, then auto-exposes.
• Vote swing — burn it at elimination to flip 1–2 NPC ballots onto the target.

Targets can Deny the Rumor — costs their stability, and isn't a guaranteed save.

Leverage escalates: first use mild, second dings your edit, third+ raises your own Crash Meter. Cameras love a spiral.

Catch a rival doing something ugly and you can park it as an IOU. Later, cash it — force a vote, force a flip, force a confessional. One-shot each. Save them for the finale, or don't and cry about it.

Certain moves gate through a mini-game — pass/fail decides whether the scene lands or blows up in your face. Fitting SFX, optional haptics, mute toggle, and prefers-reduced-motion are all respected in the sprocket menu.

• 🎲 Quick-Flip Vault — 3 doors, 1 pick. Fires on Chaos moves, sabotage / weaponized secrets, charm on someone who isn't into you, or any choice with 40–60% odds.
• 🪞 Mirror Match — Simon-says with cast confessional beats. Nail the sequence to sell the bit.
• ☕ Tea Spill — hold to pour and release to drain. Finish with the tea inside the drifting green zone when the five-second clock ends.
• 🃏 Hot Seat — bluff a card in front of a jury of housemates. Sell it or don't.
• 📈 Lie Detector — the needle sways and speeds up; land inside the (small on purpose) Truth zone.
• 🛒 Grocery Cart Dash — 15-second race with overtakes, stumbles, and last-lap surges. You make predictions (never bets — Legal is watching) for Moments and Producer Note teases. The winner and your pick stay on screen until you tap Continue.
• 🥊 Crash Out (throw hands) — the only mini-game you start on purpose. In any scene, tap CRASH OUT, pick one person standing in that room, and read the terms before anything happens: the score to beat, who wins a tie, how many people are watching, and the fact that both of you take a strike win or lose. Three strikes ejects you from the season. Then it's a 3×3 grid of faces flipping up — slap your opponent's face wherever it pops up — swinging at a face-down card costs you no points, it just kills your streak and your accuracy. The clock is saved: close the tab mid-brawl and it comes back PAUSED at the same score, not restarted. Walking away at the gate is completely free. Winners get feared, losers get circled, and the house remembers for a few episodes. Practice it with zero consequences in the sandbox.

Practice Arcade at /sandbox — practice each one without risking a run. Also the fastest way to check if your speakers work.

Starting Episode 3, the producers stamp an Edit Sticker on you based on which tags you've been spamming:

• Villain Edit — heavy drama + chaos.
• Mastermind — strategy-heavy, calculated.
• Fan Favorite — charm + loyalty.
• Chaos Goblin — unpredictable must-watch TV.
• Underdog / Pity Edit — surviving against the odds.

No lane to declare. The season's edit assembles itself out of your fingerprints.

Every rival has a hidden heat toward you:

• 💕 Adores · 💙 Likes · 🙂 Warm · 😐 Neutral · 😠 Mad · 🔥 Wants you out

The Heat Shift Strip after each episode shows who's warming up or cooling off. Ignore at own risk.

Cards have two faces. Front stays minimal — avatar, name, gender, mood emoji, stance chip, crash chip. Tap to flip for the back: archetype, traits, clout, influence, alliance trust, NEMESIS / CRUSH / SAFE stickers, strikes, fractures, and the producer edit landing on them. From the back you can pop the FULL DOSSIER.

You start with just 1 Influence. It's a currency, not an allowance.

Earn +1 Influence when you:

• Win a challenge (in addition to the Perk)
• Complete a Producer Brief
• Land a Viral Moment (Moments Meter caps)

Cap: 6. No hoarding to infinity.

Spend Influence on:

• Weaponize a secret — 1 per use, plus the social fallout.
• Sway choices — 👁 options that flip an alliance, a ballot, or a tiebreak peek.
• Read the Room — peek at who's plotting your exit.

Broke? Sway / weaponize buttons show a red 👁 cost and lock.

Big plays pump the Moments Meter (0–100). Cap it and a viral headline flashes across the screen, rolls the bottom ticker, AND drops +1 Influence. Cap it three times in a season to unlock the Viral Hat-Trick.

The cast doesn't stop when the camera turns. The Meanwhile Ticker surfaces the schemes you missed — pacts, poaches, leaks, exit plots. Treat it like a scoreboard for everything you didn't witness.

Confessionals stack into your Reel — the editors will montage this against you. Repeat a bit and it becomes a Recurring Gag that pops in recaps and the tabloid wall.

The Director pops into your dashboard with 4th-wall commentary — "spicy," "boring," "good for ratings," "we're rewriting the edit." Read between the lines. There are lines.

• Immunity Idol — protects you at the next eviction vote (episodes 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9). It does not burn out on a house night, so winning one on episode 3 still covers the episode 4 vote. Hold cap: 1. Win another while full and it auto-banks as +2 clout. Idols cannot be played in the final round. Fend for yourself, champ.
• Secret Peek — privately learn a rival's secret (weaponize later — costs Influence).
• Edit Boost — cameras worship you. +50% ratings next episode.

Every few episodes producers call a twist. Accept for wild ratings, decline to play it safe. The Golden Envelope is rarely a gift. Sometimes it's a lawsuit in a pretty wrapper.

Evictions run on a fixed calendar: episodes 1, 3 and 5 are house nights with no vote, episodes 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 end in an eviction, and episode 10 is the finale where the jury decides. Bottom Two get hauled to the hotseat. Ties break with Sponge / Spatula / Slipper — a best-of live mini-game (rock-paper-scissors with bathroom props). Spend a known secret to swing ballots (1 Influence) if you're sweating, or play an Immunity Idol if you earned one — except in the final round, where idols are locked out.

When jurors stack up, pre-finale you get a Jury Lobby pitch — pick a tag (drama, strategy, charm…) to bias how the jury remembers you. The lobby now has a Finale Explainer Panel that breaks down, in 5 steps, exactly how scoring works: pitch tag bias, edit weighting, alliance loyalty, betrayal ledger, and the tiebreaker path. No more "how did I lose to that." Yes it will still happen.

Winner takes a faux $1M check, a tabloid cover, and a 1-year-later epilogue.

Win the season and the finale offers 👑 Return for Season N — Defend the Crown. Your champion comes back with:

• Higher starting clout · influence · popularity.
• One NPC auto-cast as a hard nemesis ("taking your crown") and one as a superfan ally. The rest start wary.
• A 👑 Nx champion badge on Home. Everyone knows who they're dealing with.

Names are tracked across seasons so casts stay fresh, up to 10 seasons per profile. Surviving all ten would be historic. We doubt you. Prove us wrong.

Fully randomized shuffle of original tracks starts when you Roll The Cameras and keeps running through intro, season, and endgame. Restarts only on full reset or refresh. Sprocket menu (bottom-right) → play/pause, skip, volume. Credits scroll in the bottom ticker as each track starts.

Sprocket bottom-right = Control Room:

• Soundtrack — play/pause, skip, music volume.
• Sound Effects — SFX volume + mute for the mini-games.
• Haptics — subtle buzz on supported mobile devices.
• Diagnostics — debug log, copy for the developer, Overflow X-ray to hunt layout bugs.

Two parallel systems, no cloud, no accounts:

• Save Slots (up to 5, named) — start page. Create, overwrite, rename, delete. Great for big runs and A/B branching a season.
• Auto-Checkpoints — written at every episode boundary and each elimination vote. Crash? "Rewind to last auto-save" on the start page.

Clear your browser data and your legacy dies with it. Consider this your only warning.

Win a season and mount your finale on the Trophy Case — six pedestals, manually managed (asks before evicting anyone). Long-term unlocks — Chaos Agent, Puppet Master, Heartbreaker, Villain Factory, Ratings Monster, Canceled Immediately, Made Finale, Won It All — stack on the Achievements page.

Start page hosts a Weekly Challenge with a shared seed — same cast + twists for everyone that week. Daily prompts (Win as Villain, Win as Hero, Trigger 5 Chaos, Survive the First 4, Viral x3…) unlock stickers. Post finished runs to the Tabloid Wall for posterity.

Between every episode the network cuts to a full-screen AD BREAK interstitial: a "WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK" bumper, 1–3 parody sponsor cards (tagline, sponsor, trigger caption), CRT static between spots, then "AND WE'RE BACK" and the next episode kicks off.

• Ads are scheduled from your season — pokes trigger anti-anger meds, viral moments trigger merch drops, big fights trigger legal hotlines. Every ad is a receipt.
• Tap to skip individual ads, or hit SKIP ALL to jump straight into the next episode.
• Commercial mode in the sprocket menu: Normal (full sequence) · Fast Cut (single 1.5s bumper) · Off (bypass entirely).
• ▶ Replay ad break button lives at the bottom of every episode recap. The recap also lists which ads aired.

Party events (hot-tub nights, rooftop mixers, birthdays) pick a themed party track — a pulsing chip on the HUD and in the recap that colors the whole beat. Some tracks push flirt scenes, others push chaos, others slow the room down for confessionals. Watch the chip; it's a free tell.

Every so often the season detonates a House Event: a power outage, a lice scare, a food fight, a mystery box, a producer-mandated dress code. Events reshuffle rooms, force group scenes, or add a temporary tag to every choice. They're deterministic per seed, so a rerun of the same season sees the same events — good for challenge mode.

NPCs aren't set dressing. Each one carries an Agenda (win jury, redemption arc, take down a specific rival, hook up before finale, protect a friend) that drives their room picks, alliance offers, and votes independent of you.

The season also tracks Story Obligations — dangling threads producers promised the audience: an unresolved rivalry, a promised showmance, a betrayal set-up. Obligations that go unpaid cost you edit in the finale. Pay them off (in either direction — kiss or stab) and the jury remembers.

Behind the curtain, the Showrunner reads the season's shape every episode and picks the next twist: which brief to hand out, which twist card to fire, when to force a Producer Bomb, when to let a quiet week land. It reacts to your edit, ratings momentum, unresolved obligations, and jury balance so no two seasons cut the same way.

Sustained poking spins up a Pressure Campaign — an aimed, multi-episode drumbeat rather than one-off pokes. Campaigns:

• Show as a labeled bar on the target's card (🎯 UNDER PRESSURE).
• Escalate stage by stage — Warm → Boiling → Detonating — until they crash or the aggressor lets up.
• Turn back on you if a rival (or clique) starts a campaign against the player. Watch the Crash Board for your own row.
• Are the trigger for Player Public Crack (see below) — the reason you might snap on camera, not just NPCs.

You are not immune. When your own Crash Meter tips past the threshold — from sustained pressure, betrayals, or a nuclear rival crash-out landing on you — the game hands you a Public Crack modal: a shortlist of ways to lose it live on camera (throw hands, storm out, drop the unsayable, silent tears). Each option has its own strike / edit / audience-read consequences.

The Defensive Toolkit (Deep Breath / Redirect Heat / PR Spin) is the way to prevent hitting the crack modal in the first place. Sometimes the villain move is not snapping.

When a crash-out fires, the sequence leads with a full hero sprite: 112px pixel avatar, glow halo, event-specific icon (🥊 hands, 💢 unsayable, 🌪 storm out, 😭 sob spiral, 🪑 trashed room, ☢ nuclear), and a POKED BY chip crediting the instigator. Louder SFX, stronger haptic buzz, and a hold-frame make sure the moment lands before the fallout ticker rolls.

Every scene has a Read The Full Scene button. It calls the AI narrator with the full context — who was in the room, which choice you made, which mini-game fired and how it landed, the memory trail, and your current edit — to write a two-paragraph tabloid-style beat. Mini-game outcomes are always waited on, so the narration reflects what actually happened, not a generic filler line.

Powered by Lovable AI Gateway. If it's ever unavailable you'll see a small fallback badge and a shorter deterministic beat instead — the game never blocks on narration.

• Crash Board → scene prep on /play
• Strategic Position Card → dashboard, top of /play
• Memory Feed → dashboard sidebar + "LAST TIME…" chips inside scenes
• Producer Pressure → merged into Crash Watch on the dashboard
• Meanwhile Ticker → running strip across /play
• Party Track chip → HUD during party beats + recap header
• Next Episode Forecast → recap card at end of episode
• Crash Report → per-episode block in recap
• Commercial Break → full-screen between episodes · Replay from recap
• Crash-Out Ledger → finale report
• Finale Explainer → Jury Lobby, before the pitch
• Story Obligations → finale scoring notes + producer briefs
• Practice Arcade → /sandbox
• Achievements → /achievements
• Tabloid Wall → /wall

Loving the mess? Want more episodes, more chaos, more songs? Toss a coin to your producer. The Venmo button lives on the cover and Home screen. Every dollar keeps the confessional cam rolling and Larry from Legal off our backs.