Committing Blind
You choose where a tower goes before you know what it is.
You take five cards into a run of Project Alchemy, and then the game takes some of the choosing back. You pick the platform first, and the pull decides which of your five turns up on it. The pool is yours; the draw isn’t.
Once a tower lands, it stays. A Frost tower on the corner you’d been saving for Ember is now a Frost tower on that corner, and the plan bends around it rather than the other way round. The lab looked for a polite word for this and settled on “commitment”.
It’s less cruel than it sounds. You can see a tower’s reach before your finger lifts, and two towers can still be merged or fused into something more useful than either. For a board that truly locks up, there’s a last resort, kept in reserve and best not discussed in front of the towers.
The randomness lives in what arrives, never in where it goes, and the wave walks the same road whatever you build. Every run hands you something slightly wrong and asks what you’ll make of it. Which arrangements turn a bad pull into a good one is for you to find. The lab found most of them the hard way.
Next: reading a wave on a phone, and how you tell what an enemy has become without squinting.