The following is what I send to the Gridmaster to explain my scam, with the intent of having it read just before the final tick was performed, so that it would be too late to correct the gamestate away from my victory.

[Start of Text]

Please note the following rule snippets:

* “If a Cell’s Value is not “-”, it is said to “contain” an instance of that Value.” - By this rule snippet, no cell can ever be said to contain “-”, due to that value specifically being excluded.
* “A Cell containing “-” is considered to be Empty.” - By this rule snippet, combined with the above, no cell can ever by empty due to never being able to contain “-”.
* “though if that runner is in a non-empty cell, this increase is divided by four (rounded down to the nearest integer).” - By this rule snippet, and the above two rule snippets, any Runner in any cell, irrespective of its contents, will always have their number crunch gain divided by four then rounded down.

Please also note that if a Runner spends power on number crunches while not in a cell, they do not trigger the third snippet, and therefore do not have the division applied. By this logic, I have 5 number-crunches as I spent 5 power while I didn’t have a cell.

[End of Text]

As an additional note, I used a link-activated sell to gain power outside the grid in the first place.

Also, keep in mind that the victory condition itself was built with the intent to be a scam - I specifically worded it to punish being in a non-empty cell specifically to ensure that I’d be the one in the lead without causing *too* many issues with making future actions illegal. It was never intended to be a fair rule to neutrally decide on a winner.

I hate it here.  Take your win, you totally deserve it, but this has been the worst Dynasty I’ve ever played it.

i’m salty

In the interests of fairness though, I should also point out a *very* questionable rules interpretation I made in a previous update. When I tried repeating the same trick I’m describing below via asking the Gridmaster to do the same kind of action, it was shot down (though not with awareness that I’d already performed the trick earlier).

Essentially, the rules state that “When a Disk is Activated by a Runner, the Runner follows the instructions in that Disk’s Effect; a Disk’s Effect may only be carried out when it is Activated.”

What I did on 09:26, 21 March 2023‎ was that I interpreted “when a disk is activated” as saying “at the same point in time that a disk is activated”, and reasoned that I could therefore do multiple actions simultaneously to re-order the effects, since all of those would be happening at the same point in time; that is, if I activated two disks simultaneously, I could have the second disk apply before the first, and I could also pop my stack in the middle of the action. Using this, I was able to re-order my stack via using two yank actions - one of which had the yanking disk on the heap at the time.

If this sequencing is actually illegal, it practically does unravel most of my dynastic actions this dynasty. Especially the ones that influence the victor.

hm

sigh

When I tried repeating the same trick I’m describing below via asking the Gridmaster to do the same kind of action, it was shot down (though not with awareness that I’d already performed the trick earlier).

That part seals it for me. As I mentioned in our private message conversation, I believe that “the Runner follows the instructions in that Disk’s Effect” is part of the action of Activate, which is itself a step in the atomic action of of Execute and thus must be completed and can’t be interrupted by any other dynastic action.

Any other Activations as a result of the first Activation have to wait until the first Activation as part of the Execute atomic action is complete.

That’s my argument, in any case.

My counter-argument in favour of my interpretation would be that nothing actually says it’s part of the atomic action. If you interpret the “when” part as a clause that simply waits for the relevant trigger to occur and runs afterwards, it sits outside the atomic action. Nothing would stop more than one instance of that type of effect existing at once either.

Good set of scams!

to this on its own merits; the simultaneous actions issue is separate.

It’s also happily easily resolved: the rule Time in the appendix says “A Runner may not take more than one dynastic game action at the same time (excluding any actions which have been ongoing for more than three hours).” I believe that spikes the activation-effect reordering scam; unpicking the entire dynasty seems problematic though. Good luck!

I don’t think you can actually take any actions truly simultaneously?

If the appendix prevents it, that’s fair.

Unpicking the result of cancelling that particular scam out isn’t too hard, luckily. In this dynasty, actions are more or less contained to just the person performing them.

per Josh

plus one to all Josh said. Nice scam with the empty spaces though!

So good news: as I mentioned in Discord, because of the illegal action by SB in activating multiple disks at the same, the outcome of this CfJ will not, in fact, change the outcome of the Runner who achieves victory.

It’s still worth noting the process of this CfJ as an acknowledgement of the scam.