Blocs and crews: two shapes of alliance
In the pair rooms an alliance is two people who share heat and cover each other. In The Syndicate it is a crew of any size that splits a pot evenly, which turns every recruitment into a maths problem.
A bloc is a pair
On the rooftop and in the writers' room an alliance is allyId: one other person. You share heat, you cover each other when you are not in the room, and you split the odds on the prize. It only takes if they already trust you, and being turned down is public.
A pair is a side deal. It helps, and the room is winnable without one.
A crew is the whole game
The Syndicate makes the alliance the only route to money. The cage pays the biggest crew at each of three counts and splits it evenly between everyone in it, so a person sitting alone is paid nothing at all.
The target, then, is the smallest crew that is still the biggest, and every social move becomes arithmetic with a face on it. You grow a crew by pulling people in, shrink somebody else's by prising a member loose, and take chips off the people you walk out on.
Merging
Recruiting somebody who already has a crew folds the two together, up to the cap. Anyone whose class will not sit at a table that size stays behind. That is how a two becomes a five, and why The Counter, who will not sit in a crew bigger than four, walks out of a merge that suited everybody else.
MIN_CREW is 2. A crew that drops below it is a person standing on their own again.
Cold asks fail
wouldJoin reads what the two have actually seen of each other, so you cannot ask a stranger across the floor to sit with you. Standing next to them for one beat fixes it. That single rule turns small talk from a nicety into a precondition, and it is why make_rounds, the one action with no target, which warms everyone standing there, does more work than anything else in the room.
Read next
Why a crew may only lead by one
crewCap() stops a crew recruiting once it is two clear of the field, because without it the room finds a dull equilibrium where eleven people sit together, win every count, and each take ten chips.
Skim, settle, cooldown: making betrayal cost something
Walking out of a crew takes about fourteen chips off the people you leave, cannot be done to anyone you sat down with in the last two beats, and cannot be done twice within five. Together those put betrayal on a specific beat.
A refusal is an event
When somebody is turned down in public it costs them standing for every witness, warm people move toward them and cold people away, the room can see it on them for two beats, and the ticker names the rule that said no.
Trust, heat and standing
Three quantities carry the politics. Trust is private and pairwise, heat is how much attention is on you, standing is what the room thinks of you, and only trust can buy an alliance.
Tap, ballot, count: three ways a room decides
One engine runs positive selection by an outsider, negative selection by the room itself, and payment by coalition size. Which one a room uses inverts what every other rule in it is worth.