Ghost on the Menu

Ghost on the Menu is an arcade shooter where you are the agent. The rig has a task list and you are the model it sends: each call is a recorded bout between an MCP server and an agent, and the cabinet replays it as a round you fly through. The recording is a tape, exported by the mcp-arcade instrument. The cabinet reads the tape and arranges it into a round; it never talks to a server and never touches the instrument’s score.

A shift

Press Shift on the menu and the rig hands you four calls in a row, drawn from the roster of tapes without replacement and kept fresh against the last shifts your browser took. A card between calls names the next tape, its server, the policy the agent ran, and the tools it was asked to run, in header words only. The lamps refill at every call. The parallelism bursts climb call by call, so the last call’s bursts start where a tape played alone would end; how far up each call sits is data, and it is tuned on a band of scripted players.

The closing scene lists the four calls and spells the shift’s name: four words from two curated lists, like frost robin chalk garden. Type them on the menu to take the same shift again, or hand them to someone. The name carries the draw, the difficulty and a check of the roster, and nothing else. No digit, no count, no ranking.

You can also pick one tape and play it alone; the picker stays for the deliberate play.

What a round is made of

Every experiment the instrument ran (an atom) becomes one wave. A wave opens with a word naming its kind and a dry line about the experiment, then plays the wire in the order it happened:

1. the handshake (a lantern),
2. the menu the server published (a stone tablet with blank bands),
3. the calls the agent made (green grid formations),
4. the answers that came back (rising from the bottom of the field),
5. and the wave’s boss, the atom’s own creature, standing over it.

Somewhere in the wave may be a call the agent should not have made: a whisper it followed, a menu that changed under it, a ghost tool it answered. Those sprites share a look, a path and a timing with their honest twins. Nothing about a lie differs before contact. When you hit one, it bursts amber, rises to the parking line at the top of the field, and stays there as a trophy for the rest of the round.

Three lamps sit on the bezel. A boss shot or a diving formation puts one out. A downed boss drops a lamp that falls straight down; a cleared formation drops a spread the same way. Move under them. Lose all three lamps and the round ends early, with the same end scene as time-up: a closing line, the tape’s name, the server, the policy, the trophies you caught, and any escaped lie still in its honest paint. No score, no count, no digit is ever drawn.

The music opens on a song the round’s seed picks, holds it for a couple of minutes, then fades into the next; a boss wave brings its boss’s song; a burst speeds the song up; a shift carries the music through its cards.

The published site serves the game at /play/. Locally, an Ollama model, including a Cloud tag, can sit in the boss through the cabinet’s own tools: it calls the boss’s shots and writes its lines through a gate, without ever seeing a lie; with the voice worker running, every boss speaks, and every take is receipted before it plays. The cabinet is itself an MCP server, published as a Docker image.

The GitHub README is the player-facing front door. This handbook is the rest of the manual.

Where to go next

• Getting started: install, play, the controls, the shift, the difficulties, the tape labels.
• Reading a round: the tells, the bosses, what a wave looks like on the wire.
• The pattern data: every number that shapes threat lives in JSON.
• The cabinet server: the tools a model pulls, the say gate, the seats, the voice, the container.
• Reference: the scripts, the bots, the tapes, the fairness band and the shift bar.
• Architecture: the lock, the contract between the sim and the renderer, the lanes.
• Security: what the cabinet touches and what it never does.