import PullQuote from '../components/PullQuote.astro';

The [thirty-second countdown added three weeks ago](/posts/tuning-the-daily#where-this-leaves-things) came out of the daily challenge entirely today, end to end: the timer itself, its speed bonus, the timer bar, and the game-over reason for running out of time. Word score is back to being purely length times rarity, no clock involved, and the version number moved to 2.0.0 to mark it as what it is, not another day of tuning but a reversal of a decision.

## What the timer promised, and what it actually did

The timer was supposed to add urgency and reward speed. What it actually rewarded was typing fast, at the expense of the thing the game is actually testing: finding a good word under no pressure but the board itself. A player working out whether a rare letter was reachable, or whether a word would thread past the snake's own tail, earned a smaller bonus for spending that time thinking, never for getting the word wrong. Removing it meant deleting the countdown function, its constant, the timer bar component, and the `timer-expired` game-over reason as a valid state entirely, not hiding the UI behind a flag.

<PullQuote>What it actually rewarded was typing fast, at the expense of the thinking the game is built around.</PullQuote>

## Filling the space the timer left

The words-remaining bar took over as the thing communicating pressure instead: a dynamic label counting down words rather than seconds, a colour shift to warning at five words left and critical at three, and a new position between the board and the word input where a clock used to sit. The how-to-play guide was rewritten to match, four steps for a game that no longer explains a timer: the word limit, steering, scoring by length and rarity, fruit as a bonus on top.

## The same freeze, in three more places

The [end-game screen that froze the browser under three weeks earlier](/posts/fit-and-finish#the-end-game-screen-that-would-not-respond) was traced at the time to `backdrop-filter: blur(4px)` recomputing behind a handful of infinite CSS animations still running under the dialog. The same blur froze three more dialogs the day before, help, settings, and the duel game-over screen, and this time the diagnosis was blunter: the blur forces a full-viewport recomposite every single frame whether or not anything behind it is actually animating. The fix was the one that already worked once, removing the blur and leaving the semi-transparent background to do the dimming on its own.

## Where this leaves things

Two corrections in two days, one to what the game rewards and one to what a modal is allowed to cost. Documentation for both the score model and the ops runbook got brought back in line with what is actually true, the same kind of paperwork that keeps catching up to a decision after the decision itself is already made.