reserved-colour

Summary

Blue means X, rose means O, and amber means the winning line. Nothing else in the app may resolve to any of the three.

Why it matters

A player reads across a noisy 3×3 board in about two seconds. That read is the whole game. If blue can also mean "Easy" or "primary button", the one colour carrying the board carries nothing, and the player has to stop and parse instead of glancing.

This is not visible in any single wireframe — each screen looks fine on its own. It is only violable across screens, which is exactly why it is written down here rather than left to the pixels.

Implications

• The difficulty ramp cannot reuse the mark colours. It gets its own green → amber → rose scale (--diff-easy / --diff-medium / --diff-hard), read by comparison down a column.
• Amber is allowed on the board only for the winning line. It has to beat blue and rose at once, so it cannot be either of them.
• The turn indicator tints the same mark token rather than picking a second blue that nearly matches.
• Colour is never the only signal. The result sheet states the outcome in words as well — roughly one man in twelve cannot separate the red from the green.

Related

• monetisation — the ad surfaces must not introduce a fourth meaning
• hard-is-unbeatable — the difficulty ramp this rule pushes off the marks

Sources

• .context/designs/mobile/shared.css — the RESERVED banner in the palette block
• .context/designs/mobile/game/board.html
• .context/designs/mobile/game/win.html, lost.html, draw.html
• src/constants/theme.ts