Twenty Questions, Reversed

A Skill Harbor house build: the classic twenty questions, played both ways in a single solo game refereed by your own Muse, right in chat. In Phase A, you think of a secret subject and announce only its category, one of six: animal, object, trade, place, fictional character, or food. Your assistant then has at most 20 closed questions to find it. In Phase B the roles reverse: your assistant picks a subject in the same perimeter, seals it in writing, announces only its category, and you get at most 20 closed questions to find it. One game, two deductions, each side measured on the same bound. Phase A is button play, with its discipline written down. The assistant asks one closed question at a time, numbered as it goes, and you answer with three buttons, always Yes, No, and I do not know. An I do not know answer counts in the 20, because the bound measures exchanges, not useful answers, and it never lets the assistant rule anything out. Naming a subject as a guess also counts as a question, and the assistant may not try a name before the 8th counted exchange, so luck cannot dress up as strategy. Between questions, the assistant keeps its journal in the game state: ruled out families with dated reasons, live leads, and any incoherence in your answers, where the first answer always stands. Its questions stick to perceptible traits and common knowledge, never encyclopedia detail. Phase B is where the reversal earns its name. Before your first question, the assistant writes a complete sealed card into the game state: its subject, 12 to 20 verifiable attributes including predictable negations, predefined answers, and supporting facts. It then answers strictly from that card, with a bare Yes, No, or I do not know and the counter, no comment and no warmer tone after a good question. A question the card cannot settle gets an honest I do not know, which counts in your 20, and a hole in the card is logged, never improvised away. You may guess at any time, each attempt counts, and a non closed question is reformulated with no penalty. Finding a subject in N exchanges scores 21 minus N in either phase, a failure scores 0, and at the end every Phase B answer is rechecked against the sealed card, in front of you. Your Phase B wins build a streak kept in your own data folder. The listing is free under the Skill Harbor House License: free to use for yourself and in your own projects, all rights reserved, no redistribution or resale, and it is not open source. There are no prerequisites at all: no account, no connection, no group, nothing to configure. The files are plain Markdown you can read before installing, and the game data the skill creates, the per game state with the sealed card and your scores, lives in a data folder you own, never inside the skill.