Room as template and mode.

A room is a template, not a game. A ROM holds the durable settings — an emoji set, a duration, a guess fee, whether it is paid or free, a seed pool — and, in the reconciled model, a mode and its four policies. A game, a GAM, is one instance played in that room: when it opens it snapshots the room’s settings and generates the secret, so a change to the template later does not disturb a game already running.

Only one game runs in a room at a time. The room is the long-lived thing players return to; the game is the bounded round with a secret, a timer, and a state. This separation is what lets the engine carry a mode on the room and have every game inherit it: a classic room produces live games, a Golden Room produces blind ones, from the same template shape.

A player’s place in a room is itself an entity, a RMP membership, with a lifecycle — joined, active, left, banned — and a per-game display alias. Reifying the membership rather than leaving it an unnamed edge is what makes moderation, presence, and the anonymized leaderboard work without a new identity type.