No card ships until a blind judge passes it

My puzzle app, Keyhole, carries 296 dark stories, each with an illustrated card. A dark story is a situation that looks impossible until you drop one false assumption you did not know you were making, and the illustration must show the situation and never the reveal. Draw the aeroplane over the desert and story one is over before the player has read it. In August I ruled that the app does not ship while any card is still flagged by the judge. "End of story," I wrote in the decision, and then spent two days learning what that sentence cost. Two things get judged, the text and the art, and one design is shared by both. The judge is a model, run blind: it sees the finished card and the story the player sees, and neither the finding that triggered the redraw nor the old card. That is the whole trick. A judge that knows what was wrong last time grades the fix. A judge that knows nothing grades the card. Blindness is what makes a pass mean something, and it is why the judge is a separate call from the writer and from the illustrator, never the same conversation. The text pass first. A rubric written for the genre, with one test at its centre, "name the one assumption the solver will make that is false", and four semantic questions after it: does the reveal explain everything the situation promised, does the situation give the reveal away, is there a contradiction, can the answer be reached by yes/no questions without knowledge nobody has. Over all 296 stories it flagged 27: five unanswered, nine spoilers, ten sense breaks, three unsolvable. The fix lane rewrites only what a finding names, the deterministic gate must still pass, and the blind judge reads the result cold before it is written back. A fact-check over the rewrites then cleared them, or left a truth note where no honest fix existed. The art pass is where the numbers live. Each open card was redrawn from a scene brief and judged blind, in waves. The judge wrote a note on every failure, and the lever changed from