The second half of the promise
Hedge is a daily calibration trivia game I build solo; the architecture lives in the case study. This one is less engineering and more thesis: why this week's badge update is the half of the original promise I had not shipped. The engineering story is its own entry, The badge that wouldn't forgive.
When Hedge launched, the promise had two halves and I only shipped one of them. The first half was the mirror: play every day, and the calibration chart shows you whether your 90% actually means 90%. That part worked from day one, and it is still the most honest screen in the app.
The mirror was always the easy half
But a mirror is not a coach. The chart is a reliability diagram, and a reliability diagram is homework. The players who study it were already the kind of people who would seek out calibration training on their own. For everyone else the insight sat there, technically available, mostly unread. Revealing your calibration turned out to be the easy half of the promise. The hard half is training it, and this week's update is my real attempt at that.
A curriculum wearing trophies
The new badge roster looks like a completionist feature, and it is one. It runs thirty-six badges deep, with tiers, counts, and a tour that walks you through everything new. But look at what the badges actually pay out for. "Coin Flipper" rewards admitting you have no idea, and its higher tiers lock if you use 50% to hedge things you actually know. "Bold Call" and its ladder pay for confidence you can back up and refuse to advance while your recent 99% bets are running hot with misses. The category badges do not ask whether you are accurate in Sports; they ask whether your confidence in Sports matches your accuracy, over your last fifty bets, right now, and the little dot on the badge dims the moment you drift. Even "Crowned", the pure glory badge, demands perfect self-knowledge: five answers at 99% is only perfect if you genuinely knew all five.
Nothing pays out for luck
There is no badge for being lucky. There is no badge you can farm by betting big or by betting scared. That was the design rule underneath the whole roster, and it is what makes the completionist loop something more than engagement bait: you cannot grind this roster without becoming better calibrated. The grind is the training. The chart tells you the truth. The badges teach you what to do about it.
Every future lesson, already delivered
And because every badge is computed from your real history rather than stored, the curriculum is never finished shipping. Any badge I dream up next month arrives over the air, grants itself retroactively to everyone whose play already earned it, with the honest dates, and the badge tour walks them right to it. New lessons, delivered to old homework.
Hedge 1.0 promised to show you how well you know what you know. I think this is the update where it started keeping the other half of that promise: helping you get better at it.