Peregrine · Go Undercover · draft for review

Three rounds, one per section

27 August 2026 · guides/peregrine/entries/gu-splice · gu-irrel · gu-early

Go Undercover runs on voice-the-error: you are at the con's table wearing his face, and the game shuffles his line in with two honest ones. You have to say the line he would say. Reaching for the truth is what gets you made. So the honest lines are not distractors in the usual sense. They are correct, and picking one loses the round.

Eleven of the seventeen cons The Lineup uses had no round at all. These are the first three, one per section, drafted to prove the shape before the other eight follow.

The rounds

🔗 The Splicer splice writing · standard-english · no. 7

Two complete sentences stapled together with a bare comma.

“Both halves of that sentence could stand alone, and a comma is all that joins them.”

The three lines, shuffled at the table

say thisThere’s a natural pause right there and it reads clean — the comma’s doing its job.
blows coverTwo halves that each stand alone as a sentence need more than a comma between them.
blows coverA semicolon or a full stop is legal there; a bare comma isn’t.

Counter, read in the debrief: A comma cannot join two independent clauses on its own.

📚 The Professor irrel reading · craft-and-structure · no. 8

A choice that’s true and in the passage — just not an answer to the question.

“The question asks what the storm reference accomplishes. This choice says the storm damaged three boats, which the passage does state.”

The three lines, shuffled at the table

say thisYou can point at the line that proves it. Nobody argues with a fact — take it.
blows coverIt’s true, and it still doesn’t say what the mention is doing there.
blows coverThe stem asked about purpose, so a true detail isn’t an answer to it.

Counter, read in the debrief: Being true isn’t the bar — answering the question that was asked is.

🏁 The Sprinter early math · problem-solving-data · no. 9

The right work, quit one step before the value they actually asked for.

“You added the two morning shipments and got 140 crates. The question asked for the day’s total.”

The three lines, shuffled at the table

say thisOne-forty is what the work says, and it’s sitting right there in the choices. Circle it and go.
blows coverThat’s the morning only — the afternoon shipment still has to go in.
blows coverYou’re one addition short of the number they actually asked for.

Counter, read in the debrief: A partial total is still partial; add the piece you haven’t counted yet.

Where the words came from

Part	Source
Con line	Derived from the dossier’s `move` — the advice the con gives. Splice: “Join the sentences with whatever pause sounds natural.” Irrel: “Pick any choice the passage clearly shows to be true.” Early: “Stop at the first number that matches your scratch work.”
Counter	Derived from `first_move` and `warning` on the same dossier.
Claim, honest lines	Judged. Invented here to give those lines something to stand on.
`section`, `skill_code`	Assigned by inspection of the scenario, following gu-swap. The Lineup round sharing each con id carries different material and was not used.

Four calls to confirm

Confidence 80, against the family’s 90. Every other go-undercover round scores 90 and was migrated verbatim from content that shipped and was played. These are unreviewed authoring. Each note says so. Say the word and they normalise to 90.
Irrel against mirror and herring. Three cons in one neighbourhood. Mirror turns on echoed wording, herring on airtight evidence for a claim nobody asked about, and this one on function versus content — so it is hung on a purpose question rather than a content one. If that separation is too fine, irrel is the one to re-cut.
Early against swap. Swap is complete work aimed at the wrong quantity; early is incomplete work. The shipment scenario was chosen to make the round unfinished rather than misaimed. The two cons are one sentence apart in the dossier.
Numbering. These take 7, 8, 9 after the shipped six. The remaining eight would run 10–17 in authoring order. If Go Undercover should instead be ordered by section or by difficulty, that is a renumber of all seventeen and better done once.

The eight still to write

Writing — agree (The Mismatch), dangle (The Dangler). Reading — distort (The Half-Truth), footnote (The Footnote), reverse (The Contrarian), scope (The Embellisher). Math — invert (The Inverter), wrench (The Wrench). Each has a dossier with a move, a tell and a warning, so the con line and the counter come from the same two places every time. The scenario is the only part that has to be invented.