The Oracle and the Wolf: I Made Gemini Lose Like a Kid 🐺

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam TL;DR Save the Sun is a kids' deduction game set on the eve of the June solstice: you race Sköll—the wolf who wants to eat the sun—to Sól's one true rune before he catches her and the longest day never dawns. Gemini does two jobs and the engine referees both: it reads the player's questions—typed, or spoken aloud and transcribed—as the Oracle, and it plays the wolf as Sköll. The engine owns the secret and never hands it to Gemini. Everything here is checkable: play a round · watch the demo · anchildress1/save-the-sun . What I Built Blame a board game 📞 The idea started with Dream Phone , a 90s deduction game I played as a kid—you dial pretend phone numbers and narrow down which boy has a secret crush on you. The catch: it needed 2-4 players and fell flat with two. So I rebuilt it as a two-player game à la Guess Who and gave the second seat to Sköll, an AI opponent to race. That became Save the Sun , a deduction race for players aged 8 to 12 against Sköll, the Norse wolf who wants to eat the sun. The story of Sól and Sköll comes straight out of Norse mythology and is one of my all-time favorites. Sól drives the sun-chariot across the sky, and Sköll chases her—every day, all day, forever—until Ragnarök, when he finally catches her and the sun goes out. The game drops you into the night before the solstice with the wolf a stride behind: get the true offering to Sól before he reaches her, or the dawn never comes. Teaching AI to lose 🧩 The hard part of a kids' deduction game is making the AI beatable without handing it the answer. The opponent never sees the secret: a deterministic engine holds it and referees every move, and Gemini only ever plays on top. Sköll's side was easy—he answers in structured JSON—but a loose human question has to be read into something the engine can resolve first, and that reading is the only job I gave the Oracle. Twenty-four runes, one short night 🌙 The round itself is small on purpose. Th