Every deck-crawler has to answer one question early: what does the player know? Most answer it with hidden information and luck. Corridors answers it with a price tag. You can know almost anything about the maze ahead of you — the exact card, its lanes, its teeth — but sight costs Thread, and Thread is also what the fire eats, what the shops charge, and what the final door demands as toll. The resource that makes your decisions safe is the resource you are saving to win.
The law that makes this work is one we wrote early and defend fiercely: the maze taxes labor, not information. Notes are always legal. If you paid a Thread to see the next four cards, you may write all four down, and no rule will ever punish you for remembering. The tax was collected at the moment of sight; charging again for memory would be a tax on paper, and it would quietly turn the game into a memory contest instead of an economy. Position 1 of your notes always means the first card beneath the one you face — the game even prints the convention, because a player with honest notes is a player engaging with the actual puzzle: not what is down there, but what is knowing it worth to me right now?
Deep Dark mode is that question with the price doubled. Our first human run of it produced a beautiful autopsy: a skilled player who kept a Standard-mode peeking rhythm, paid 20 Thread in sight tax across the game where Standard would have charged 10, and arrived at the final door with everything required to win except the two compass points that would have let him find it. The mode's lesson, learned in blood: in the Deep Dark, look half as often and remember twice as hard.
The wager system is the sight economy's other face. Wager lanes pay you to name the next card's type, glyph, or exact name before it turns. Backed by paid sight, a wager is a certainty — bought knowledge converting back into Thread at a profit. Blind, it is a donation to the maze. Our telemetry so far is stark: the game's best players have literally never lost a wager, because they never wager on anything they haven't already paid to know. The maze sells certainty. It is usually worth the price.