---
name: taste-swipe
description: Find out what someone actually wants when they can't say it yet. Breaks a subject (a game, an app, a brand, a trip, a house, a film) into its smallest choices, turns them into a swipe feed of about 100 cards (no / yes / love / don't care), then reads the answers back and turns them into a profile and concrete directions. Use when the person says "I don't know what I want", "help me figure out my taste", or asks for a Tinder-style or swipe-based preference test.
---
# Taste Swipe
People can rarely describe what they want, but they react instantly to concrete options. Taste Swipe
asks about one small idea at a time, so each answer is cheap, and a hundred answers add up to a clear
picture.
The skill has four steps: atomize the subject into a deck, build and publish the swipe page, read the
answers, and turn them into directions.
## 1. Atomize the subject
Write a deck: categories, and atoms inside them. An atom is the smallest choice the subject can be
made of, phrased so a person can react to it in two seconds.
**Categories** (12 to 25). Together they must cover the whole subject, from the big picture to the
texture. For a game that is premise, tone, art style, camera, scale, the player's role, economy,
building, units, combat, controls, opposition, information, world systems, maps, progression, story,
pace, playing with others, challenge, sound, feel and platform. For a product it might be problem,
audience, form factor, interaction, look, voice, pricing, onboarding, privacy. Always add one
calibration category of real, well-known examples ("Games like", "Apps like", "Places like"): the
answers there anchor everything else.
**Atoms** (6 to 15 per category, 150 to 300 in all). Rules that keep the signal clean:
- **One idea per card.** "Cozy and warm" is one idea; "cozy, warm and colourful" is three.
- **Concrete and picturable.** "Fire that spreads with the wind" beats "dynamic systems".
- **Same granularity within a category,** so the cards compete fairly.
- **Cover the poles and the middle.** Fast and slow, tiny and huge, plus a sensible middle option.
- **No straw men.** Every atom should be something a reasonable person could love.
- **Independent of each other.** A card must make sense without seeing the others.
- **Title:** 2 to 6 words, at most 48 characters. **Line:** one sensory sentence, at most 110 characters.
- Write in the person's language.
The finished games deck in `decks/games.json` shows the expected quality and is a good starting point
for anything game-related.
### Deck format
```jsonc
{
"id": "games", // lowercase, dashes; keys saved answers
"name": "Game taste swipe", // heads the copied summary
"title": "Taste Swipe: Games", // browser tab and gallery name
"heading": "What game do you want?", // shown above the card
"subject": "a game", // used in "Not enough answers yet to sketch a game"
"rounds": 100, // cards per session (at most the number of atoms)
"categories": { "premise": { "name": "Premise", "hue": 28 } }, // hue 0-360 tints the card art
"atoms": [ ["premise", "Last fire in a dark world", "The sun is gone. Your light is the only safe ground.",
""] ],
"pitch": [ ["premise", "a game about"], ["tone", "that feels"] ] // builds the one-line sketch at the end
}
```
### Sketches
Give every atom a sketch as its optional fourth element: a lo-fi line drawing that makes the idea
readable at a glance, like a notebook doodle or a manual pictogram. Cards without one fall back to an
abstract pattern, which says nothing, so draw them all. Rules (the builder checks the first four):
- One `