[leodiegues]

New players start a round without knowing its rules. The carousel blurbs give a mode's feel ("feed the fuel"), but not that fuel starts at 10s, that 5 landed words cook you, or that a wrong key stalls you in pursuit. The rules live only in docs/play/modes.md.

Every round already has a "waiting for the first key" state (started.is_none()), so the rules go there instead of in a help overlay. Players don't need to discover a key or close anything, and the rules disappear on the first keystroke.

• menu::rules(mode): two lines per mode, taken from docs/play/modes.md. Lock-on and free aim in floor is lava each get their own.
• Typing panel (sprint, blitz, zen, survival, pursuit): before the first key, the rules replace the combo counter and rank, which would only show 0 HITS and BELL PEPPER at that point.
• Floor is lava: the rules sit above the existing "type a falling word to start".
• docs/play/modes.md: one sentence about it.

│   HOT PURSUIT                                       SCORE 0  │
│                                                              │
│        a cop chases your caret, faster every 10 words        │
│    a wrong key stops you cold · get caught and you're busted │
│   ╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮   │

Tested: fmt, clippy (desktop and wasm, -D warnings), the typepper tests, and .github/docs-check.sh main. A throwaway TestBackend dump rendered the pursuit panel and lava field at 90 and 40 columns, which caught pursuit's second line overflowing on narrow screens; it's shorter now. I haven't played it yet in a real terminal or browser.

Known limits:

• The numbers (10s of fuel, +1.5s per word, 5 landings) are written into the strings, the same as in the docs. They won't follow the engine constants if those change.
• No ? help screen for heat, combo and fever. Add one if players still get lost.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code