Git Recon: menus as a toy-soldier briefing (clay figures, moulded plastic, field-manual stencils), hill climb to 8/10, rounds 1+ #3544

Score: 0/10 (target 8)

Part of the owner's 2026-11-04 round of hill climbs on every game's UI: once the eqosys skin hook (#3541) lands, each game's menus get real, stylised artwork in the game's own look, not flat house cards. This climb is git-recon.

Direction

The README's own words: a toy-soldier third-person shooter fought in a codebase; glossy black clay soldiers. The menus should be the toy box and the field manual: moulded-plastic sprues and runners as frames, a glossy clay sheen on buttons, stencilled field-manual headings, mission cards like punched dog tags. Our own ideas, never the look of any commercial toy line or game.

Goalpost: 8/10 from the owner on the menus

1. In the game's own look. Title, lobby or front, settings, results and any panel read as the same world as the play view: material, type, ornament.
2. Artwork, not only CSS. Backplates, frames, textures and insignia as small SVG, procedural canvas or headless-Blender tiles; say what each weighs.
3. Still readable, every screen size. Contrast at or above today, play view unobscured, checked with bun run probe git-recon --shot from phone to desktop.
4. eqosys menus wear it. The sign-in chip, report form, achievement toast and any lobby come through the skin hook from eqosys menus: a game injects its skin once and every shared surface wears it, hill climb to 8/10, rounds 2+ (from #3530) #3541, never a second stylesheet.
5. House kit underneath. Components come from packages/ui and packages/game-controls re-themed by tokens; a forked copy of one is a gap.

The loop

Each round is one PR against main that says "Part of #N" and commits before/after shots to apps/git-recon/docs/shots-<date>/. A fresh judge scores BEFORE vs NOW (judges run about two points above the owner). End with a comment starting Score: x/10 (target 8) and ending Next: ..., open the "rounds N+" issue and close this one with "Moved up to #new". At the target, a MANUAL RUN: for the owner's own score.