A question and a suggestion: 1. How much of a first-mover advantage is there? 2. Maybe have the first player only execute 5 instructions on the first turn, to remove whatever first mover advantage there is -- that way at the end of each player's turn they will always be 5 moves "ahead" of their opponent, whether they went first or second. 3. Okay, a second question: I'm curious how well handicapping by e.g. one player getting an extra instruction per turn?

its actually not much of an issue because as you are writing your shellcode the other person has access to it as well, and ofc there is the monkeypatch nop pawn