diff --git a/tools/autoplay-batch.sh b/tools/autoplay-batch.sh
index e0a7cc6d..5f1e2b3b 100755
--- a/tools/autoplay-batch.sh
+++ b/tools/autoplay-batch.sh
@@ -22,6 +22,9 @@
 #   PARALLEL       — Max seeds to run concurrently (default 1 = serial).
 #                    Remote runner is concurrency-safe via scoped pkill per AUTO_PLAY_DIR.
 #                    Apricot has 64 cores → PARALLEL=10 is a safe, ~10× wall-clock speedup.
+#   LAUNCH_COOLDOWN — Seconds to sleep between launching each parallel worker (default 0).
+#                    Use 10–20 on memory-constrained hosts to stagger Godot init spikes
+#                    so games never all peak-initialize simultaneously (prevents OOM crashes).
 #   SEED_OFFSET    — Shift the seed range from [1..COUNT] to [1+OFFSET..COUNT+OFFSET]
 #                    (default 0). Use for multi-sweep runs that share a parent
 #                    results_dir and need disjoint seed numbers (e.g. Task #10
@@ -70,6 +73,7 @@ AUTOPLAY_HOST="${AUTOPLAY_HOST:-}"
 REMOTE_BATCH_ROOT="${REMOTE_BATCH_ROOT:-/tmp/@magic-civilization/builds}"
 SAFETY_TIMEOUT=$(( TURN_LIMIT * 2 + 300 ))
 PARALLEL="${PARALLEL:-1}"
+LAUNCH_COOLDOWN="${LAUNCH_COOLDOWN:-0}"
 
 # SEED_OFFSET shifts the seed range from [1..COUNT] to [1+OFFSET..COUNT+OFFSET].
 # Used by multi-sweep aggregation (e.g. Task #10 B5 AI_PIN_PERSONALITY rotation)
@@ -310,6 +314,7 @@ else
             wait -n 2>/dev/null || break
         done
         _run_one "$seed" &
+        [ "${LAUNCH_COOLDOWN}" -gt 0 ] 2>/dev/null && sleep "$LAUNCH_COOLDOWN" || true
     done
     wait
 fi