It’s a bug that is easy to fix at the DBAL level. The second issue of incompletely initialized games can be healed with the same medicine called transactions. Almost all DBMSs I’m familiar with guarantee ACID compliance.
Thanks for the links @mikhail.trusfus . Not a race condition or something that could be solved with transactions, was just a doubling of retry mechanisms, one of them being fairly aggressive. Will deploy the fix on Monday.