Basal cognition asks how far intelligent-seeming behaviour extends beyond nervous systems. The slime mould Physarum polycephalum remodels its transport network in response to resources, making its morphology a candidate readout of information storage — but whether such measurements can be extracted reproducibly from low-cost, home-lab imaging is untested, and whether unconstrained plate geometry even permits a clean behavioural assay is rarely examined. We report a feasibility pilot across seven plates, inoculated from a single plasmodial culture and imaged over the first days of foraging on consumer equipment. The batch was designed as a forced-choice paradigm requiring the plasmodium to remain naïve to one site until a directed transfer could be tested; in practice, radial exploratory growth reached the naïve site on three of seven plates within 24 hours and on all seven within 72, before any choice could be assayed. Quantifying the closing state, we separated each network into the dense plasmodial body and the pale extracellular trail it leaves behind, and found that every plate had abandoned the majority of the territory it explored (mean 72% across uncontaminated plates). A four-timepoint series resolved this into an explore–consolidate–retract trajectory. We argue that unconstrained radial geometry defeats forced-choice designs by colonising naïve sites through expansion rather than preference, and that a corridor-constrained redesign is required to test directed transfer.