station-master-startos/instructions.md

# Station Master

## Documentation

- [Rules and design docs](https://draco.local:53871/Jesse.Markowitz/station-master/src/branch/main/docs)
  — the rulebook implications, the multiplayer design, and the game's architecture.

## What you get on StartOS

This service runs the multiplayer server: a lobby, and a table for 2 to 4 players to play a
competitive or cooperative game together from their own browsers. Everything a player needs — the
game itself, the lobby, and the connection back to this server — is served from the single web
interface below; there is nothing else to install or configure on a player's side.

## Getting set up

1. Run the **Get Join Secret** action from this service's Actions menu, and copy the value it
   returns.
2. Share that secret, and this service's address, with everyone you want to play with. Anyone
   holding the secret can create a new game or join one that hasn't started yet.
3. Open this service's **Multiplayer Table** interface. You'll land on the front page, which
   offers three ways in: solitaire, the replay viewer, and multiplayer.
4. Click **Play multiplayer**, then **Create Game** (or **Join Game** with a game code someone
   else created), and enter the join secret when asked.

## Using Station Master

### Multiplayer Table

The front page offers solitaire, the replay viewer, and multiplayer. **Play multiplayer** takes you
to the lobby: create or join a game, seat players (including filling empty seats with a bot), and
start. Once a game is underway, this same interface is where every player plays their turns and
watches the table — there is nothing else to open.

Solitaire runs entirely in your own browser and needs nothing from the server, so it works here
exactly as it does on the public Station Master site.

**What changed in 0.8.0.16.**

**The Interchange no longer offers a sorting action it does not have.** The card on the Mainline
said cars could be re-ordered there. That has never been possible, so the only thing it achieved was
sending you looking for a button that was not there. What the Interchange actually gives you is the
one place on the Mainline where an **Extra Train** can be made up and started. To re-order a train,
use a **Small Yard** in your own district.

**There is a guide for new players.** A Quickstart now ships with the package — what the game is,
how you win, how a Stage runs, what everything on the screen is for, a first twenty minutes, and the
handful of things that surprise everybody. The rules and card references beside it have been brought
up to date with how the game actually runs; several had been describing an older version.

---

**What changed in 0.8.0.14. GAMES ALREADY RUNNING ON THIS SERVER MAY NOT RESUME** — one rule
changed, and a game whose history contains the move it affects will stop replaying at that move.
The server says which move and leaves your save file alone, so if a game is worth finishing you can
re-install 0.8.0.13 and play it out. On the game this was tested against, it stopped eleven moves
from where the table had got to.

**A Modifier card may no longer be placed outside your Limits.** Your district ends at its sign, and
that is now true of every card, not only track and industries. A Facility standing right at the sign
keeps six of its nine nearby spots, and the sign moves outward as your Running Track grows.

**Why your passenger trains were running empty, and why nobody could get off.** Coaches only travel
one way. Passengers boarding sends the emptied coach to the Classification Yard; passengers getting
off needs an empty coach fetched from the Division Yard; and the Classification Yard comes back only
when the Division Yard is completely bare. In one three-Day game every coach had ended up in
Classification by the middle of Day 2 and stayed there — so nobody could board or get off anywhere
for the rest of the game, and a train whose card calls for coaches was made up with nothing. **None
of that has changed**: running out is part of the game. What has changed is that the game now says
it. A train made up short of what its card calls for reports what it wanted, how many are waiting in
Classification, and how far the Division Yard is from empty; and the yard panel warns you while the
shortage lasts.

**The Small Yard shows you the train each option would build.** Re-ordering a consist used to offer
a list of numbers. Each option now shows the resulting train laid out **west to east**, exactly as
the board draws it, with the engine in place — and says whether that train would be ready to leave
the Office or held there until it is sorted again. A train may also now be sorted with cars ahead of
its engine, which is how you shove a cut into an industry.

**Making up a train says which train.** The lines were there but every one of them said "the train
being made up", so looking back for a particular train found nothing.

**A switching turn no longer fills the history with coordinates.** It keeps the move that set the
crew off, anything set out at or picked up from an industry (named — "at the Freight House"), the
Small Yard sort, and a closing line saying what the turn cost and where the crew was left. Every
move is still recorded and still captions the board as it happens.

**Each role says what it is for.** The Freight Agent stocks the green Loading box and frees a jam;
passengers board and get off in the Cargo phase, with a Porter; a Laborer moves a load along MEN →
AT → WORK. Reaching for the wrong one used to mean finding nothing there and no explanation.

**What changed in 0.8.0.13. Games already running on this server are not affected** — they resume
normally; no rule changed.

**A car in the Division Yard can no longer be clicked while your board is behind.** When other players
have moved and your board is still catching up, the game hides the action list, because choosing
against a position that has already moved on is choosing blind. The cars in the Division Yard were
the one thing left out of that: a click during somebody else's turn sent a real move against a board
several turns stale, and a car left the yard. They now wait like everything else, and the car counts
beside the yards show the board you are looking at rather than the one the game has already reached.

**There is a button for your own district.** The row for looking at another player's Office Area had
one for everybody except you, so the player with nothing to do but wait was the only one who could
not look at their own board. The buttons are also in map order now — west to east along the Division
— rather than the order people joined, and they follow the seating when it rotates between Days.

**You are told when the Fedora passes.** The Superintendent changes at the end of Stages 3, 6, 9 and
12. It is announced on screen and written into the history now, the same as a train completing its
run.

**A collision says whose district it happened in and who paid for it.** The 5 Revenue penalty was a
separate line further down the log, and the wreck itself never named the district.

**A Depot that cannot take another passenger explains itself.** Stocking one takes a loaded coach out
of the Division Yard, and when there is not one there, the option used to vanish from the menu with
nothing said. The shortage stays — running out is part of the game — but the panel now tells you how
much room is left, that the Division Yard has no loaded coach, and how many are waiting in the
Classification Yard for it to run bare.

**Smaller.** The make-up panel and the New Train tip say "working eastward" rather than "working
left", which is the same rule described by the map instead of by a table nobody is looking at. The
history panel keeps 90 lines instead of 60, in the same space.

**What changed in 0.8.0.12. Games already running on this server are not affected** — they resume
normally; no rule changed.

**A player who cannot get back into their game can be let back in.** The only proof of who you are is
kept by your own browser, so clearing your browsing data, coming back in a private window, or sitting
down at a different browser makes you look like a stranger — an empty lobby, no game code, no name —
even though the game is still running and the seat is still yours. The new **Restore a Seat** action
hands you a link for that player; opening it in their own browser puts them straight back where they
were. It works once, expires after 30 minutes, and whoever opens it takes that seat, so send it to that
person rather than posting it somewhere public. See **Restore a Seat** below.

**What changed in 0.8.0.11. Games already running on this server are not affected** — they resume
normally; no rule changed.

**Making up a train tells you what is left, and why your turn ended.** The panel now says what the train
still needs rather than only what its card calls for, and says outright that you add one car before the
round passes to the next player. The train being loaded is marked on the Division map, and the cars you
can add are highlighted in the same amber as every other button — they were always the buttons, but they
did not look like it.

**A train's arrival says whose Office it reached**, instead of telling everyone at the table they can work
a train standing in somebody else's district.

**You can pause the playback, and look at another player's Office Area.** While your board catches up on
everyone else's moves, **Pause** holds it where it is for as long as you like — the move you paused keeps
the time it had left — and a button for each player opens their Office Area for a look. The Day, Stage and
phase on screen now match the move you are watching, so being five moves behind looks the same everywhere
rather than on only half the page. When nobody is being waited on, the screen says what the Division is
doing instead of "waiting on nobody".

**Saved games are named after the game**, with the join code, Day and Stage in the filename.

Smaller things: the LIMITS sign is printed below its card rather than through the middle of the word, the
dividing line on a Mainline card can actually be seen, a Restaurant or Hotel next to a Whistle Post now
says it is dormant until the Office is upgraded instead of appearing to do nothing, and the version number
appears once in the page header instead of twice.

**What changed in 0.8.0.10. GAMES ALREADY RUNNING ON THIS SERVER MAY NOT RESUME** — this update fixes a
rule, and a saved game is replayed through the current rules, so a game that contains a decision the rules
no longer ask for stops at that point. Nothing is deleted: the server says which move it stopped at and
keeps the file, and re-installing 0.8.0.9 lets such a game be played out.

**The fix is worth it.** The Superintendent was being asked to rule on a train BEHIND the one leaving,
which is nobody's concern — and holding the leaving train kept the only arrival track occupied, so the
train behind arrived into it and was destroyed. A train moving away behind you no longer holds you up
either.

**Watching other players is clearer.** While your board catches up on everyone else's moves, the screen
names the player whose move you are watching rather than whoever the game is really waiting on, and the
history no longer runs ahead of the board — each line appears as its move is drawn, with Skip still
showing everything at once. The name on the Division map is readable again. A Realignment now says which
card it converted, and that card flashes on the map as it changes. A move made by holding the
Superintendent's office says so, and no line names a player twice.

**You can save a multiplayer game to a file.** The **Save replay** button on the play screen now works in
multiplayer as well as solitaire, and writes the game to your Downloads folder — the same save the Manage
Game action hands back as text.

**What changed in 0.8.0.9. Games already running on this server are not affected** — they resume
normally; no rule changed.

**The bots are much better opponents and seat-fillers.** A bot now plans its whole switching turn before
it moves, so it delivers cars to industries that can use them and brings expedited trains home. It stops
picking up face-up cards it cannot play, so it actually builds its district, and it lays track where it
opens up something to do, including run-arounds. It also no longer runs a Second Section by accident,
which was behind many of its collisions.

**What changed in 0.7.9.8. Games already running on this server are not affected** — they resume
normally, and nothing in this update changes a rule, so no saved game stops being playable. (That is
the opposite of 0.7.9 below, which did change one. It was checked, not assumed.)

Most of this update is multiplayer, and two of it are things the table could see that only one player
should have. **The random number that deals the game was announced in the shared history**, and **a
blind draw from the Home Office named the card it drew** to everybody, not just the player who drew
it. Both are gone.

**Your history panel came back empty if you reloaded the page mid-game.** The server had the whole
log the entire time and was sending it in a field the page never read, while the field the page does
read was told there was nothing new. Reload now and your history comes back with you.

**During the "play one more Day?" vote, the turn chart named a player at random.** That vote is open
to everyone at once — anybody who has not voted may vote, in any order — so there is nobody whose
turn it is, and the chart said so wrongly while the tally beside it correctly listed everyone still
to vote. It now says nobody is being waited on.

**A train your Interlocking stopped at your Limits used to disappear from the board.** It was still
there in the rules — first in line for the next free A/D track — but nothing drew it, so it looked
like the train had gone until it reappeared in your Office some Stages later. It now stands at the
Limits, marked as held.

Things that are easier to see: **trains waiting for a Crew Tray say so**, with how many trays are
free — a played Extra or an ordered second section used to wait with nothing on screen about it.
**A Red Flag standing at an Office is drawn on the map**, at the end it guards. **A Telegraph,
Telephone or Radio you have already used today is struck through** instead of still advertising its
bonus, and tells you when another district is dispatching, since it is the Superintendent's devices
that get used. **The Campaign Train says whether its speeches are made** — before them it stops
normally, after them it must be kept at the station. And two from the last playtest session: **the
Express's "one freight car per location" rule is now explained where it stops you** (the panel used
to talk about the industry instead, sending you to fix the wrong thing), and **westbound trains are
drawn in the correct half of a Mainline card**.

**What changed in 0.7.9. Read this part first: your saved solitaire game may not reopen.** Solitaire
has always had two collision limits — 3 in a Day and 5 in a game — and the setup screen has always
offered them and said that reaching one ends the game in a loss. They were never actually checked.
They are now. A saved solitaire game in which trains have collided will therefore refuse to reopen,
because the moves it recorded are no longer all legal. **Nothing is destroyed:** the save is left
exactly as it was and the game simply declines to load it, rather than opening something the rules
could not have produced. If you have a solitaire game you care about, finish it before updating.
**Multiplayer games on this server are not affected.**

The rest of 0.7.9 is things you can see. **The end-of-game screen now asks whether to play one more
Day** — the question was being drawn underneath the results dialog, so a solitaire player reaching
the end of the timetable was never offered it. **"Waiting on" now names the person and what they are
being asked**, instead of saying nobody was holding the game up while it waited on the
Superintendent. **The game's settings have moved off the top line into a This Game card** at the foot
of the right-hand column, where all of them are listed rather than the four that fitted; the running
collision counts take their place at the top, since those change as you play. **The Office Area's
show/hide button is now three buttons** — auto-hide, always show, always hide — because as a single
cycling button it could not reach every setting. **The history now reads newest first.** And **a
Heavy Grade card shows which way it climbs**, instead of only saying so in its tooltip.

**What changed in 0.7.8.** The solitaire setup screen now appears for everyone. It was being skipped
whenever your browser held a saved solitaire game — and any browser that has ever played holds one —
so most players never saw it at all. Clicking **Play solitaire** now always asks how you want the
game set up. **Your game in progress is safe:** the screen offers **Continue saved game**, and says
plainly that dealing a new one replaces it. Simply reopening the page still picks up where you left
off, exactly as before. The homepage footer now names both ways to play, too.

**What changed in 0.7.7.** Updates to this service now actually reach your browser. Until now every
release published its files under the same cache name and the server never told browsers when to
look again, so returning players kept running whatever version their browser had already stored —
the 0.7.5 solitaire setup screen and its 0.7.6 fix were both installed correctly here and neither
was ever seen. If a past update seemed to do nothing, this is why, and opening the page in a private
window was the only way to see it. That should not be necessary again.

**What changed in 0.7.6.** The **Play solitaire** door on the front page now reliably reaches
solitaire. If this browser had ever taken a seat at a multiplayer table, the door used to lose to
that game or lobby instead — a plain page load couldn't tell "I clicked Play solitaire" apart from
"I reloaded mid multiplayer game". Fixed; nothing else changed.

**What changed in 0.7.5.** Solitaire now asks before it deals. A genuinely fresh visit to the
solitaire page opens a setup screen with the full set of options — game type, starting hand, where
an Extra may start, the revenue rates, victory conditions, and the optional rules — the same
question the multiplayer lobby has asked before a game starts since 0.7.0, below. Press **Deal**
when you're ready. A saved game, a shared link that already carries a seed, or a link the setup
screen itself just produced all skip straight past it — those already answer the question rather
than needing to ask it again. Nothing about the rules changed, so **every game in progress carries
over**, both here and on the multiplayer server, without exception.

**Setting a game up (new in 0.7.0).** The lobby opens on **Join a game**: type the code you were
given and you will see the whole rule set — the opening hand, what the work pays, every way the game
can end — _before_ you take a seat. Creating a game instead starts from a **game type**: Co-op,
Competitive or Cutthroat. A type just fills in the rules; every one of them is yours to change, and
changing any of them marks the game **Custom**, which keeps the scoring of the type you started
from. The seed, the number of players and the number of Days sit above the type and do not make a
game Custom — the targets re-derive from them.

**What changed in 0.7.4.** Before anything else: **a game already in progress may not carry over.**
These are rules changes, and three of them alter what a saved game is allowed to contain, so an
old game may stop replaying. The server declines to resume one rather than breaking it — it says
which move it stopped at and leaves the save alone — so if you are mid-game and it matters, finish
it before updating or put 0.7.3 back on afterwards. A game that never runs into one of the three
carries on as normal.

**The Yard Office asks you now.** A freight train arriving in your district used to be sent into the
yard automatically, whether you wanted it there or not. Now you are asked. Three things it never
checked before it does now: it has to be able to **reach the yard in one move** — if it cannot, you
are not offered the choice, and the history tells you why rather than staying silent — and if there
are **cars standing on the way in, the train hits them**, exactly as it would anywhere else. Taking
the yard still keeps your Train Order Office free, which is the whole point of the card.

**Circus, Campaign and Military trains run loaded.** They take loaded cars from the Division Yard
while there are any, empties once there are not, and will run short rather than wait. A Circus or
Campaign train earns its point for setting up **once in each player's district** rather than once in
the whole game — so a train that tours the Division is worth more than one that parks — and only
when every car is full. Not much of a circus if the cars are empty. The Campaign train earns that
point for the first time; it never scored at all before, and it needs its candidate aboard.

**Red Flags does something else entirely.** It used to protect one stopped train out on the line.
Now you plant it on the **east or west side of your own district**, and it holds the next train
coming from that way — which is how you buy yourself a Stage to finish switching. It comes down with
the train it stops: one card, one train. You can also play it at the moment it matters. If a train
is arriving into a certain collision and you are holding the card, the game stops and asks whether
you want to flag it; say no and the collision happens.

**What changed in 0.7.3.** **Your games in progress survive this one** — unlike the last update,
nothing about the deck or the way a game is saved has changed, so a game saved under 0.7.2 picks up
where it left off.

**The game asks before it ends.** When the last Day on the timetable runs out, you are no longer
simply told the game is over: you are asked whether to play one more Day. Say yes and you get one
Day — not two, not the rest of the evening — and at the end of it you are asked again. In a
multiplayer game **everybody has to agree**, and one "no" ends it there and then, so nobody is kept
playing a game they have finished with.

**Playing on cannot change who won.** The result is decided at the length you dealt the game for. If
you set up five Days and carry on to eight, the winner is still whoever was ahead at the end of Day
5, and the results screen says so — everything after that is recorded as what it is, an exhibition.
One exception: a game that ends because of **too many collisions** is over for good and is not
offered another Day, whether that happens on a scheduled Day or an extra one. A railroad that has
been declared unsafe does not carry on regardless.

**The end of a game now tells you what happened.** In place of one line and a number there is a full
results screen: why the game ended, in plain English rather than a code; who won and by how much;
every player's Revenue side by side; the rules the game was actually dealt under, including the pay
rates and any optional rules; who did what; and what the railroad managed — trains that ran the
length of the Division and how many of them did any switching on the way, loads made up and broken,
passengers boarded and set down, cars coupled and set out, and any trains lost to a collision along
with the cars that went with them. It comes up by itself when the game ends and there is a button to
open it again, so playing on never costs you the results.

**What changed in 0.7.2.** Before you read on: that update was the one where **a game already in
progress did not carry over**, because the card deck changed size. If you are updating from 0.7.1 or
earlier, that still applies to you.

At the table, three things looked different. **Crossing a Mainline card is quicker, and counted
differently**: the speed sign printed on the card was always just scenery, and what decides the time
is the number of regions drawn on it — Plains and Double Track one, Curves and Tunnel two, Heavy
Grade three unless you have Helpers or Brakeman on it. A train's **Fast/Slow rating only matters on
the Hilly card** now, instead of adding a Stage to every card, so slow trains in particular get
across the Division far quicker than they used to. **The deck is smaller and holds less track**,
matching the published card counts, so building a district is a slower business and the cards you
draw are worth more. And **the Division map is one row you read left to right**, west on the left and
east on the right, instead of wrapping around the screen — it no longer shows the inside of anyone's
district, which is what your own Office map is for, but every train in a district still appears on
it, with the ones holding an arrival track drawn on the rail and any crew switching drawn below it.

**Leaving, and coming back.** Anyone may leave a lobby, and the host can clear a chair, so a
mis-join or somebody who wanders off no longer blocks a table that cannot start until every seat is
taken. A **Leave game** button appears once a game is running: it keeps your seat and the table
waits for you, and the lobby lists every game this browser is in so you can rejoin it — or join a
different one without losing the first. **Forget** on that list is the one thing that cannot be
undone: the token kept in your browser is the only proof of who you are, so a forgotten game cannot
be rejoined from that browser.

### Get Join Secret

Run this whenever you need the current join secret again, or want to shut out anyone still
holding an old one. Every run replaces the secret and immediately puts the new one into effect —
players already seated in a game are unaffected, but the old secret stops working for creating or
joining games from that point on.

### Games in Progress

Shows every game on the server: who is playing, which Day and Stage they have reached, and whose
turn it is. It changes nothing, so run it whenever you are curious. It is also how you spot a game
nobody is coming back to — one whose last move was days ago, still waiting on a particular player.

### Manage Game

Pick a game, then either save a copy of it or end it.

**Export** hands you the whole game as text and leaves it running. Save that text as a `.json`
file and you can open it in the replay viewer later to watch the game back.

**End the game** deletes it and disconnects anyone still watching. This is the only way to clear
a game that will never be finished — otherwise it sits there, and comes back every time the
service restarts. It cannot be undone, so the game's save is handed back to you when it happens:
that text is the only copy left, so keep it if the game was worth watching.

### Restore a Seat

Use this when a player cannot get back into a game they are already in — they open the page and find
an empty lobby, with no game code and no name filled in, as though they had never joined.

That happens because the only proof of who you are is kept by your own browser. Clear your browsing
data, come back in a private window, or sit down at a different browser, and that proof is gone —
even though the game is still running on the server and the seat is still yours.

Pick the player from the list and this hands you a link. Send it to them, and opening it in their own
browser puts them straight back in their seat. **The link works once and expires after 30 minutes**,
and whoever opens it takes that seat — so send it to that person directly rather than posting it
somewhere public. If it expires before they get to it, just run the action again.

> **Games in progress normally survive an update of this service.** When the update changes the
> rules of the game itself, a half-played game cannot be resumed under rules it was not played by,
> and that game is set aside rather than continued — you would see it disappear from the lobby.
> Nothing is ever deleted, so going back to the previous version makes it playable again.