station-master-startos/instructions.md

Station Master

Documentation

• Rules and design 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 0.8.0.10. 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.

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.