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v0.8.0.15 — the reference documents, and a card that advertised what it cannot do

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The four hand-written references brought up to the game as it actually runs,
ahead of the next testing round, plus a Quickstart to hand a tester who has never
played. They had not been touched since v0.6.2 — a month and two minor versions —
and each now says at the top which build it describes.

ONE LIVE BUG CAME OUT OF THE PASS. mainlineDescription told players "Cars may be
sorted into any new order here" on the Interchange. It is the printed capability
and has never been implemented: nothing reads sortsCars to permit a sort, and its
one live use is marking the card an Extra may be made up on, because it is the
Mainline card with a yard. That sentence is not only documentation — view.ts
renders it as a Mainline card's `what`, so it is what a player reads on the
board, and the generated reference printed a "Sorts cars: yes" column beside it.
A card advertising a button that does not exist sends a player hunting for it and
then concluding the game is broken.

What the documents had wrong, all of it verified against the code rather than
read for tone: the victory model in the Rules book (firstToTarget /
highestAfterDays and the target-bearing length presets stopped existing in
2026-08 — it is a free days count and a combined floor of 3 x players x days);
"there is no lobby, no server, no multiplayer"; crossing time in mph rather than
regions; Extras launched automatically eastbound; the Uncontrolled Siding listed
as a passing card; industry track length taken from the box count; and a
"Sister Trains" optional rule that never existed. The Home deck's counts table
came out under TODO #15a — Jesse's own ruling that counts move with balance —
and it had been wrong for a month, which is the argument made twice.

The Home and Mainline deck references are restructured to explain how a deck is
USED and to defer every per-card table to rules/as-built.md. Duplicating it by
hand is precisely the drift #15a was raised about: as-built needed no correction
beyond the Interchange, because build:cards regenerates it and a test fails when
the checked-in file disagrees. Everything hand-maintained around it had drifted;
it had not.

docs/design.md, the index everything starts from, said v0.4.3, "what is not: the
server", and 493 tests. It now also lists the player-facing references, which it
never has, so the Quickstart is findable at all.

999 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DmdqqCNoiqE7GBo6wthBnR
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Jesse.Markowitz
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co-authored by Claude Opus 5
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# Station Master — Quickstart
**For a tester who has never played. Describes the game as built at v0.8.0.15** (2026-09-20).
Read this once before you sit down. It is about twenty minutes of reading and will save you an hour
of confusion. The deeper references are listed at the end.
---
## 1. What the game is
You are a railroad **Office** — a town — on a shared east–west main line called the **Division**.
Everyone's Office sits in a row along it, west to east, with **Mainline cards** between them.
Two jobs run at once:
**Your own job, in your district.** Build track. Build industries and a passenger platform. Shunt
cars around with a switching crew to get the right car to the right place, so that freight can be
loaded and unloaded and passengers can get on and off. Every one of those completed pieces of work
pays **Revenue**, which is the score.
**The shared job, out on the Division.** Scheduled trains run across everybody's territory on a
timetable. They arrive at your Office, and you work them. When two trains want the same stretch of
track, the player wearing the **Superintendent's Fedora** rules on whether the second may follow the
first. Rule wrong and they collide, which costs 5 Revenue and counts against a limit that can end
the game.
The tension the game is built around: **the useful work is local and slow, and the trains are shared
and do not wait.**
---
## 2. How you win
The game runs a set number of **Days** — five by default. Each Day is **12 Stages**, which you can
think of as two-hour clock periods from midnight.
At the end of the last Day:
1. **The table's combined Revenue is checked first**, against a floor of **3 × players × Days**. At
three players over five Days that is 45. **Miss it and everybody loses**, however well you
personally did. This is the number to watch.
2. **Co-op:** meeting the floor is the win, together.
3. **Competitive:** meeting the floor puts the game on, and the **highest individual Revenue** wins.
4. **Solitaire:** meet the floor by yourself.
**Collisions can end it early and badly.** Breaching the collision limit stops play at once in a
collective loss — the railroad has been declared unsafe. Default limits are 3 in one Day and 5 in
the game.
**Falling short offers another Day** rather than just ending, so a game that misses the floor can be
played on. A game stopped by collisions cannot.
### Where Revenue comes from
| Work | Pays |
| --- | --- |
| A passenger boarding at your platform | 1 |
| A passenger getting off at your platform | 1 |
| Completing an outbound freight load | 1 |
| Completing an inbound freight unload | 1 |
| A train completing its run across the whole Division | 0 by default, to every player |
Those rates are set when the game is dealt and can be changed. The default means **your score comes
almost entirely from working cars in your own district** — trains passing through pay nothing by
themselves.
---
## 3. The shape of a Stage
Every Stage runs five phases in this order. Only two of them are your turn.
| # | Phase | What happens |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **Local Operations** | **Your turn.** Choose ONE of three things (below). Each player in turn, starting with the Superintendent and working eastward. |
| 2 | **New Train** | Trains due this Stage are made up from the Division Yard. The table takes turns adding one car each. |
| 3 | **Mainline** | Automatic. Trains move, lowest number first. This is where clearance rulings and collisions happen. |
| 4 | **Cargo** | **Your turn.** Your Laborers and Porters do their work — the loading, unloading, boarding and detraining that actually pays. |
| 5 | **Supervisor Shift** | Automatic. Laborers and Porters refresh; expedited trains depart. Every third Stage the Fedora passes. |
### Local Operations: you get exactly one of these
- **Switch** — take a crew and shunt. **Six Moves** (five at night under Reduced Visibility). This is
how cars physically get from the yard to an industry and back. Cars you run over are coupled up
automatically, so plan the route.
- **Draw** — take a card, then play and/or discard. This is how your district gets built: track,
industries, Office upgrades, modifiers, train cards.
- **Freight Agent** — one clerical act: stock a green outbound box, clear a red inbound box, or
unjam a facility.
**You cannot do two of them in one Stage.** Choosing is most of the game. A Stage spent drawing is a
Stage not spent switching.
> Passengers are **not** the Freight Agent's job. They board and get off in the **Cargo** phase, with
> a **Porter**. Reaching for the wrong role and finding nothing there is the single most common new
> player mistake, so each role now says on screen what it is for.
---
## 4. The screen
Left column, top to bottom:
- **The Division — west to east.** The shared main line: every Office and the Mainline cards between
them, with trains drawn where they are. **West is always on the left**, and a train's engine is
drawn as an arrow (◀ or ▶) showing which way it points.
- **Your Office Area.** Your own grid of track cards. This is where switching happens. It folds away
outside the phases that change it, unless you pin it open.
- **History.** What has happened, most recent first.
Right column:
- **Your Move** — the buttons. If it is not your turn this is empty, and the board tells you who is
acting.
- **Cards in My Hand**, and the **Department decks** — three face-up discard piles anyone may draw
the top of.
- **The Yards.** The **Division Yard** is the live supply of cars. The **Classification Yard** is
where used cars go, and it comes back **only when the Division Yard runs completely bare**.
- **Timetable** — who is due out and when.
- **Blocked — why nothing is moving.** *Read this panel.* When something will not work, this is
where the game explains why, in rules terms.
- **Facilities** — the load pipelines at each industry.
Across the top: your Revenue, the target, the Day and Stage, collisions, and the game code.
**When other players are acting**, their turns are replayed on your board a step at a time rather
than arriving already rearranged, with a `[N behind]` counter, **Pause** and **Skip**. Your own moves
are not replayed at you — they are already on your screen.
---
## 5. Your first twenty minutes
Play a **solitaire** game first. It needs no server and nobody else, and it is the same rules.
1. Open the site, choose **Play solitaire**, accept the defaults, **Deal**.
2. **Stage 1 — Draw.** You start on a **Whistle Post** with almost nothing. Play a track card or two
to extend your Running Track, and get a **Depot** down as soon as one appears: it is the upgrade
that makes you a passenger facility and gives you a second A/D track.
3. **Build one industry** on a stub off the main — not on the Running Track itself, which the game
will not allow.
4. **Play a train card** when you get one. It rolls onto the timetable and then runs at that Stage
**every Day**.
5. **When a train arrives at your Office**, switch cars to it or from it, and do the paying work in
the **Cargo** phase.
6. Watch the **Blocked** panel whenever you are stuck. It is usually one missing thing: no empty car
spotted, no loaded car in the yard, a full box, a locked industry track.
Then play a Day or two of multiplayer with bots filling the other seats, to see the table take turns.
---
## 6. Things that surprise new players
- **A turnout cannot be stopped on.** You may run through it; you may not end a Move there.
- **Coupling is mandatory.** Run over a standing car and you take it, whether or not you wanted it.
- **An industry track locks while a load is on its MEN | AT | WORK boxes.** No train can enter,
cross or work there until it clears.
- **A modifier adds a BOX, never room for a car.** It raises how much work an industry can hold, not
how much rail it has.
- **Nothing may be built outside your Limits** — track, industries and modifiers alike. Your district
ends at its sign, and the sign moves outward as your Running Track grows.
- **A train must be made up to leave.** Engine at one end; if it has a caboose, the caboose at the
far end. A train shunted out of shape sits at your Office until you fix it — a **Small Yard** will
re-order a consist for one Move, and each option tells you whether the result can leave.
- **Passengers may dry up completely.** Coaches move one way — boarding sends the emptied coach to
the Classification Yard, and it only comes back when the Division Yard is bare, which may never
happen. When it does, the yard panel warns you and passenger trains are made up empty. **This is
the rules working as designed**, not a bug; report how it felt, not that it happened.
- **Expedited trains leave the same Stage they arrived**, after the Cargo phase. Ordinary ones wait.
---
## 7. What to report
Most useful, in order:
1. **What you expected versus what happened**, with the Day and Stage. "Day 2 Stage 9, train 5 had
no coaches" is worth more than "passengers seem broken".
2. **Save the game** (the **Save replay** button) and send the file. A save is the seed and the moves
made, so it replays exactly and the bug can be looked at directly.
3. **Anything the screen did not explain.** If you had to guess a rule, that is a finding even when
the game was right.
4. **Anything you went looking for and could not find.**
Bugs go to the tracker; anything unclear in this guide is also worth saying.
---
## 8. Where to read more
| For | Read |
| --- | --- |
| The rules in full, with the FAQ | [Rules](StationMaster-Rules-v0.4.5.md) |
| Every card, generated from the code | [`rules/as-built.md`](rules/as-built.md) |
| How the Home Office deck is dealt and played | [Home deck](StationMaster-Home-Deck-v0.4.5.md) |
| The Mainline cards and what they do to a train | [Mainline deck](StationMaster-Mainline-Deck-v0.4.5.md) |
| Rolling stock, yards, trays, the Fedora | [Components](StationMaster-Components-v0.4.5.md) |