10 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Fable 5.1 04ca74c365 v0.8.5 — housekeeping from the audit, and the playtest line retired
The third release from the audit; nothing a player sees changes. CHANGELOG has the detail.

The 0.4.9 playtest line is no longer maintained (Jesse, 2026-09-29): the deploy rule that
existed for it is gone and #85 is moot. The table test (#39 #35 #42a #40) is closed — every
line of the checklist was met at a table. #46 is done and cannot regrow: the 36 unused
declarations are removed and `noUnusedLocals`/`noUnusedParameters` are on; two of them were
dead bot functions from rejected candidates the round said it had deleted. The documents no
longer teach `trainCapSlack` (a knob that throws), point at `as-built.md` (deleted in 0.8.2),
model `officeType` (the engine says `tier`) or describe `collisionOccurred` (never emitted);
the README's account of bot flags now matches the bot's. Five playtest saves committed in
`docs/` against the repository's own rule are in the ignored `playtests/`.

What the audit found and did not fix is written down as TODO #112-#117, each with its reason.
#112 is `docs/plans/structure.md`, the proposal for `http.ts`, `main.ts` and `check`. #117 —
`/api/save` hands a seat the seed mid-game — waits on a conversation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FrCWubm9GAftYCm2hWdKwK
2026-09-29 17:02:33 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 3befc420da v0.8.2 — every district opens on a Depot, and the docs are pages now
A second-digit bump for a playtest read back against the save file. Nine questions
were asked of one three-Day game; three were bugs, three were the rules working
and undocumented, three were decisions. Every save on the test server was replayed
against this build BEFORE release, which is how the cost of each rule was known
before it was chosen rather than discovered after.

EVERY DISTRICT OPENS ON A DEPOT. A Whistle Post has one A/D track and is not a
Passenger Facility, so the opening of every game was spent unable to work a
passenger and one arrival away from a collision. Two A/D tracks and passengers
from Stage 1 now; "Players start with Whistle Posts, not Depots" is the harder
game, set when the game is created. The deck follows the choice — starting on
Depots the four Depot upgrade cards are left out, because an upgrade must be to
the next tier and a Depot card at a table of Depots is a dead draw. How much
easier it is showed up as a test failure rather than an argument: the cue-coverage
pool needed widening from 24 seeded games to 60 before it held one collision.

NO SAVE WAS STRANDED BY IT, which took care. This is the one house rule that
changes how a game is DEALT rather than how it plays, so replaying a save under
the wrong opening is a different railroad from intent one — silently, with no
error. `withSavedOpening` fills it on the replay paths ONLY. Putting it in the
resolver instead made a fresh Cutthroat game deal Whistle Posts and read as
Custom, which is how the distinction was found.

THREE BUGS, ALL REPORTED FROM ONE GAME AND ALL CONFIRMED ON ITS SAVE.

An Office held TWO TRAINS ON ONE A/D TRACK. The capacity test passed with nothing
standing, the train the Interlocking had been holding at the Limits was moved into
the free slot, and the arriving train was pushed in after it without anyone asking
again whether there was room — so the collision §8.3 calls for never happened. The
held train keeps priority; the newcomer now takes the consequence it would have
met had the held train arrived first.

THE HISTORY FROZE, permanently, and the log cap was not really the cause. Each
seat's "what have I sent you" bookmark was an INDEX into an array the game trims,
so once a seat's bookmark reached the limit the slice returned nothing for the
rest of the game — at a different moment per seat, because each holds its own.
That game's log ended at exactly the cap. Lines carry a sequence number now, which
survives trimming; proven by pushing twice the cap through a simulated seat.

§8.1 ASKED THE WRONG QUESTION TWICE. "Trains may pass" returned `clear` before the
Subdivision was looked at, so a train entering a Double Track was released however
busy the rest of it was — that, not anything about Control Points, is what let
Train 8 out with no ruling. And a train standing at an Office was invisible to the
scan, so one about to re-enter the very Subdivision being entered counted for
nothing. Capacity is the test, not presence: a Depot with a track free is not in
the way; a Whistle Post with its one track taken is.

THINGS THAT HAPPENED SILENTLY NOW SAY SO — a train held against a facing one, a
train released from the Limits (a side effect of somebody else's arrival, so it
simply appeared at the Office), and the train an Interlocking is holding, whose
explanatory tooltip has existed since #99 with NO renderer ever reading the flag.

WHERE A MOVE IS REFUSED, AND WHY. `exploreMoves` decides where the rails go and the
pick-up restrictions are enforced afterwards in `check`, so a square the rails
reached and the card forbade was reachable, un-offered, and absent from the block
list with nothing said. Those squares are blocked with the rule that blocks them
now, and the reasons are got by ASKING `check` rather than re-deriving: a second
implementation of the rules is exactly the failure the block list exists to avoid.
A train may also always recover its own caboose — X13 prints "may drop but not
pick up anything", and a train needs its caboose to be made up, so one that parted
with it could never legally leave again.

RULES DECIDED IN SEPTEMBER AND APPLIED HERE. A Modifier must sit square against its
host, no diagonals. A passenger Modifier may not be played at a Whistle Post. Both
were built, measured, held back for a fortnight so a playtest could finish, and
applied now. A Second Section costs its card: `SECOND_SECTION` was declared in
content.ts and never dealt, so the action was free and the bot ordered 26
accidental ones in a measured round. The card is dealt and spent — gating on a card
the deck never holds would have deleted the mechanic rather than fixed it.

THE DOCUMENTATION IS A SET OF PAGES, not five text files served as text/plain — a
card reference is mostly tables, and as plain text a table is rows of pipes.
Markdown is still the one copy; the build renders it, and publishes the .md beside
each page. No Markdown library: this project has no runtime dependencies and one
would be a poor first. The pages add what Markdown cannot carry without drifting —
a nav across the set, a contents list built from the headings actually rendered,
an anchor on every heading, a 70-character measure, and tables that are tables.
They print as ink on paper.

The references caught up with the rules, checked rather than assumed: two
statements had gone from stale to misleading (the Quickstart told a new player to
"get a Depot down as soon as one appears"), and four rules nobody could look up
are written down — the Office tier table, §8.1 in practice, what the Circus Train
pays for, and that a Realignment can be a card with no legal target.

Adding one card to the deck reshuffles every seeded deal, which broke five
fixtures. Each was a seed meaning "a game like this" — TODO #84, exactly — so
seeds moved and pools widened rather than assertions weakening, and the clearance
fixture pins its terrain the way `enhancements.test.ts` already does. The three
published replays were re-recorded.

Closes TODO #40, #42a, #108, #109 and #110.

1046 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MUizFYCMHRWhbWwXhp7WPR
2026-09-23 07:07:21 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 45580d8b61 v0.7.3 — a game that asks before it ends, and a results screen worth reading
Two issues off the tracker, and they are halves of one thing: the end of a game.
Neither ships on the 0.4.9 line — Jesse's call, that line may be complete and
these are not fixes people mid-playtest need.

EXTENDED PLAY (#11). The official result is settled at the original game length
and never changes: in a five-Day game extended to eight, the winner is whoever
led at the end of Day 5. Extending grants exactly one Day and the question is put
again at the end of it — solitaire the player decides alone, multiplayer it is
unanimous and one refusal ends it there. Only days-based endings offer it; a §3.4
collision breach is final, during an extended Day exactly as during the scheduled
game.

It could not be a client-side change. `check` refused every intent once `status`
left `active`; the server never loads a `finished` game back into memory; and a
save is `{ seed, config, history }` replayed through the engine, so a "continue"
the history does not record did not happen. Hence a fourth status,
`awaitingExtension`, and a `game.extend` intent. `config.days` never moves —
`extraDays` counts the borrowed Days and `official` freezes the outcome, the
standings and the statistics at the first ending.

THE RESULTS SCREEN (#16). `GAME OVER — revenueFloor` was `outcome.reason`, an
internal enum interpolated into the page at the one moment the game has the
player's whole attention. Every reason now has a sentence with the game's own
numbers in it. Around it: the result and winner, standings, the rules the game
was dealt under, a per-player breakdown, and the railroad — trains through the
Division and how many worked en route, loads made up and broken, passengers, cars
switched, trains destroyed. It shares the Day-end dialog's blocks rather than
reimplementing them, and stays reopenable so continuing does not cost you the
results.

Statistics are folded, not recorded: `state.tally` counts what the event stream
says happened, hooked at `applyIntent` and `advance` because `reduce` never sees
the phase driver's events — and those are the interesting ones. Nothing in the
rules reads it, and it rides the Frame, so multiplayer gets the same numbers as
solitaire from one implementation.

THREE BUGS FOUND IN TESTING, all of which would have shipped:

  - a saved game containing a vote could not be resumed (NO_ACTOR). A history is
    a flat Intent[] with no seat recorded; the replay derives who acted from the
    turn order, which cannot work for an intent every seat may send in any order.
    `game.extend` carries its voter, checked against the authenticated seat.
  - an all-bot game hung on the question for ever. `driveBots` loops on
    `currentActor`, null the moment the game stops, so it cannot cast a vote, and
    the bot-vote driver returned early with no humans to follow.
  - the balance harness became unbounded — `test/sim.test.ts` went from under a
    second to never finishing. `randomBot` took another Day about half the time,
    so every seeded game ran to playGame's 50,000-turn cap. Fixed in the driver,
    not in a policy, so it holds for bots not yet written.

All three have regression tests. 832 tests pass, against 793 before this change.

NOT BUILT, and a correction. #16's own comment said `trainStoodStill` "is emitted
per Stage, so a run of them is exactly the sat-on-a-siding streak". It is not:
reading advance.ts, it fires once per game and only for a train whose profile
sets `stopEarnsPoint` — the X18 Circus — with `stopPointClaimed` preventing a
second. The streak was built, rendered "1 Stage at (0,0)", and was taken out
again. There is no per-Stage "this train did not move" signal in the engine, so
"longest an engine sat on a siding" needs one first; TODO.md #36 records what it
would take, and the Circus set-up is reported instead. Badges remain the second
pass #16 asks for (TODO.md #33), and because the statistics are derived rather
than recorded, that pass can add any of them retroactively to games already
played and saved.

Extended play has not yet been played at a real table (TODO.md #35): the
multiplayer vote has only been driven through `session.intent`, never through two
browsers.

Closes #11
Closes #16

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
2026-08-29 04:23:26 -04:00
Jesse.Markowitz 2ab25e320c v0.7.2 — a leg that is part of the row, the deck the sheet prints, regions not miles per hour, and a Division you read left to right
Gitea#17 — a 45° leg is an end of the west-to-east row, so backing into a cut
through a curve's south leg no longer couples it back to front. The same
assumption left a crew's own cut standing when it pulled out through a leg,
which is the "cars left behind" report we had failed to reproduce.

Gitea#14 — every count is docs/Deck cards5.xlsx. Track halved, and the Q12
office doubling and Gap 12 industry tripling both come out with it: they were
measured against a deck with twice the track, and keeping them at the sheet's
track count wipes out the reefer chain entirely. 84 rows now match card for
card; the ten Safety, Event and Inspection cards it adds are not built and are
held out. Cards the sheet no longer lists are dealt zero copies rather than
deleted, so their rules stay implemented.

Gitea#15 — RAR reversed it: a rail may stop dead against its neighbour and the
placement is legal. What must hold is that no train crosses the gap, which was
already true and is now pinned against the reported board.

Gitea#3 — the printed speeds are scenery. A card costs one Stage per printed
region and where a train STARTS is what varies; Fast/Slow is read on Hilly
alone. Entering a one-region card behind another is a collision now, which is
what ABS exists to prevent, and ABS no longer holds trains silently.

Gitea#18 — the Division draws as one row, west to east, with no office-area
detail. East is finally always to the right.

Closes #3
Closes #14
Closes #15
Closes #17
Closes #18
2026-08-26 15:20:56 -04:00
Jesse.Markowitz 40f07b0710 v0.6.0 — saves survive a release, Employee Rotation is real, and the lobby
asks what game you want

Three queued items. The last matters most.

A RELEASE NO LONGER DESTROYS EVERY GAME IN PROGRESS.

Four consecutive releases killed every game on the box, one of them a
release that changed only how the board is drawn. The reasoning behind the
refusal was always right — a move legal under old rules may not be legal
under new ones, and half-replaying a save is worse than refusing it. The
TEST was wrong: it compared engineVersion for exact equality, and that
stamp is the package version, which moves for a CSS fix.

Whether a save still replays has an exact answer, so it is now asked
directly. loadGame reads the file and judges nothing; tryResumeSession
replays the intents and reports the first one the engine refuses. A save
stamped with a version this server has never run resumes fine provided its
moves replay — verified against a file hand-stamped 0.4.9-ancient. One that
genuinely does not replay is still refused, but the log names the move
rather than two version strings: "move 3 of 8 (localOps.choose) is rejected
by the current rules with OPTION_ALREADY_CHOSEN".

fromMultiplayerSave had to stop lying first. It has always stopped at the
first unacceptable intent and done so in silence, which was survivable only
because the version gate meant a doomed replay was never attempted. Now
that the replay IS the check, it returns where it stopped and why.

Deliberately not done: resuming a partly-replayable game at its last good
move. That silently rewinds a game to a position nobody played to while
every browser holding a later Frame carries on unaware. Refusing leaves the
file intact, so putting the previous version back still recovers it.

EMPLOYEE ROTATION IS IMPLEMENTED, SISTER TRAINS IS DELETED.

Two of the four optional-rule flags were read by nothing at all. Employee
Rotation is four lines in advance.ts, because the seat/player split (D9)
exists for precisely this rule: seating is the only thing that moves, so
Revenue, hands, the Superintendent and whose turn it is travel with the
player, and the Office, district, grid and any trains standing in it stay
with the chair. Inheriting the district you move into is the point of the
rule, not a side effect. "Left" is seat + 1, matching playerLeftOf.

Sister Trains is deleted rather than built: Q9 records that the Second
Section card supersedes it, and that card exists, so the flag was a toggle
for a rule the game no longer has.

THE LOBBY ASKS WHAT GAME YOU WANT TO PLAY.

Creating a game asked for a name, a mode and a table size; every other dial
was hardcoded. A Game settings block now carries the same set the solitaire
dialog does — seed, starting hand, the three revenue rates, Days, the
combined-Revenue floor, both collision caps, the opponent-card toggle —
plus the three surviving optional rules. Mode and table size set the
defaults and everything stays editable. The seed is honoured, so a game can
be reproduced or compared.

Verified: 682 tests pass (679 + 3). The rotation tests were mutation-checked
both ways — disabling the rotation and turning the table the wrong way each
fail the suite. Live: a save stamped 0.4.9-ancient resumed, an injected
illegal move was refused by name, and a create with every dial set to a
non-default value came back out of game.json with all of them intact,
including seed 777.

Two of my own assertions were wrong on the way and the tests caught them:
the Fedora legitimately passes at Stage 12 (§5) so it cannot be compared
against its own earlier value, and dispatchUsedToday is cleared at every
Day boundary so it cannot mark a district.
2026-08-21 21:45:34 -04:00
Jesse c3c5cbfeec v0.5.0 — multiplayer Phases 2 and 3: a server that runs a game and survives being restarted
Phases 0-1 shipped in v0.4.0 (seat/identity split, per-player turn state, the Session boundary).
This lands Phase 2 (server core, one game, no lobby) and Phase 3 (persistence and resumption) per
docs/architecture/multiplayer.md §12. Phases 4-6 (lobby/reconnection, the 22 opponent-directed
cards, StartOS packaging) are still ahead.

Phase 2: src/server/session.ts hosts a game in pure logic (no sockets) on top of game.ts's existing
Game/submit/currentActor/actionMenu; it verifies seat === currentActor(game) itself before calling
submit, since submit() trusts its caller and a server can't. src/server/http.ts and index.ts add
POST /api/game, GET /api/stream (SSE, per-seat), POST /api/intent, and static serving of dist/.
src/sim/frame-delta.ts is a purpose-built per-seat board delta for one live push at a time. Found
and fixed along the way: actionMenu(game, seat) only used seat for the hand field, so a server
computing every connected seat's Menu would have handed the acting player's legal moves to a
waiting seat. Verified with a live end-to-end smoke test (2-player game, two SSE streams, a
rejected intent from the wrong seat, an idempotent resend) plus test/server/session.test.ts and
test/redaction.test.ts. Not verified: an actual browser (none available in this environment).

Phase 3: src/server/persistence.ts writes game.json and turn-timings.json, atomic-rewrite-then-
rename. game.ts gained fromMultiplayerSave, fixing a narration-attribution bug found while testing
it (fromSave's replay loop drops the actor argument, invisible in solitaire, unreadable the moment
there's more than one seat — fromSave itself still has this gap, deliberately untouched). Verified
live: server killed and restarted mid-game, both seats reconnected exactly where they left off.

Two rules bugs found while building this: the New Train phase never implemented its car-placement
round (every car of every train was placed by the Superintendent alone, in every mode, all along —
now reads the round position off tray.consist.length); and victory conditions are now one shared,
configurable GameConfig set across solitaire/competitive/coop instead of a fixed length lookup and
a dead firstToTarget condition.

Also folds in the three fixes already released on the patch line as v0.4.9b/c/d: a switching
train's crew badge failing to draw once it left the Office square, an unload that always took the
westmost car regardless of which was picked, and a legal decision that could render with zero
buttons.

docs/testing/0.5.0-test-plan.md and three reported-bug save files (docs/station-master-seed*.json)
included for reproducibility. tools/jitsi-harness/ deliberately left untracked — unrelated
side-project work, not part of this release. 635 tests, 0 failures.
2026-08-20 23:50:38 -04:00
Jesse 6655e20ea8 v0.4.4 — New Game dialog for the opening hand and the three revenue rates, Yard renamed Interchange, and two movement bugs behind a mirrored consist 2026-08-14 22:39:50 -04:00
Jesse 1bf1e95058 v0.3.0 — playtest fixes, two new rules, and §7 enforced 2026-08-12 21:08:28 -04:00
Jesse 4a800a053a created harness to better test bots. improved bot play 2026-08-09 19:24:54 -04:00
Jesse 35575147cd added harness to support bots being able to run / test strategies. 2026-08-08 15:07:42 -04:00