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Author	SHA1	Message	Date
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.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

Author

SHA1

Message

Date

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.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