"If played, asked FLAG EAST or FLAG WEST. That stops all trains from entering your
limits from that direction (i.e. Flag East holds westbound trains). You can do this
if you see a problem or wish to complete switching."
REPLACES the old rule outright, per Jesse's call. Red Flags used to be played on a
stopped train out on the Mainline and protected it from a rear-ender: offered 4,212
times and played 4 across 600 games, a mechanic nobody used, and ABS Signals already
does that job better. The flag is now planted on one side of your own district and
holds the next train arriving from that side.
SPENT ON THE TRAIN IT STOPS. One card, one train, so there is no lifting action to
build, nothing to forget, and a flag cannot quietly strangle the Division. The held
train loses one Mainline Phase and comes in on the next — it buys a Stage to clear
the lead, which is what "wish to complete switching" asks for.
PLAYABLE OUT OF PHASE, which is the other half of the issue: when an arrival would
certainly collide and the district's owner holds the card, the phase breaks in and
asks. Offered ONLY to somebody holding one — a prompt with a single button is not a
choice, and it would leak that a collision is coming. The danger is read from §8.3's
own two triggers rather than restated, so the prompt cannot offer a flag against a
collision that will not happen.
Built on the decision union Gitea#5 introduced: this adds a `redFlag` case and
nothing else structural.
THE BOT STILL NEVER PLAYS IT, AND I MEASURED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. It now takes the
out-of-phase prompt unconditionally — the engine has already established the danger,
so there is nothing left to judge — and over 200 solitaire games `redFlagsSet` fires
ZERO times. The prompt needs an arrival that would collide (0.14 per game, about one
game in seven) to coincide with holding the card from a three-card hand out of 121.
So the anomaly exemption in sim.test.ts stays, but its comment no longer claims the
bot is unwilling: it is measuring deck luck. What is left to fix is the half of the
card a human would use, planting a flag on purpose to buy switching time, and TODO.md
now says that instead of the old finding.
A BUG WORTH RECORDING, because the next interruption will meet it too: the flag was
originally taken down in a `reduce` case, which never fires for an event advance.ts
emits — the phase driver mutates state and then describes it. The flag stayed up and
held every train that came. test/events.test.ts's unreduced-event registry is what
makes that class of mistake visible, and `redFlagSpent` is on it deliberately now,
with the reasoning.
858 tests pass.
Closes#19
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
"Trains that are only freight (cabooses ok, no coaches allowed) that arrive in a
player's area who has the yard office card get an extra ability… the game will
offer that player the option… They can of course still choose to have the train go
to the standard office."
It was implemented, in a stripped form missing all three conditions: a qualifying
train was TELEPORTED onto the Yard Office card. Nobody was asked, no route was
computed — so the card's own printed "that can reach the yard office in one move"
was unenforced — and because nothing was walked, nothing was ever met on the way.
All three now hold:
- OFFERED to whoever sits in the district, interrupting the Mainline Phase on the
turn the train arrives. Declining is an ordinary arrival onto an A/D track.
- REACHABILITY is the engine's own move walk. `exploreMoves` already means what
the card means — any distance without changing direction, finishing on
Operational Rail (§2.4, §A.1) — so using it is what makes code and card agree.
Reversing is a separate Move, so a yard that can only be reached by backing up
is correctly out of reach.
- CARS ON THE LEAD COLLIDE. The walk does not treat standing cars as obstacles;
it COUPLES them, because that is what a switching move does. An arriving train
is not switching, so what it would have coupled is what it is about to hit —
the same reading §8.3 already applies to the Running Track. `destination.couples`
is therefore the fouling signal, and it needed no new machinery.
Per Jesse's ruling (2026-08-29) the two failures his issue names are kept apart: no
route means no offer, with the history saying why ("make sure this is logged in
history — why can't move so user knows why they can't get to yard"); a route that
exists but is fouled IS offered, and taking it crashes. A silent absence is
indistinguishable from a broken feature, which is how the missing check survived.
THE SHARED REFACTOR THIS NEEDED. `pendingDecision` was one question asked of one
player — §8.1's clearance, always the Superintendent — and `currentActor` hardcoded
that. It is a discriminated union now, with `decisionActor` as the single place that
maps a question to whoever must answer it, and `clearanceRuling` generalised to
`decisionAnswer`. Six copies of `pendingDecision !== null ? superintendent :
currentActor` across the engine, the sim, the web client and the tests collapse into
`actingPlayer`; they had already stopped being right the moment a second kind of
question existed. Gitea#19 needs the same machinery and now only has to add a case.
A BUG THE FIRST CUT WALKED INTO, worth recording because it is a trap the next
interruption will meet too: the offer must be put BEFORE the train is taken off its
Mainline card. `needsClearance` unwinds the whole phase and the driver re-enters
from the top, so asking after the `transits` filter cost the train its place on the
card and the answer had nowhere to land. §8.1 gets this right by asking before it
commits, and the Yard Office now does the same.
The developer bot declines: the Yard Office frees an A/D track, but the lead may be
fouled and the bot cannot read its own yard well enough to tell (`TODO.md`, Bot
Performance). Declining is always safe and keeps the harness comparable with every
measurement taken before this rule existed.
851 tests pass.
Closes#5
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
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#11Closes#16
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
Three more from the v0.4.9e gameplay-testing round, filed as Gitea issues, plus two bugs found
underneath them. Gitea#2 is diagnosed but NOT fixed: it needs a ruling, and the reasoning is in
TODO.md under Play Balance.
GITEA#4 — AN EXTRA STARTS WHERE THE PLAYER PUTS IT. Only one Division Point was ever offered,
chosen by number parity. The number no longer decides an Extra's direction — the start does, which
supersedes the recorded ruling that "the number decides, like everything else on the timetable".
The two cannot both hold: an odd, westbound Extra placed at the WEST end would leave the Division
on its first move having crossed nothing, and be paid for the run. Either end now runs the train
away from itself; at an Interchange or a Control Point the player picks the direction. The
Interchange start is a YARD, off the running line, which is what makes the Superintendent clause
work: placing it can never force a collision, a guaranteed one holds it there for another Stage,
and a potential one is the Superintendent's to rule on — exactly evaluateClearance's `blocked` and
`ask`, so nothing new decides collisions. Where an Extra may start is now a house rule
(divisionPointsOnly / ownOffice / anyOffice, defaulting to what the engine already did). The
legacy `atSeat` intent field still replays as it always meant.
FOUND UNDERNEATH IT: an Extra started away from a Division Point ran empty. isBeingMadeUp tested
position alone, so the Control Point start has been shipping since it was added with a train that
could never be given a consist. Found by playing it, not by the tests, which had only asserted
where the tray landed.
FOUND UNDERNEATH IT: collide left the wrecks on the card. Destroyed trains kept their Transit
entries, and evaluateClearance counts every transit as an occupant, so one rear-end collision
permanently poisoned that Mainline card for every later train.
THE MAINLINE CARDS WERE ROLLED, NOT DEALT — drawn from the nine types with replacement, so a
Division could hold two Interchanges and Plains carried the weight of a card printed once. "An
Extra may start at the Interchange if one is on the board" only reads as a rule if the board holds
at most one. Now dealt from the printed deck without replacement, verified over 1600 deals. This
re-deals every seed: the published replays were re-recorded, and the saved games in docs/ are
retired too — two of those were already dead before this release and nobody had noticed.
GITEA#6 — A TRAIN CARD IS NEVER DISCARDED, Timetabled and Extra alike. The forced play needed no
mechanism: nothing discardable plus a hand over the limit leaves exactly one legal way to end the
turn, and playing a train is unconditionally legal, so the corner cannot trap anyone. The bot
needed no rule either. 400/400 games finished, revenue unmoved, trains scheduled 1.2 -> 1.3. The
player is told on the card and on the button.
GITEA#7 — COACH COUNTS. 1/2 Crack Limited 3 -> 2, 5/6 The Sparrow 2 -> 3. A change to the cards,
so Trains3.pdf and the transcription keep the original numbers with a footnote while content.ts
and the Home Deck reference carry what the game plays.
CONTENT.TS COMMENT PASS — no data changed, only comments. Four were factually wrong, including an
office table naming counts doubled long ago and a pointer to a DEALT_DECK_SIZE that has never
existed. Every Enhancement row cited its implementation by line number and every citation had
rotted; they name functions now. Card counts came out of the comments, since they move with play
balance; source-sheet figures and dated measurements stayed.
TODO.md gains an item for a card reference generated from content.ts, in six sections, so the
documentation cannot disagree with the game.
715 tests pass, tsc clean, site builds.
Gameplay testing on 0.4.9d returned six reports. Five are fixed; the sixth could not be
reproduced and is written up in TODO.md with the two questions that would pin it down.
TWO TRAINS AT ONE PLATFORM ANSWERED TO ONE BUTTON. `porter.board` and `porter.detrain`
carried no tray, so there was one button per platform however many trains stood at it and
the reducer filled the first empty coach on the A/D tracks. `check` and the reducer were not
even asking the same question: `check` skipped a train whose card refuses passenger work and
the reducer did not. Both intents now carry an optional `trayId`, one function resolves the
train and the coach for check/execute/reduce alike, `legal.ts` offers one candidate per train,
and the label names it.
A LOAD COULD BE MADE AND BROKEN WITHOUT GOING ANYWHERE. A Freight House could unload the
boxcar it had just loaded; a platform could detrain the passengers it had just boarded. Full
Revenue at both ends for a movement that never happened. Jesse's rule: a load made anywhere in
an Office Area may not be broken anywhere in that Office Area, ever — it has to be carried to
another district. The load carries the seat that made it (`RollingStock.origin`), stripped by
`pooled` at every yard push. Measured at -0.60 +/- 0.10 Revenue a game (t = -6.1) over 400
paired deals: 78 worse, 3 better, 319 unchanged — free Revenue coming off the board, not a nerf.
THE GROCER'S WAREHOUSE SHIPPED AND THE REFINERY RECEIVED. Both were `flow: 'both'` on the
reading that "Freight House" was a collective term for exactly those two, and therefore what
§9.3 described. The engine has dealt a Freight House CARD since before v0.4.9, so §9.3 names
it and the argument goes. The card set agrees: all three Refinery modifiers grant +1 outbound.
Refinery outbound-only, Grocer's inbound-only, Freight House the one two-way industry — which
leaves exactly the one same-district pairing the rule above refuses.
NOT REPRODUCED: cars left behind when backing up over them. Five layouts tried, including cars
spotted at an industry; every one couples the lot. Three are pinned in `apply.test.ts`. One way
to create such cars was closed anyway — `flyingSwitch` wrote its cut past `carsOn`.
Both published replays that had gone dead were re-recorded; a rules change retires a save, and
`harness.test.ts` is what catches it.
The same change ships as v0.4.9e on the 0.4.9 line, branched from the v0.4.9d commit — the engine
files these fixes touch are identical across the two lines, so the patch applied cleanly both ways.
Also carries the two "Queued 2026-08-22, from playing on StartOS" TODO items that were staged
before this work started (Games in Progress readability, and getting back into a game after
losing a browser). They are notes, and items 9-12 below them are numbered against them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011nbvwWMef8CuEP6t5cgkTv
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.
Patched directly onto 0.4.9a rather than the in-progress 0.5.0 line.
A switching train vanished from the board the moment it left the Office. `selectedTrain` in
`officeSvg` (board-svg.ts), which gates whether a card draws a train's crew badge, was only ever
assigned inside the `cell.adTracks !== null` branch — true for the Office card alone. A train
standing anywhere else, which is everywhere it stands while actually being switched, drew no badge
at all. Game state was never affected; confirmed against the reported save with the engine directly.
Fix hoists the assignment out of the guard so it runs for any card with a train on it.
Unloading always took the westmost car, whichever one was picked. `laborer.beginUnload` carried the
player's chosen `carIndex`, and `check()` validated that specific car, but the `unloadBegan` event
it produced carried only the car's type — the reducer that performs the swap re-derived the target
with `industryTrack.cars.findIndex(c => c.loaded)`, which always answers the first loaded car in
track order regardless of what was requested. Fix adds `carIndex` to the event and uses it directly.
A legal decision could render with zero buttons, which looked exactly like a hang. The "where does
this Extra start" decision is titled by `trainCardTitle`, beginning "Making up Extra X22…" — the
same prefix `renderActions()` stripped from the action list on the assumption it only ever belonged
to the separate yard-chip car-placement panel. With no tray yet being filled, that panel is null, so
nothing rendered the Extra's decision either: a legal, correctly-computed option with no button
anywhere on the page. Replaying the reported save found no engine deadlock at any step — the engine
always had a move. Fix matches the exact title of the one group the yard-chip panel covers instead
of a title-prefix regex.
New tests for all three: a train parked on an ordinary facility card must draw its crew badge; three
differently-typed loaded cars, unloading index 2, must leave indices 0 and 1 alone; the existing
softlock regression test now mirrors the real render filter instead of only the raw menu, plus a
deterministic test for the exact reported scenario. 590 tests, 0 failures.
A playtest review of seed 58228926 (day 6), plus one long-standing display complaint and the
first real audio beyond a placeholder.
- Coordinate labels read X,Y everywhere shown to a player, not the internal Y,X storage order.
Display-only.
- "No switching" now means may not add or drop cars, not "never touch it" — these trains can
still be moved onto Secondary Track to clear the mainline.
- Q3 corrected: Expedite governs WHERE a train may be left standing, not WHEN it leaves. The
forced same-Stage departure is gone; a new fault costs 1 Revenue if an expedited train is left
off the station when a Mainline Phase begins. Resolves "3/4 Express prints a rule it can never
use" as a side effect.
- evaluateClearance now checks every occupant on a Mainline card before offering a judgment
call, instead of returning on whichever it found first — found while explaining a playtest
report, fixed with a regression test.
- Three new synthesised sounds: arrive, depart, crash.
- The splash page shows the box art.
Full detail, measurements and reasoning in CHANGELOG.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FvU99NEakShRMg3nN3fHAZ
Builds docs/plans/switching-paths.md. A passing loop can offer two legal
routes between the same two squares, coupling different cars — the engine
only ever found one, an artifact of search order (Reported by Jesse, undo
379). exploreMoves now enumerates every simple route (per-path visited set,
capped at 4000 frontier nodes) and dedupes on outcome — destination, entry
side, and origin-tagged cars — rather than on reaching the square at all.
switch.move gains an optional `via: GridCoord` naming one intermediate
square on the chosen route; absent, it resolves exactly as before, so
every existing save and bot decision replays identically (575/575, then
579/579 with the new tests). Threaded through the label, the action-list
dedupe, the hover highlight (data-route), and the history (trayMoved.via).
Ruling recorded as Gap 14 in docs/rules/open-questions.md: the player may
choose the path; §A.4's "may not go around" a car does not reach a
different track the player declined to enter.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01SAt2YCXgd5qCjBcF2x34aK
Eight play reports and one design that had been written up and not built. The
through-line is switching: what a card can hold, which end of a train a cut comes
off, which way a train meets cars standing on the line, and what the board and the
log say about all of it.
TRACK ORDER FOR STANDING CARS, AND THE CUT ON YOUR OWN CARD
Two reports turned out to be one root cause. `TrackCard.standing` claimed "in track
order (§A.3)" and had no defined orientation at all, while `CrewTray.consist` does
(nose first, relative to facing) — so every transfer between them was a conversion
nothing performed. §A.3 says what it should be: cars occupy the track "in the same
order they originally held, left-to-right". Left-to-right is west-to-east, and that
is now the defined orientation of `standing` and of an industry track through
`carsOn`. It is the board's orientation, not the train's, so it does not change when
a different train touches the card.
- Setting out is batch-invariant. Four cars at once, four singles and two pairs
parked three different orders, one of them physically impossible. Successive
cuts off the same end stack up towards the engine, so the insertion point is the
train's own place in the row.
- Approaching a cut from either end now mirrors. `couples` is built nearest-first
along the direction of travel and reverses onto the nose, so the farthest car met
ends up nose-most — which is what makes a run-around worth its Move.
- A train no longer drives through its own cut. The walk began at the neighbour of
the start square and never read the start card, so a crew could set cars out and
pull straight away from them. Coupling is mandatory (§A.4) and your own square is
no exception; the cut counts against the four-car limit. Setting out off the end
you are not leaving by still works.
`CrewTray.standingWest` records where a train stands among the cars on its card — a
train may set out off both ends on one square, so which side a cut is on is not
recoverable from the array alone.
On the board, the cut is drawn split at the train — west cars left, east cars right,
engine in the gap — and each car's tooltip says whether it stands ahead of or behind
the engine. The history says which end a cut came off, and a move's button separates
"takes your own boxcar back off this card" from cars found standing on the line.
Decided: taking your own cut back on the square you are standing on is UNDOING the
drop. It is exempt from trains 3/4's per-location freight budget, X13's "drop but not
pick up" and X22's "empties only", and it refunds the budget the drop spent.
Otherwise a legal-looking drop becomes silently one-way.
Measured, 200 paired seeds, developer bot: -0.55 revenue (t = -3.63), freight revenue
1.11 -> 0.56. That cost is the bot's, not the rule's — its trains run engine-first,
so at a stub industry it sets a car out between itself and the only way out, and the
correct play is §A.5's facing-point move, which is the cross-turn planning TODO.md
already records as out of reach of any bot. Filtering self-recoupling moves out of its
options took recoupling from 625 of 1,029 set-outs to 101 of 677, and all 101 that
remain are that case. Read the number as a bot measurement, not a balance one.
THE SUPERINTENDENT'S RULING NAMES THE TRAINS IT IS ABOUT
Reported: the Superintendent could not tell which train he was clearing. The heading
asks the question now — "may Train 6 follow Train 4 onto the same Mainline card?" —
and the trains moved to the FRONT of each button, because the button splits its label
at the first em-dash and showed only the head.
AN INDUSTRY TRACK HOLDS FOUR CARS, LIKE EVERY OTHER CARD
Reported at undo 188: "we wanted to drop two cars, but were only allowed to drop one."
An industry track was built as long as its box count, so a one-box industry had room
for one car. Box count is how much WORK an industry can hold, not how much RAIL it
has. Ordinary track was the other exception, unbounded; both are gone and every card
holds four.
THE FREIGHT AGENT MAY STAGE A LOAD BEFORE THE CAR IS THERE
§6.3 asks nothing of the industry track — the empty car belongs to §9.3's Load the
car, which is the Laborer's action. The gate now lives only there, so cargo can wait
on the dock while the car to ship it in is still being switched in. Nothing can jam:
a load in a green box is waiting, not stuck.
THE TRUCK DOCK UNLOADS, AND BRINGS NOBODY
+1 inbound, no Laborer. It printed +1 outbound and +1 Laborer, which made it a
longer-host-list copy of Forklifts. Beside Packing Sheds it now does nothing at all,
and the hand tooltip says so before it is played.
Also in this release, from the days before: Mainline card tooltips computed from the
crossing rule; an Extra starts from the Division Point its number sends it to; a
modifier's suppressed grant comes back when a Whistle Post is upgraded; the Oil
Refinery and the Grocer's Warehouse ship as well as receive, per the card reference;
and the dormant defences name the attack they answer. `.claude/` is now gitignored —
it holds Claude Code's worktrees, i.e. a second checkout of this repository.
570 tests, typecheck clean. The three published replays were re-recorded twice —
legality changed, so bot play changed. Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.
Fifteen items from two playtest sessions. Three that read as drawing faults were engine
bugs: cars could be added to a train that was not being made up (50 offers in 8 games),
the make-up panel merged two trains and could couple a car to the wrong one, and an
Office upgrade silently deleted what a Modifier had added. A fourth was a sentinel
inside a coordinate's own value range — a Mainline placement travelling as row -1, which
is an ordinary district row.
Trains are now drawn the way they stand: west on the left, nose toward the way the engine
faces, on both the district card and the Division chip. Undo steps back through the game
by replaying the save without its last intent. The switching walk keeps its rejections, so
the board can say why a square is not offered. Laborers and Porters are on the card, and
the rule that a district only grows outwards is finally written down.
Versions start here: third digit for fixes, second for a feature set, 1.0 for a release.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GgtkX8JnvKa8y2tuJ8aQf4
