Nothing was wrong with the ordering. What had gone wrong is that eight
items were done or superseded in one place and still open in another,
which reads as live work — worse than no entry at all. Found by
reviewing the file against the Gitea tracker and the git log, not by
reading it.
NEXT WAS 43 CHRONOLOGICAL ENTRIES, 26 OF THEM STRUCK THROUGH, and the
live work had stopped being visible in it. It is grouped by what each
item is WAITING ON now — blocked on a table, the screen, waiting on
something outside the code, unscheduled, standing practice — with the
closed entries moved to a Settled block at the end of the section.
EVERY NUMBER IS KEPT AS A STABLE ID. The rest of the file refers to
items by number ("decide with item 15", "same drawing pass as 19-21"),
so renumbering would have silently broken every cross-reference.
Numbers are ids, not positions, and the file now says so. The one
reference that pointed at a settled item (item 22, the dead centre of
the Division map) is rewritten to name the principle that outlived it
rather than the item.
EIGHT STALE ITEMS CLOSED. The Heavy Grade orientation was fixed in
cf018b4 and never checked off. The Fedora is TODO #29, done in this
same unshipped v0.7.9. The remaining six were the Division-map drawing
pass, all answered by Gitea#18 (closed 2026-08-26) replacing the layout
rather than fixing the drawing — 167 lines describing a wrapped map
that no longer exists, collapsed to 32 that keep the two ideas which
outlived their items: "SHARED in the middle, YOURS on the right", now
Gitea#20's territory, and why rotating the map to seat a viewer at the
bottom was refused (it moves the open gap between the buffer stops out
of the eye's path, and that gap is the only thing saying the Division
is a line and not a loop).
65 open items to 57; 2,400 lines to 2,179.
TWO PIECES OF DEAD CODE GITEA#18 LEFT BEHIND, found while confirming
the map really is one row before closing the items that say it is.
SIDE_GAP was declared and never read. And divisionSvg's header comment
still described "one row alone, two rows facing, a horseshoe of three,
a square of four" — contradicting the layout comment 200 lines below
it, which explains why that layout was dropped. A comment that
survives the code it describes is how the next reader gets it wrong.
No behaviour change. 878 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YTaNBL1jVxNqgFdjHkHoo3
Jesse: "heavy grade mainline card tooltip states climbs east, but card
doesn't show it." The Frame has carried gradeUp all along and the tip
has said it; the card drew nothing, so the one Mainline card whose
orientation is set per game was the one you had to hover to read.
A brown wedge in the lower right rising toward the climb, with a bone
arrow lying along its slope, centred on the triangle's centroid. East is
right on this map (Gitea#18), which is what lets a wedge be read without
a compass.
Four passes. Up the hypotenuse the arrow began at the wedge's thin
corner, where there is no height, so its head read as clipped. Level, it
was contained but did not read as climbing. At 30° — steeper than the
wedge's own 22.5° — it had to be tucked into the fat half. Parallel to
the slope is the shape that fits: the gap to the hypotenuse is then
constant, so the arrow can sit centred. The wedge grew to 58x24 to pay
for it, since a centred arrow has less room than an off-centre one.
Sizes are a search result, clearing every edge by 2.88px.
The first containment test bounded the arrow against the CARD, which it
never left, while the wedge clipped it — a green check on a visibly
broken glyph. It checks the TRIANGLE now with a 2px floor, plus
parallelism derived from the wedge and centroid placement.
Orientation is always set, measured not assumed: 400 seeds x 4 player
counts, 535 grades placed, 0 without one, 276 east / 259 west.
Stays in the unshipped v0.7.9. 874 tests pass, one new.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AdG46Ja2PEDBkpqiDazMoX
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#3Closes#14Closes#15Closes#17Closes#18
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.
Three things off the first proper look at a live table.
The lobby listed chairs as Seat 0 to Seat 3. Zero-based is right inside —
it indexes seating, the seats array and every route, and none of that
changes — but nobody sitting at a table calls their chair "seat 0". There
were four of these rather than one: the lobby list, the topline's Seat N
for a remote session, the presence banner's fallback name, and the admin
summary's. All go through a single seatLabel now, and a test fails the
build if any "Seat ${...}" interpolates a raw seat again, since the
conversion has to happen in exactly one place or the two conventions drift
apart. Verified by mutation — putting the raw seat back fails the suite.
seatLabel lives in sim/view.ts, not web/game.ts. Putting it in game.ts was
the first attempt and test/session.test.ts caught it: the page may not
import values from that module, because they are the local engine by
another name and importing one reopens the Phase 1 boundary. The test was
right and the placement was wrong.
.bs-name.bs-turn carried font-weight:700 over a base of 600. At 11px a
monospace face has to be synthesised the rest of the way and the extra ink
lands as blur, so the one name you most need to read was the one you could
not. The bump is gone; amber against #e6e9ee was always doing the work, and
blue "(you)" and amber "their move" stay clearly distinct without it.
The west-to-east chain under the Division map now shows only during Day 1
Stage 1. It answers who is where and why, which is a question you have once
— at the start, when the chain has just been rolled and the names are new.
By Stage 2 the map has been answering it for a while and the line is
something to read past.
675 tests pass (673 + 2).
Six things found playing the StartOS build, all of them the game telling
you what it already knew.
The lobby's Start button did not look disabled when it was. The reported
symptom was "it says it's waiting for a player but Start is enabled" — it
wasn't: the note and the disabled assignment are two lines apart in the
same block. The page had only `header button:disabled` and `#actions
button:disabled`, and #lb-start is in neither, so a disabled button kept
its normal face AND still lit up under the cursor from the generic
button:hover. It advertised a click it would refuse. The rule is generic
now.
The game code was rendered as "— code TRESTLE-5109" in dim text beside a
heading, reading like a reference number rather than the thing you have to
send somebody. It is a labelled block at 22px with a Copy button, and a
clipboard refusal says the code can be selected instead of failing
silently. The blurb under it was also WRONG — it claimed the chairs were
"in the order everyone joined", which stopped being true in v0.4.1 when the
§4.4 D12 started deciding. It now says what actually happens.
Every Office on the Division map was labelled with its tier, which every
other player's Office also has, so four districts read identically and
"where does Bob sit" had no answer on the one map showing where trains are.
The owner's name takes the headline and the tier moves beside the A/D
count. Amber marks whose move it is — the same "happening here" the action
panel uses — and "(you)" is spelled out on the reader's own district,
because colour alone cannot say which of four railroads is yours. Turn
colour wins over the you-colour when both apply: whose turn it is changes
every few seconds, which railroad is yours never does.
Under the map, the chain in words with the roll behind it: "West to East:
Alice (1) → Bot 2 (5) → Bot 1 (11)". state.openingRolls has been kept for
exactly this since v0.4.1 and nothing had displayed it. It also answers
"is the host always at the eastern end" outright — no. Alice there is the
host, rolled lowest, and sits at the western end.
Supporting: Frame gained viewer and viewerSeat. Every private field on it
was already scoped to one player, but nothing said which player, so a page
could draw a railroad without being able to say whose it was — harmless in
solitaire, the first question at four seats. Frame also gained
openingRolls. Bots are Bot 1 / Bot 2 rather than all Bot, since two of them
are two different railroads. The standalone replay gets all of it: players,
actor and viewer are not delta'd keys in compress, so they ride whole on
every frame and replay.ts passes the same roster.
Verified: 673 tests pass (668 + 5). The new ones were mutation-checked —
removing the (you) suffix, never applying the turn mark, and reinstating
the pre-v0.4.1 identity seating each fail the suite. The seating test
deliberately asserts across six seeds that the eastern end is NOT always
player 0, which is the claim it exists to defend.
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.
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 "The Roster Pass" / "Two Trains, One Card" (station display for
multiple trains at one Office). The Office is the one square where
more than one train may legally stand at once (one per A/D track), and
CellView.train had room for exactly one — a second train at a busy
Station was counted in the old A/D pips and never drawn.
CellView.train -> CellView.trains: TrainView[], seat-filtered and
collecting every match rather than the first (fixes a latent
cross-district leak in the process: trainOnCard never checked seat).
The A/D pips are replaced with one roster chip per A/D track, always,
free or occupied; clicking a chip sets selectedCrew, wiring the board
and the action panel to the same value.
standingWest moves from CrewTray to TrackCard: two trays sharing one
Office card need one shared split, not one each, and there is no such
thing as "west of one particular A/D track". No save migration — Save
replays through the engine — and a stale value on an emptied card is
inert because nothing reads a split with no train standing there.
The Division map's Office cell is now sized by A/D capacity rather
than occupancy, so it holds still as trains arrive and leave; chips
lay into fixed slots instead of centre-spreading onto the Limits cards
either side.
584 tests, 0 failures. Verified end-to-end against the built app and a
direct render of a 4-train Terminal (screenshotted).
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
Adds SVG board rendering shared by the game and the replay, a splash page with a
shareable replay directory, hover tooltips for reference detail, and makes curves
two-port arcs so sidings and run-arounds can finally be built.
