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.
Both halves came out of playing the StartOS build. The wrapper's health
check and admin actions consume this; they land separately.
The host picks the table size (2-4) when creating a game, and the seats
array is built at that length once. Before, it GREW as people joined, so
the four rows on screen were partly fiction — a 2-player game just started
with a 2-long array, while a host who dropped a bot into a later chair
padded it with a null and silently disabled Start behind a one-line note.
A gap can no longer be written down rather than merely being refused.
That also avoided a trap. Compacting seats at Lobby.Start — the obvious
way to support a "closed" chair — would have shifted the player index that
every PlayerSession stamps at join time and that /api/stream and
/api/intent both route by, handing a player somebody else's railroad with
no error anywhere.
And it fixed a live balance bug: minCombinedRevenue is derived from the
player count, but the config was fixed at CREATE while the count wasn't
known until START, so the lobby guessed 4. Every 2-player game ran against
a floor of 60 instead of 30 — and missing the floor means everyone loses,
so a 2-player competitive game was set up to fail for a UI artifact rather
than a rule.
/api/health gained games:{active,lobby}, read from a new cheap summary()
on GameSession rather than exportSave(), which would copy every intent of
every game to answer a question about none of them. Three admin routes are
new behind an ADMIN_SECRET env var in an x-admin-secret header: GET
/api/games, GET /api/games/<id>/save, DELETE /api/games/<id>. Until now a
started game could not be ended by anyone — no route, no player action, no
resignation — so an abandoned game stayed active in the index and was
faithfully resumed on every boot, forever.
Three deliberate choices there: the admin secret is NOT the join secret,
which every player holds and which would therefore let anyone at the table
destroy anyone else's game; unset means the routes 404 exactly as any
unknown path does, with or without a header, so a server never given an
administrator doesn't advertise that it has one; and a delete returns the
deleted game's save, since the intents are the game (D5) — nothing is
destroyed without being handed to whoever destroyed it.
SavedGame gained an optional lastMoveAt (falling back to createdAt) so
"has this stalled?" survives a restart. Kept out of history for the same
reason the turn timings are: a replay must reproduce a game from decisions
alone, and wall-clock is not a decision.
index.ts logs "Resuming N saved games..." before the loop rather than one
line per game after it. Measured a full 4-player game at 100ms to replay,
and only unfinished games are replayed, so listening before loading would
have bought nothing for the cost of a "still loading" state everywhere.
Verified: 667 tests pass (662 + 5), and the new session tests were checked
against two mutations (lastMoveAt never advancing; resume dropping it) to
confirm they fail without the code. Live against a running server: health
counts tracking through the lobby->game transition, admin auth rejecting a
missing and a wrong secret, list/export/delete, the deleted game's files
and index entry actually gone from disk, a second delete 404ing, the admin
routes invisible when ADMIN_SECRET is unset, and a 3-player table refusing
a 4th player and a size of 5 refused at the door.
Also carries the TODO items raised on 2026-08-21: the lobby offering no
game parameters (the floor bug within it now fixed, the form still
missing), and the four optionalRules — of which only reducedVisibility and
emergencyToolbox are read by anything, while sisterTrains and
employeeRotation are declared, defaulted, and consulted nowhere.
The "Play multiplayer" door on index.html had sat disabled, labelled
"Coming soon", since before the server existed — Phases 2 through 4 built
a working lobby and nothing ever linked to it. Loading the site landed on
the same solitaire splash whether a real multiplayer server was behind it
or not, with no visible way in. Found packaging Phase 6 for StartOS.
The door is now a live link to ./play.html?lobby, and main.ts's start()
routes ?lobby straight to the lobby screen — the same showScreen('lobby');
runLobby(beginRemote) the in-game Multiplayer button already used —
instead of dealing a solitaire game first.
GET /api/health is new, and exists to be failed. The same dist/ ships both
served by src/server/ and uploaded as flat files by deploy-web.ts, and the
bundle is identical either way (D4), so the page cannot know from its own
build which it is; every other route 404s an unknown path exactly as a
static host does, so nothing distinguished them. The splash probes it on
load and closes the door when nothing names itself in reply.
The door starts open and only ever closes, deliberately: a wrong "no
server" is the bug above again — invisible, and it strands a player who
does have one — while a wrong "there is one" costs a click and a lobby
that says it cannot connect. The reply must name itself rather than merely
return 200, or a host answering every path with its index page would pass.
Verified: tsc clean; 659 tests pass (656 + 3); /api/health exercised live
against a running server — 200 with the right body, unauthenticated, while
an unknown path and a wrong method both still 404, which is what makes the
probe discriminate at all.
The probe's own test was vacuous on the first attempt — both its "closes"
cases reached close() through the .catch arm, so deleting the body-naming
check outright still passed. Caught by mutating splash.ts and re-running;
the test now covers all three closing routes and fails without the check.
A real server existed since v0.5.0 but nobody could reach it without a hand-built ?seat=&secret=
URL. This is what makes it a game you can actually create or join.
The server now hosts more than one game: src/server/lobby.ts (new) is pure logic — creating,
joining, bot seats, host transfer, starting — same split session.ts already draws for a running
game. persistence.ts gained one directory per gameId plus a top-level index so index.ts resumes
every saved game on boot. /api/stream and /api/intent now authenticate by session token instead of
?seat=&secret= — the token alone proves identity (lobby-and-sessions.md §1), so the join secret's
job ends at the lobby door.
Bots fill empty seats at Lobby.Start only, never take over a disconnected human (D8): session.ts
gained driveBots(), playing developerBot forward through consecutive bot seats after every accepted
intent. Disconnect keeps the seat and says so — Push gained an optional presence field, built
entirely by http.ts and never routed through the engine, since a disconnect is transport news, not
a GameEvent. Host rights pass to the earliest-joined remaining player if the host drops before
start.
Client: src/web/lobby.ts adds create/join forms and a live seating screen; localStorage replaces
?seat= for reconnecting straight back into a game already joined. A Multiplayer button sits beside
New game; the New Game dialog itself is untouched.
Found only by the live smoke test, not by typechecking: /api/intent read its token from the JSON
body while the client sends it in the query string (matching /api/stream) — every intent failed
"no such game" until caught by curl-level verification.
Doc fix: multiplayer.md's D18 said the player cap was 6; lobby-and-sessions.md §2 says 2-4 with the
reasoning and the test coverage to back it. The two had drifted apart. D18 now reads 2-4.
Not verified: an actual browser walking through the lobby screens — none available in this
environment, same limitation Phase 2's RemoteSession shipped under. 656 tests, 0 failures.
tools/jitsi-harness/ deliberately left untracked — unrelated side-project work, not part of this
release.
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.
Splash page only: the box art thumbnail opens a full-size lightbox on click, a
new "Play multiplayer" (coming soon) card balances the bottom row to three
cards, and the footer's "runs entirely in your browser" claim is now scoped
to solitaire.
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
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
Planning only; no source files touched. The BFS visited set in exploreMoves
keys on (coord, entry), so two legal routes that rejoin through the same port
collapse to whichever is shorter — silently discarding the option that couples
cars on the way.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YQAJ4dND7enLj54eLyiF2C
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.
Jesse