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
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.
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.
Jesse.Markowitz