Commit Graph
9 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 9735468d25 v0.4.9g — a caboose is not a load, a Day that says it ended, and a train you may throw away
The v0.7.1 bugfix set ported to the playtest line: Gitea#8, #10, #9 and #2. Reasoning, and what
differs from main, in CHANGELOG.md.

- Gitea#8: X22 Pee-Dee refused every caboose, including the one it was made up with. A caboose
  carries the crew, not freight, so it is never a load.
- Gitea#10: a dialog when the Day rolls over, carrying the standings, the Days left and your Revenue
  against the target with the pace. Suppressed on the first frame, on Undo stepping back across a
  rollover, and on the Day the game ends.
- Gitea#9, superseding Gitea#6 from v0.4.9f: a Timetabled train may be discarded, an Extra may not.
  This line takes the plain rule — main has it as a New Game setting.
- Gitea#2: the shortage stays, by Jesse's ruling. A blocked platform now gives its reason instead of
  simply having no button.

Three things are written for this line rather than ported: the Timetabled discard has no setting and
no URL parameter, the Day-end dialog reads f.objective (this line's per-player target) where main
reads its combined victory dials, and Frame gained the viewer index the dialog needs to mark your
row. 636 tests pass; no published replay was retired.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FLnYR4XtXQNamYJXGYT8oC
2026-08-25 10:47:10 -04:00
Jesse.Markowitz e255076b5c v0.4.9f — an Extra starts where you put it, a train card is never discarded
The 0.6.2 change, ported to the playtest line. Three from the v0.4.9e gameplay-testing round —
Gitea#4 extras did not start where the player said, #6 train cards could be discarded, #7 four
train cards had the wrong coach counts — plus two bugs found underneath #4. Gitea#2 is diagnosed
but NOT fixed; it needs a ruling, and the reasoning is in TODO.md.

GITEA#4 — AN EXTRA STARTS WHERE THE PLAYER PUTS IT. Both Division Points are offered now, and the
START decides the direction rather than the number: an odd westbound Extra placed at the WEST end
would otherwise leave the Division on its first move having crossed nothing and be paid for the
run. 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 an
Extra there can never force a collision, a guaranteed one holds it for another Stage, and a
potential one is the Superintendent's to rule on, which are §8.1's two existing answers. Where an
Extra may start is a new setting in the New Game dialog, defaulting to what the engine already did
so this build does not change under its testers mid-line.

FOUND UNDERNEATH IT, both already shipping: an Extra started away from a Division Point could
never be given a consist and ran empty, so the Control Point start has been broken since it was
added; and collide left destroyed trains' transits on the Mainline card, permanently poisoning
that card for every later train.

THE MAINLINE CARDS ARE DEALT FROM THE PRINTED DECK NOW, without replacement. They were drawn from
the nine types with replacement, so a Division could hold two Interchanges — and "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. This re-deals every seed, so both published replays were retired and re-recorded.

GITEA#6 — A TRAIN CARD IS NEVER DISCARDED, Timetabled and Extra alike. No forcing mechanism was
needed: 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 a hand of four cannot trap anyone. The hand
panel says so on the train, and the blocked end-turn button changes its wording.

GITEA#7 — COACH COUNTS. 1/2 Crack Limited 3 -> 2, 5/6 The Sparrow 2 -> 3.

WHAT DIFFERS FROM THE MAIN LINE. The car-placement round rotation test that accompanies #7 there
arrived with the 0.6 multiplayer work and does not exist here, so there was nothing for the
coach-count change to follow. src/web/main.ts and test/web.test.ts needed hand-resolution: this
line's New Game dialog has neither the mode radios nor the victory dials, so only the Extra-start
parts were taken. The content.ts comment pass came across whole; main's TODO documentation item
did not, since this line keeps its own TODO.

623 tests pass, tsc clean, site builds.
2026-08-22 21:42:27 -04:00
Jesse 9f3b92d08e v0.4.7 — the switching game: track order, the cut on your own card, and four rules
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.
2026-08-19 12:12:30 -04:00
Jesse 6655e20ea8 v0.4.4 — New Game dialog for the opening hand and the three revenue rates, Yard renamed Interchange, and two movement bugs behind a mirrored consist 2026-08-14 22:39:50 -04:00
Jesse 2d348e1ecf fix tracks to all be EW. no more NS tracks 2026-08-05 01:00:11 -04:00
Jesse f00255ce31 more fixes and tweaks 2026-08-01 12:00:27 -04:00
Jesse d261ad7af8 Fix parking trains, freight deadlock, and Whistle Post lock-in 2026-07-31 15:09:16 -04:00
Jesse b085d5a0bb Implement Enhancements, Mainline modifiers and Maneuvers; fix unplayable track 2026-07-31 11:02:54 -04:00
Jesse 401b879140 Expand game engine, replay, tests, and documentation 2026-07-31 08:10:54 -04:00