contradiction
Two things found by playing v0.8.0.1, neither in the mechanism itself.
?pace= never worked. index.html's doors are play.html?lobby and
play.html?solitaire, so arriving through the splash replaces the query string and
the play page only ever saw ?lobby — a whole game was played at 1x while believing
it was at 7x. v0.8.0 shipped that parameter as the only way to change speed and the
game's own front door destroyed it. There is a control on the play screen now,
beside zoom, persisted per viewer; the doors carry pace through as well, so the URL
lever is honest for handing two playtesters different speeds. PACE_LEVELS moved to
sim/pacing.ts with DWELL and MAX_PACE — the tuning surface in one file, and
testable. The committed default is unchanged: what it should be is a question for a
game played at a speed that took effect.
And the Day-end dialog said "0 today, 2 in all". advance.ts increments the Day and
then zeroes collisionsToday, and noteDayEnd() fires when the Day goes up — so the
dialog reporting the Day that just finished was drawn from the very frame in which
that Day's count was reset. Reproduced on four of five seeds before changing
anything. The count is captured at the rollover now; it is not derivable on the
client, because in multiplayer the push announcing the new Day is the same push
that carries the reset. And "today" was the wrong word regardless: it names the Day
instead — "Collisions: 2 on Day 1, 2 in all".
Unrelated to v0.8.0 — that one has been wrong since the dialog was built for
Gitea#10, and needed somebody to play a Day with a collision in it and then read
the summary.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01X6cF1iYvJ1kNmzYBzu4QX6
"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
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
The multiplayer set-up, the lobby, the start of a game, and four signals a remote client had never
been sent. Reasoning, the preset table and what was verified how: CHANGELOG.md.
- Co-op, Competitive, Cutthroat, Solitaire and Custom, on both screens, from one shared block —
they had drifted, and each was missing a question the other asked.
- A player reads the whole rule set before taking a seat, may leave a lobby or a running game, and
keeps a seat across a reload. The host may clear a chair. The browser remembers every game it is
in, not just the last one.
- The start of a game is drawn: a handoff beat, an announcement, the code and type in the header.
- Sound, the timetable flash, announcements and the just-drawn badge now reach a remote client;
justDrawn goes to the seat that drew it and nobody else.
- Played on StartOS, which found the rest: an Extra belongs to the player who played it, the board
never named the Superintendent, bot seats were reported as absent players, and rule section
numbers are out of every string a player reads.
Also carries the previous session's Heavy Grade documentation work — asked again, answer unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016JczK5i33ZNSf2PtzZqdhS
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.
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 "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.
