Commit Graph
26 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Fable 5.1 04ca74c365 v0.8.5 — housekeeping from the audit, and the playtest line retired
The third release from the audit; nothing a player sees changes. CHANGELOG has the detail.

The 0.4.9 playtest line is no longer maintained (Jesse, 2026-09-29): the deploy rule that
existed for it is gone and #85 is moot. The table test (#39 #35 #42a #40) is closed — every
line of the checklist was met at a table. #46 is done and cannot regrow: the 36 unused
declarations are removed and `noUnusedLocals`/`noUnusedParameters` are on; two of them were
dead bot functions from rejected candidates the round said it had deleted. The documents no
longer teach `trainCapSlack` (a knob that throws), point at `as-built.md` (deleted in 0.8.2),
model `officeType` (the engine says `tier`) or describe `collisionOccurred` (never emitted);
the README's account of bot flags now matches the bot's. Five playtest saves committed in
`docs/` against the repository's own rule are in the ignored `playtests/`.

What the audit found and did not fix is written down as TODO #112-#117, each with its reason.
#112 is `docs/plans/structure.md`, the proposal for `http.ts`, `main.ts` and `check`. #117 —
`/api/save` hands a seat the seed mid-game — waits on a conversation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FrCWubm9GAftYCm2hWdKwK
2026-09-29 17:02:33 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Fable 5.1 4d222a7eba v0.8.3 — the engine half of the audit, and the deal 0.8.2 silently changed
Seven rules faults and one dealing fault, from a four-way code audit (engine, server,
client, tests) read against the code before anything was acted on. Each is pinned by a
test that failed first. CHANGELOG has the reasoning; this is the list.

THE DEAL. 0.8.2 put the Second Section card into the deck after its save check had run
and without a line in its notes. A deck one card larger shuffles differently from the same
seed, so every save on the test server refused at move 3 — the boot log shows thirteen of
thirteen — while the release notes said three would resume. `withSavedDeal` (was
`withSavedOpening`) now sets `secondSectionCard: false` for a config that predates the
setting, and the thirteen replay exactly as 0.8.2 described: three resume, ten refuse, the
same ten at the same moves.

THE RULES. `check` never tested that a switching tray was in the actor's own district, so
a rival's train could be shunted and the rival charged the Moves. Occupancy matched on
coordinates alone, so a rival's crew blocked your track. A Department draw that emptied the
deck duplicated the drawn card and destroyed the refill card. The unjam cleared the first
load rather than the one named. The collision floor could not fire in Stage 12. The
Expedite fault was charged once per clearance question rather than once per phase. A train
held at the Limits was only ever released by another arrival, never by a departure.

Docs: rules.md describes each as built (and no longer says an Expedited train departs at
Shift Change — that was v0.4.8's reading, corrected in v0.4.9's code and never in the
document); game-state.md's collision-floor note now matches the code.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FrCWubm9GAftYCm2hWdKwK
2026-09-29 17:02:31 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 3befc420da v0.8.2 — every district opens on a Depot, and the docs are pages now
A second-digit bump for a playtest read back against the save file. Nine questions
were asked of one three-Day game; three were bugs, three were the rules working
and undocumented, three were decisions. Every save on the test server was replayed
against this build BEFORE release, which is how the cost of each rule was known
before it was chosen rather than discovered after.

EVERY DISTRICT OPENS ON A DEPOT. A Whistle Post has one A/D track and is not a
Passenger Facility, so the opening of every game was spent unable to work a
passenger and one arrival away from a collision. Two A/D tracks and passengers
from Stage 1 now; "Players start with Whistle Posts, not Depots" is the harder
game, set when the game is created. The deck follows the choice — starting on
Depots the four Depot upgrade cards are left out, because an upgrade must be to
the next tier and a Depot card at a table of Depots is a dead draw. How much
easier it is showed up as a test failure rather than an argument: the cue-coverage
pool needed widening from 24 seeded games to 60 before it held one collision.

NO SAVE WAS STRANDED BY IT, which took care. This is the one house rule that
changes how a game is DEALT rather than how it plays, so replaying a save under
the wrong opening is a different railroad from intent one — silently, with no
error. `withSavedOpening` fills it on the replay paths ONLY. Putting it in the
resolver instead made a fresh Cutthroat game deal Whistle Posts and read as
Custom, which is how the distinction was found.

THREE BUGS, ALL REPORTED FROM ONE GAME AND ALL CONFIRMED ON ITS SAVE.

An Office held TWO TRAINS ON ONE A/D TRACK. The capacity test passed with nothing
standing, the train the Interlocking had been holding at the Limits was moved into
the free slot, and the arriving train was pushed in after it without anyone asking
again whether there was room — so the collision §8.3 calls for never happened. The
held train keeps priority; the newcomer now takes the consequence it would have
met had the held train arrived first.

THE HISTORY FROZE, permanently, and the log cap was not really the cause. Each
seat's "what have I sent you" bookmark was an INDEX into an array the game trims,
so once a seat's bookmark reached the limit the slice returned nothing for the
rest of the game — at a different moment per seat, because each holds its own.
That game's log ended at exactly the cap. Lines carry a sequence number now, which
survives trimming; proven by pushing twice the cap through a simulated seat.

§8.1 ASKED THE WRONG QUESTION TWICE. "Trains may pass" returned `clear` before the
Subdivision was looked at, so a train entering a Double Track was released however
busy the rest of it was — that, not anything about Control Points, is what let
Train 8 out with no ruling. And a train standing at an Office was invisible to the
scan, so one about to re-enter the very Subdivision being entered counted for
nothing. Capacity is the test, not presence: a Depot with a track free is not in
the way; a Whistle Post with its one track taken is.

THINGS THAT HAPPENED SILENTLY NOW SAY SO — a train held against a facing one, a
train released from the Limits (a side effect of somebody else's arrival, so it
simply appeared at the Office), and the train an Interlocking is holding, whose
explanatory tooltip has existed since #99 with NO renderer ever reading the flag.

WHERE A MOVE IS REFUSED, AND WHY. `exploreMoves` decides where the rails go and the
pick-up restrictions are enforced afterwards in `check`, so a square the rails
reached and the card forbade was reachable, un-offered, and absent from the block
list with nothing said. Those squares are blocked with the rule that blocks them
now, and the reasons are got by ASKING `check` rather than re-deriving: a second
implementation of the rules is exactly the failure the block list exists to avoid.
A train may also always recover its own caboose — X13 prints "may drop but not
pick up anything", and a train needs its caboose to be made up, so one that parted
with it could never legally leave again.

RULES DECIDED IN SEPTEMBER AND APPLIED HERE. A Modifier must sit square against its
host, no diagonals. A passenger Modifier may not be played at a Whistle Post. Both
were built, measured, held back for a fortnight so a playtest could finish, and
applied now. A Second Section costs its card: `SECOND_SECTION` was declared in
content.ts and never dealt, so the action was free and the bot ordered 26
accidental ones in a measured round. The card is dealt and spent — gating on a card
the deck never holds would have deleted the mechanic rather than fixed it.

THE DOCUMENTATION IS A SET OF PAGES, not five text files served as text/plain — a
card reference is mostly tables, and as plain text a table is rows of pipes.
Markdown is still the one copy; the build renders it, and publishes the .md beside
each page. No Markdown library: this project has no runtime dependencies and one
would be a poor first. The pages add what Markdown cannot carry without drifting —
a nav across the set, a contents list built from the headings actually rendered,
an anchor on every heading, a 70-character measure, and tables that are tables.
They print as ink on paper.

The references caught up with the rules, checked rather than assumed: two
statements had gone from stale to misleading (the Quickstart told a new player to
"get a Depot down as soon as one appears"), and four rules nobody could look up
are written down — the Office tier table, §8.1 in practice, what the Circus Train
pays for, and that a Realignment can be a card with no legal target.

Adding one card to the deck reshuffles every seeded deal, which broke five
fixtures. Each was a seed meaning "a game like this" — TODO #84, exactly — so
seeds moved and pools widened rather than assertions weakening, and the clearance
fixture pins its terrain the way `enhancements.test.ts` already does. The three
published replays were re-recorded.

Closes TODO #40, #42a, #108, #109 and #110.

1046 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MUizFYCMHRWhbWwXhp7WPR
2026-09-23 07:07:21 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 a6657241de v0.8.0.14 — the coaches that never come back, and a district that ends at its own sign
Six reports from the Day 2-3 playtest of v0.8.0.13.

GAMES IN PROGRESS DO NOT SURVIVE THIS ONE. Modifiers are now bounded by the
Limits, which makes a once-legal move illegal, so a save holding one is refused
at that move: whistle-6945.day3.stage10 stops at intent 528 of 539. Jesse's call,
knowing it strands the game on the box. The file is untouched and v0.8.0.13
still finishes it.

The Sparrow running empty and Tom unable to unload his passengers are the same
shortage from opposite ends, and both are the rules working as printed. §9.2
boarding discards the emptied coach into the CLASSIFICATION yard, detraining
draws a fresh empty out of the DIVISION yard, and §2.2 sends Classification back
only when the Division Yard runs bare — so coaches move one way. Measured over
the save: sixteen in the Division Yard at setup, zero from Day 2 Stage 8 to the
end, fifteen piled in Classification, the Division Yard steady at 46-47 freight
cars with no prospect of going bare. Jesse's ruling is Gitea#2's: the shortage
stays and the game says so. A train made up short now reports what its card
wanted and why none is coming (`makeUpShort` — `trainNeedingCars` answered null
for "done" and for "cannot be done" alike, so the phase moved on in silence); the
yard panel warns while the condition lasts; the Depot's blocked panel was right
all along.

The modifier outside the Limits was working as designed and the design was
Jesse's own call, now reversed. What decided it is what the board shows — a card
beyond your own sign, in territory §8.1 and §10 reason about. The case that
motivated the exemption was checked on the reported move rather than argued away:
the Power Plant sat at (-1,3) against a sign at column 3 and two spots inside
were free, legal and adjacent.

Switching filled the history with coordinates — a line per move, plus one per
mandatory coupling. It is still LOGGED in full; what the panel draws is the line
saying somebody switched, the first move, work at an INDUSTRY (named, not a
coordinate), the Small Yard sort, and a closing summary. The suppressed lines are
still WRITTEN, marked `trace`: dropping them outright was the first attempt and
the step-queue suite caught it, because dwellForStep pays nothing for a step that
said nothing, so the board stopped replaying switching at all. The last move
rides in the closing line rather than being kept in place — nothing knows a move
was the last until the turn is over, by which time the line has been streamed to
every client and cannot be revised. Two things fell out of reading those lines:
every move ended with a tutorial sentence the opener already gives, and the move
count said "of 6" with the six hardcoded, which is wrong on a night Stage.

Make-up lines name their train — they all read "the train being made up", so
looking back for train 10 found nothing under that name — and "a empty tank" is
now "an empty tank". The Small Yard's options read as the train they would build
instead of `[1,2,3,0]`; the one Jesse wanted was the first of five and unreadable.
Two of those five were junk: bringing the last car to the end is the identity and
would have spent a Move, and a two-car reversal duplicated its only real option.
Both are filtered by the resulting order, not by the case that made them.

A Small Yard may now put cars AHEAD of the engine, which was Jesse's own open
question. Two sources disagreed and the design notes won: the v0.4.5 card text
says the sort puts the engine at the nose, implications.md says "any order,
including cars ahead of the engine". `engineAt` is optional on the intent, so
older saves replay to the same train. The menu did not multiply — the engine is a
separate short list against the consist as it stands, eight options for a
four-car train rather than twenty. §8.2 needed no new code: badlyMadeUp is
deliberately direction-free, so a PUSHING train is fit to run and only a
broken-backed one is held. The button warns by asking that predicate rather than
copying it, and immediately earned itself — every one of train 10's eight options
is refused, the one asked for at the table included, because that train carries a
caboose and each sort moves it off the rear. That is the right answer rather than
a gap: the train is already made up, so every offer would break it, and the labels
say which is which. A made-up order is always on the menu for a train that needs
one, because "bring car k to the tail" is enumerated for every car and the caboose
is one of them.

Labels read WEST TO EAST, with the engine drawn as the board's own ◀ / ▶ arrow.
"Front to back" is not a direction a table can read — which end is the front
depends on which way the train points — and board-svg has reversed east-facing
consists since v0.8.0, so the button now describes the same train as the picture.

The Freight Agent, Porter and Laborer groups now say what the role is for, where
the role is chosen. Tom reached for the Freight Agent to detrain passengers,
which is a Porter's action in the Cargo phase; both halves were working and
neither was visible.

TODO closes #107 (the nose sort) and gains #108 (the coach ratchet, with the
measurement, to revisit on a second game's data).

999 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DmdqqCNoiqE7GBo6wthBnR
2026-09-17 20:49:31 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 4adf149ba5 v0.8.0.10 — playtest fixes: clearance rulings, the log, the map, and a save file
From the first two multiplayer playtests of v0.8.0.9, each traced before fixing.

The engine:

- A train on a card BEHIND the one departing no longer triggers a clearance
  ruling or an opposite-direction bar (#26). Reproduced from the exported
  save: X15 was held over X18 behind it, and X18 then collided into the full
  Whistle Post. Games in progress holding a ruling the engine no longer asks
  for will not resume (28 of 40 recorded four-seat games); shipped as is at
  Jesse's call.
- `mainlineModified` carries the card's previous kind, so the log can say
  what a Realignment converted (#27).

The screen:

- The turn chart and the Division map name the player whose move is on
  screen while bot turns replay, not the live actor (#25).
- The owning player's name is no longer outlined by the turn arrow's stroke,
  which made it unreadable (#24).
- A Mainline card flashes on the map when a Realignment changes it (#28).
- The history is held back with the board and revealed step by step, instead
  of arriving whole while the board is still catching up (#29).
- A ruling made by holding the office reads "Superintendent Player X" (#30),
  and no line names a player twice (#31).
- A seated player can download their own game as a save file: the play
  page's Save replay button, fed by GET /api/save?token=… (#32). The StartOS
  action cannot do this — an action result is text only.

Closes #24
Closes #25
Closes #26
Closes #27
Closes #28
Closes #29
Closes #30
Closes #31
Closes #32

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017nnuCv8UodHucFfx3LWEoX
2026-09-15 22:44:20 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Sonnet 5 f2c87b6871 v0.7.9 — solitaire setup screen feedback, and the dead settings it exposed
Four pieces of feedback from Jesse on the solitaire setup screen.

THE COLLISION LIMITS DID NOTHING IN SOLITAIRE. Asked to reword those
entries to "the game ends immediately and results in a loss", which was
unwriteable: advance.ts gated the §3.4 check on competitive/coop, and a
solitaire game's mode is 'solitaire'. Both limits were offered as live
settings, rode into the config, and never fired — the existing text was
already false. The exclusion was never a stated rule and nothing
recorded a reason for it. Jesse's ruling: the settings do what they say,
so the gate is gone rather than the controls.

Measured, not asserted — 200 standard developer-bot games:
loss/collisionFloor 1 in 200, Days played 5.00 -> 4.98 mean with a
minimum of 1, collisions per game unchanged at 0.14. Recorded in
TODO.md under Play Balance, since full-length figures predate it.

Extra start defaults to ownOffice: at one seat it is the same rule as
anyOffice (apply.ts only rejects another seat's start), so this is a
label fix with no gameplay effect.

Also: collision wording on all three screens, Employee Rotation reads
"not applicable for solitaire", and the save warning is legible at 14px
on an amber panel with buttons that say Continue Existing Saved Game and
Deal New Game.

869 tests pass, two new; one asserted the opposite of the ruling and
says so where it was reversed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AdG46Ja2PEDBkpqiDazMoX
2026-08-30 01:01:11 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 228027637b The Yard Office is offered, reachable, and can be run into (Gitea#5)
"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
2026-08-29 06:57:31 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 5e34c73b16 Extras that must run loaded, and a circus paid per district (Gitea#13)
"I've redefined some of the extra trains that they have to run full boxcars —
military trains, circus trains, etc. If not loaded, then empty, and if none
available, run without."

MAKE-UP. X17 Campaign, X18 Circus and X19 Military carry `mustRunLoaded`. It is a
preference order rather than a flat requirement, so the rule is asked of the
DIVISION YARD: an empty is refused only while the yard can still supply a loaded
car this train would accept, and once it cannot, the empty is legal and the train
may still depart short. Per category, since that is the slot the car competes for
— a loaded coach is no reason to refuse an empty boxcar.

SCORING, per Jesse's ruling (2026-08-29): "once per stop in an office area. In a
multiplayer game, each player could score if the circus stops in their area." So
`stopPointClaimed` (a boolean, once per game) becomes `stopPointSeats` (the seats
already paid). A Circus touring three districts is paid three times; one parked in
the same district all game is paid once. The other half of the ruling — "if the
circus train gets recycled and played a second time as a second extra, then it
could again score points later too" — needs no code: a train is made up onto a
fresh tray every time, so a re-played Extra starts with an empty list.

The point now requires the train to be FULLY LOADED, meaning every non-caboose car
loaded. A coach counts as loaded when occupied, which is what makes this the right
test for the Campaign Train: X17 carries one coach and no freight, so "fully
loaded" is exactly "the candidate is aboard". X17 also GAINS the per-stop point —
it had `stopThenExpedite` and no scoring rule at all, and Jesse's "credit for a
circus or campaign train (one point per stop)" says it should score.

TWO BUGS FIXED ALONG THE WAY:

  - `ConsistSpec.emptiesOnly` was declared on X13 Appleseed, RENDERED to the player
    as "(empties only)" by both web/game.ts and sim/view.ts, and enforced by
    nothing — `acceptsCar` never read it, so the Appleseed could be made up loaded
    while its own card said otherwise. It is the same rule as this issue pointing
    the other way, and it would have been perverse to add one and leave the other.
  - Setting up out on the Mainline paid a point to PLAYER 0 whoever was playing:
    `playerAtSeat` needs a seat, off the grid there is none, and the fallback was
    `0`. Scoping the rule to Office Areas is what the ruling says and removes the
    misattribution rather than patching it.

Both loading rules exempt the caboose: every caboose in ROLLING_STOCK_SUPPLY is
minted loaded, so an unexempted rule would bar the one car a consist lists by name.

`trainNeedingCars` now asks the full question per car rather than the shape
question. It shares its predicate with `check` precisely to avoid the stall its own
comment describes, and the shape question stopped being the same question: an
empties-only train facing a yard of loaded cars would have been told a car was
available and then refused every one.

The two published replays that stopped replaying under the new rules were retired
and re-recorded with save-replay.ts, which verifies each candidate before writing
it. That is what test/harness.test.ts is for and what its comment prescribes.

846 tests pass.

Closes #13

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
2026-08-29 06:44:13 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 45580d8b61 v0.7.3 — a game that asks before it ends, and a results screen worth reading
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 #11
Closes #16

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
2026-08-29 04:23:26 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 06db36e5b5 v0.7.0 — four game types, a lobby you can read and leave, and a multiplayer game that makes a sound
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
2026-08-23 05:46:42 -04:00
Jesse.Markowitz 7804756f11 v0.6.2 — an Extra starts where you put it, a train card is never discarded
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.
2026-08-22 19:51:40 -04:00
Jesse.Markowitz 40f07b0710 v0.6.0 — saves survive a release, Employee Rotation is real, and the lobby
asks what game you want

Three queued items. The last matters most.

A RELEASE NO LONGER DESTROYS EVERY GAME IN PROGRESS.

Four consecutive releases killed every game on the box, one of them a
release that changed only how the board is drawn. The reasoning behind the
refusal was always right — a move legal under old rules may not be legal
under new ones, and half-replaying a save is worse than refusing it. The
TEST was wrong: it compared engineVersion for exact equality, and that
stamp is the package version, which moves for a CSS fix.

Whether a save still replays has an exact answer, so it is now asked
directly. loadGame reads the file and judges nothing; tryResumeSession
replays the intents and reports the first one the engine refuses. A save
stamped with a version this server has never run resumes fine provided its
moves replay — verified against a file hand-stamped 0.4.9-ancient. One that
genuinely does not replay is still refused, but the log names the move
rather than two version strings: "move 3 of 8 (localOps.choose) is rejected
by the current rules with OPTION_ALREADY_CHOSEN".

fromMultiplayerSave had to stop lying first. It has always stopped at the
first unacceptable intent and done so in silence, which was survivable only
because the version gate meant a doomed replay was never attempted. Now
that the replay IS the check, it returns where it stopped and why.

Deliberately not done: resuming a partly-replayable game at its last good
move. That silently rewinds a game to a position nobody played to while
every browser holding a later Frame carries on unaware. Refusing leaves the
file intact, so putting the previous version back still recovers it.

EMPLOYEE ROTATION IS IMPLEMENTED, SISTER TRAINS IS DELETED.

Two of the four optional-rule flags were read by nothing at all. Employee
Rotation is four lines in advance.ts, because the seat/player split (D9)
exists for precisely this rule: seating is the only thing that moves, so
Revenue, hands, the Superintendent and whose turn it is travel with the
player, and the Office, district, grid and any trains standing in it stay
with the chair. Inheriting the district you move into is the point of the
rule, not a side effect. "Left" is seat + 1, matching playerLeftOf.

Sister Trains is deleted rather than built: Q9 records that the Second
Section card supersedes it, and that card exists, so the flag was a toggle
for a rule the game no longer has.

THE LOBBY ASKS WHAT GAME YOU WANT TO PLAY.

Creating a game asked for a name, a mode and a table size; every other dial
was hardcoded. A Game settings block now carries the same set the solitaire
dialog does — seed, starting hand, the three revenue rates, Days, the
combined-Revenue floor, both collision caps, the opponent-card toggle —
plus the three surviving optional rules. Mode and table size set the
defaults and everything stays editable. The seed is honoured, so a game can
be reproduced or compared.

Verified: 682 tests pass (679 + 3). The rotation tests were mutation-checked
both ways — disabling the rotation and turning the table the wrong way each
fail the suite. Live: a save stamped 0.4.9-ancient resumed, an injected
illegal move was refused by name, and a create with every dial set to a
non-default value came back out of game.json with all of them intact,
including seed 777.

Two of my own assertions were wrong on the way and the tests caught them:
the Fedora legitimately passes at Stage 12 (§5) so it cannot be compared
against its own earlier value, and dispatchUsedToday is cleared at every
Day boundary so it cannot mark a district.
2026-08-21 21:45:34 -04:00
Jesse c3c5cbfeec v0.5.0 — multiplayer Phases 2 and 3: a server that runs a game and survives being restarted
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.
2026-08-20 23:50:38 -04:00
JesseandClaude Sonnet 5 859817d173 v0.4.9 — X,Y coordinates, no-switching can still clear the mainline, Q3 corrected, a clearance bug, three sounds, and the box art
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
2026-08-19 23:51:35 -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 08339effba more info on train moves in history. train info added to tooltip on timetable and division map. support for multiple trains in area switching. more info on train7/8 wrt location of coach on initial train build. 2026-08-16 21:45:19 -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 49f8504b05 v0.4.0 — multiplayer Phases 0 and 1: seat and player split apart, turn state per player, the page behind a Session, and eight seat/player mix-ups fixed with tests that fail without them 2026-08-13 14:06:02 -04:00
Jesse 1bf1e95058 v0.3.0 — playtest fixes, two new rules, and §7 enforced 2026-08-12 21:08:28 -04:00
Jesse 6ead39c530 fixed train# specific rules. cleaned up display topline and train display on division map 2026-08-09 19:44:18 -04:00
Jesse 821d3cdffa adding classification and division yard updates, train collisions, engine and car updates, turnout improvements. 2026-08-04 21:03:17 -04:00
Jesse c3c5c59a45 Show the whole Division mainline. district now has option for auto hiding on phases where not needed. scaffold for multi-player geometry showing division. regions on mainline cards implemented. bug fix on laying rail cards. optimized replay (carried links forward). Add sounds, first pass 2026-08-04 11:26:18 -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
Jesse e7bc07df85 Initial commit 2026-07-31 07:19:57 -04:00