5 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 b90c0413d2 v0.8.0.17 — four things the game knew and the screen did not say
All four reported from a table on Day 1 of v0.8.0.16, and all the same shape.

ABS SIGNALS COULD ONLY BE PLAYED ON ONE MAINLINE CARD, while its tooltip said
"any Mainline card". The engine was never wrong: check accepts any node whose
kind is mainline and legalActions filters by check, so all of them were legal.
The failure was the LABEL — describeIntent named i.placement and never i.node,
so every placement described itself as plain "play ABS Signals", and the action
list drops duplicate labels. All but the lowest-index node were discarded before
the menu saw them. This is the THIRD time that trap has fired and the file
documents the other two three lines apart: a turnout's two rotations, and three
Department discards. Same fix — name what distinguishes them.

The card is also called what the card face calls it. prettyKey rendered
absSignals as "Abs Signals" beside a tooltip saying ABS, an acronym no
key-splitter can recover, so the authored names now win. Three of those names
were transcribed in sentence case and were CORRECTED rather than adopted: the
repository says "Yard Office" 36 times against "Yard office" twice. A lookup
that imports its own source's typos is the drift it exists to prevent.

NOTHING ON A MAINLINE CARD SHOWED WHAT WAS STANDING ON IT. Played, ABS left no
mark and you found out by hovering — the same complaint the Heavy Grade wedge
answered, and it matters more here because ABS decides whether a second train on
that card is safe. It draws a signal mast with a lit lamp now; a signal is the
literal object and needs no room for words, which is what lets it sit clear of a
name as long as "Uncontrolled Siding" on a 152px cell. The Mainline modifiers
draw as BRK, AIR and HLP. Realignment is deliberately not among them: reduce
takes the `became` branch and changes node.card, so a realigned Trestle IS an
Uncontrolled Siding afterwards. Asserted, so the absence reads as a finding.

A FREIGHT AGENT TURN SAID A CAR MOVED WHEN NONE HAD. Three faults behind one
line. It asserted an outcome, where §6.3 requires no action and the bot declines
deliberately — unjamming a healthy box destroys a load that cost a whole action
to stock. An idle Agent was then silent, which read as a dropped turn; a new
freightAgentIdled event says so and why, reducing to nothing exactly like
switchingEnded. And the work named a coordinate rather than the industry, though
a `place` helper has existed for precisely that since the switching lines moved
to it. "Loaded a loaded boxcar INTO the green Outbound box at the Freight House",
with the direction in capitals because to-or-from was the question asked.

THE LOG AND THE ACTION MENU SPELLED THE SAME SQUARE DIFFERENTLY. view.ts wrote
(col,row) — X,Y, east/west then north/south — with a comment saying why;
narrate.ts wrote the internal storage order with no comment at all. So the menu
offered a move to "(1,-1)" and the log reported it at "(-1,1)", side by side.
Pinned by a test that renders one square through BOTH describers and compares
them to each other: a test written against either file alone would have passed.

THE DOCUMENTATION IS REACHABLE FROM A RUNNING GAME, AND ALL OF IT IS PUBLISHED.
v0.8.0.16 published the Quickstart and nothing it points at — its §8 links five
documents by relative path and every one 404'd on the package, verified against
the running container. The build publishes the full set, and the test reads the
links OUT OF the guide rather than listing them. They are linked from the This
Game card, where reference already lives, rather than the header that must not
wrap; no mode awareness is needed, because solitaire and multiplayer are the
same page on the same origin.

THE REFERENCES DROPPED THE VERSION FROM THEIR NAMES. Four described v0.8.0.16
and had since the v0.8.0.15 audit; the v0.4.5 was the prototype edition they
were first written against, kept only because 36 citations pointed at it — and
it read as documentation five minor versions stale. They are quickstart.md,
rules.md, home-deck.md, mainline-deck.md and components.md now, kept current
with each release rather than published as editions. Two errors surfaced while
checking them against this release, which is the argument for doing it:
home-deck.md filed ABS Signals under Enhancements "played into your district"
that "change what a square does" — it does neither, this release's bug written
down — and mainline-deck.md, which lists everything playable onto a Mainline
card, never mentioned it at all.

1010 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MUizFYCMHRWhbWwXhp7WPR
2026-09-21 05:53:52 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 f308a2d94d v0.8.0.15 — the reference documents, and a card that advertised what it cannot do
The four hand-written references brought up to the game as it actually runs,
ahead of the next testing round, plus a Quickstart to hand a tester who has never
played. They had not been touched since v0.6.2 — a month and two minor versions —
and each now says at the top which build it describes.

ONE LIVE BUG CAME OUT OF THE PASS. mainlineDescription told players "Cars may be
sorted into any new order here" on the Interchange. It is the printed capability
and has never been implemented: nothing reads sortsCars to permit a sort, and its
one live use is marking the card an Extra may be made up on, because it is the
Mainline card with a yard. That sentence is not only documentation — view.ts
renders it as a Mainline card's `what`, so it is what a player reads on the
board, and the generated reference printed a "Sorts cars: yes" column beside it.
A card advertising a button that does not exist sends a player hunting for it and
then concluding the game is broken.

What the documents had wrong, all of it verified against the code rather than
read for tone: the victory model in the Rules book (firstToTarget /
highestAfterDays and the target-bearing length presets stopped existing in
2026-08 — it is a free days count and a combined floor of 3 x players x days);
"there is no lobby, no server, no multiplayer"; crossing time in mph rather than
regions; Extras launched automatically eastbound; the Uncontrolled Siding listed
as a passing card; industry track length taken from the box count; and a
"Sister Trains" optional rule that never existed. The Home deck's counts table
came out under TODO #15a — Jesse's own ruling that counts move with balance —
and it had been wrong for a month, which is the argument made twice.

The Home and Mainline deck references are restructured to explain how a deck is
USED and to defer every per-card table to rules/as-built.md. Duplicating it by
hand is precisely the drift #15a was raised about: as-built needed no correction
beyond the Interchange, because build:cards regenerates it and a test fails when
the checked-in file disagrees. Everything hand-maintained around it had drifted;
it had not.

docs/design.md, the index everything starts from, said v0.4.3, "what is not: the
server", and 493 tests. It now also lists the player-facing references, which it
never has, so the Quickstart is findable at all.

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
2026-09-20 12:13:18 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 9a9e50b3c6 v0.8.0.11 — sixteen fixes from the second multiplayer playtest
Arrivals name whose Office they reached, and no longer tell every seat they can
work the train. The turn chart follows the animation queue, so being five behind
looks five behind across the whole screen rather than half of it. Pause sits
beside Skip and preserves the dwell a held step still owed. A one-render look at
another player's Office Area. The district summary counts the board being shown.
LIMITS is printed beneath its card instead of through its border. The Mainline
region divider is visible. Only Hilly mentions FAST/SLOW, because it is the only
card that reads it. A passenger Modifier on a Whistle Post reports itself dormant
rather than claiming the facility "only receives". An automatic phase says what
the Division is doing instead of answering by negation. The version appears once
in the header rather than twice on every .s9pk. Save files carry the join code,
the Stage and the date.

The New Train phase, reviewed before being changed: the make-up panel now says
what the train STILL needs rather than only what its card calls for, explains
that a player adds one car before the round passes on, marks the train being
loaded on the Division map, and gives an addable car in the yard the same amber
every other clickable thing on the page wears.

Reasoning, measurements and the reports behind each are in CHANGELOG.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017nnuCv8UodHucFfx3LWEoX
2026-09-16 16:06:01 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 e734481d65 v0.7.9.3 — the reference says what only the code knows, and saves get a rule
The generated card reference now carries the half TODO #15a said was the
point of generating it: every Enhancement's `live` / `dormantSolo` /
`unbuilt` status — whether its printed effect actually resolves yet — and
the opponent-directed Action and Space-use cards, none of which is dealt
in any deck. A transcription cannot carry either fact.

Card counts are removed throughout, as ruled: they move with play balance
so a document printing them is stale on the next retune. Where a count
matters it is a yes/no "is this dealt at all", which is a fact about the
design rather than the current tuning. #88 closes with it — it asked
whether `card-reference.md`'s industry rows were stale, deliberately
without rewriting them since Laborer counts are a balance decision. They
are; nothing in the engine changed; that file is simply no longer where
anyone looks. The balance question it guarded is #70.

Save compatibility becomes a general rule in `README.md` § Design notes
rather than a fact restated per version: a save is a list of moves and
reopens by being re-played through the CURRENT rules, so any change that
makes a once-legal move illegal stops an older one there — a deck change
being the likeliest breaker. It fails safe every time. #40 generalised,
#32's version-specific note dropped, #52 carries the ruling that
versioned replays are a post-1.0 question.

#94 opened: a Red Flag set out at an Office's Limits holds the next train
from that side and is drawn nowhere. `DivisionView`'s office node has no
`redFlag` field and `board-svg.ts` never mentions one, so after the single
log line announcing it there is nothing on screen. Same class as Gitea#21
and #22, and already on the common board's step 1 list.

No engine change. 897 tests pass, unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E3Qk7uresKCHksdZajXCLg
2026-09-07 14:50:11 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 819996faa2 v0.7.9.2 — two things the table could hear that only one seat should
Both leaks were found while planning the common board (Gitea#20 step 1),
and both are live multiplayer bugs with or without that display, so they
are fixed now rather than with 0.8.0.

`game.log` is one shared list and `linesSince(seat)` slices it with no
per-seat filter, so every line reaches every player. It carried the SEED
in the opening line of each multiplayer game — the whole future of the
deal — and the NAME OF A CARD DRAWN BLIND from the face-down Home Office
deck. Solitaire deliberately keeps both: a one-seat table has nobody to
leak to, the seed is what a bug report quotes, and a player's own history
naming their own draw is the record. A Department slot is face up and
stays named. The drawer still learns their card through `justDrawn`,
which already goes to that seat alone.

Neither was found by a test. Every test in `redaction.test.ts` passes an
empty log, so the whole of narration has sat outside the redaction net
since the net was built. Both now have tests there; TODO #91 carries what
is still owed and supersedes #78, which described a gap that had already
been closed and never mentioned this one.

`docs/rules/` had no current description of the game, and `content.ts`
named `card-reference.md` as the file that carries what the cards say —
a file whose own banner says not to use its numbers, describing the
v0.4.5 deck where 3/4 is a Mail-Express with three coaches. Every file in
that directory is a deliberate historical record, so none of them is
rewritten. `as-built.md` is new and GENERATED from the same catalogues
the engine instantiates from, with a test that re-runs the generator and
fails when the checked-in file disagrees. A hand-written replacement
would have drifted the same way, for the same reason.

TODO.md: #32 closed — the playtest migration note did its job and the
jump is made; the durable fact it carried is kept. #78 retired in favour
of #91. The "play it at a table" section now records that 0.7.4-0.7.9
were test-run without change requests, and that more testing comes at the
end of the 0.7.9 series.

897 tests pass, up from 891.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E3Qk7uresKCHksdZajXCLg
2026-09-07 12:09:25 -04:00