9 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 517238a727 v0.8.1.0 — the car comes back empty, and the lobby lets you leave
A second-digit bump, deliberately. 0.8.1 had been reserved for the seatless
display table; that work is getting more thought, and this table pass over
v0.8.0.17 earned the number on its own. Six reports: one was a rules question,
one a wording complaint with a real bug underneath, four straightforward.

A CAR CLEARED FROM A RED INBOUND BOX CAME BACK STILL LOADED. Reported as
wording — "technically accurate but doesn't make any sense" — and the wording
was the visible half. `inboundCleared` pushed `pooled(e.stock)` under a comment
reading "a car back in a yard is back in the common supply, carrying nothing",
and `pooled` does not do that: it strips the load's origin stamp and keeps
`loaded` ON PURPOSE, because a train can retire at a Division Point with freight
aboard. So the comment described an intention the call never carried out, and
every car the Freight Agent cleared reached the Classification Yard carrying a
load already delivered and already paid for.

It bites hardest on coaches: `passengersDetrained` takes `coach && !loaded` out
of the Division Yard and §2.2 refills that yard from Classification, so a
cleared coach came back as stock that could never unload another passenger.
Measured over five three-Day solitaire games: 18 loaded coaches in
Classification against 6 empty. The red box is where a journey ENDS; clearing it
sends the passengers out of the station, or the delivered load into the
industry, and returns the CAR, empty. The option says that now instead of
describing the counter that moves.

SCOPED TO THE RED BOX ON PURPOSE. `retireTrain` also returns loaded cars and is
left alone: that is what `pooled`'s own documentation describes, and a loaded
car in a yard is pre-loaded cargo rather than dead stock — it can be made up and
delivered, and a loaded coach can still detrain. Only the red box's contents had
already finished their journey.

GAMES IN PROGRESS DO RESUME, MEASURED RATHER THAN ARGUED. Yard contents change,
so the worry was real. All twelve saves on the test server were pulled and
replayed through `tryResumeSession` — the server's own boot check — against this
build. Six resume, six refuse, and the six refusals are the SAME six, at the
same moves, with the same codes, that 0.8.0.17 already logged. Nothing new was
stranded. That pre-install replay is a better check than reading the next boot
log, because it answers before the install rather than after.

THE HISTORY SAID "Mainline card 7" and left the reader to remember what card 7
was — with two Plains dealt, which is why the slot is kept beside the name
rather than replaced by it. A second fault sat one word to its left and nobody
reported it: the name was built as `e.key.replace(/([A-Z])/g, ' $1')`, so
`absSignals` printed as "abs Signals" while the action list directly above said
"ABS Signals". `narrate` takes `mainlineAt` and `enhancementName` beside the
`facilityAt` it already had, and `simpleCardName` is exported so the log reads
the same table the buttons do. `mainlineModified` had both faults and is fixed
with it.

LEAVING A RUNNING GAME WAS A DEAD END. `enterSeating` hides the choice section
and only the lobby's own two leave paths put it back; leaving a running game is
a third route, so the lobby came back holding nothing but "Games you are in"
with both doors on the page at display:none and no control able to reveal them.
Reset in `runLobby`, which is the one function every route onto that screen goes
through — which is exactly why the two paths that did it themselves missed a
third.

THE LOBBY'S ACTION BUTTONS CARRY THE BOARD'S AMBER. A list of the actions rather
than `#lobby button`: the settings form under Create is a field of inputs, and
amber on all of it would say everything is a move and so say nothing. A disabled
Start game drops back to chrome.

THE DEPARTMENT REFILL IS A RULE AND IS NOW WRITTEN DOWN. §6.2 — "if any of the
Department decks is empty, draw a Home Office card and place it in the empty
spot" — firing only when the draw actually empties the pile. Kept as implemented
(Jesse's ruling) and stated in rules.md and home-deck.md, neither of which had
ever mentioned it. A rule implemented from the prototype and never written down
is a rule that surprises the table.

1016 fast tests and 35 sim tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MUizFYCMHRWhbWwXhp7WPR
2026-09-22 21:20:52 -04:00
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 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 ad277fb994 v0.8.0.13 — the board on screen is the board you can act on
Nine reports from the Day 1-2 playtest of v0.8.0.12. One moved a car, one was a
rule working correctly with nothing on screen to say so, and the rest are things
the table could not see.

The real bug: the Division Yard chips stayed lit and clickable while the board
was catching up. `renderActions` puts the action list away while the queue is
behind — a move offered against a position that has already moved on is a move
made blind — but the make-up wiring sat outside that guard. A chip was clicked
during a bot's make-up, a coach left the yard, and the train ended up with three
cars: a real intent submitted against a board several moves stale. The chips now
follow the queue like every other control, and the yard COUNTS are drawn from the
shown board rather than the live game — they were the one panel still reporting a
future the player had not been shown.

The Office Area picker had a button per opponent and none for yourself, so the
one player who could not reach their own district was the player waiting on
everybody else. Your own seat is in the row now, and the row is ordered by SEAT,
west to east as the Division map draws it, rather than by join order — sorted
from the Frame's own `seat` on every render, so it rotates with Employee Rotation
instead of having to be told.

§5's handover of the Fedora rode on `actorChanged`, which is turn bookkeeping and
which `record()` drops as noise, so the one moment it carried that a player needed
went past in silence. It is its own event now, narrated and announced. The phase
keeps its name: the Supervisor Shift refreshes every Laborer and Porter EVERY
Stage and the Fedora moves only every third.

A collision now names whose Office it was and who paid the 5 Revenue, which rode
in a separate `revenueChanged`; a Mainline collision is phrased differently
because §10 makes it the Superintendent's.

Passengers, reported as a bug and ruled not one after replaying the save: the
Depot's capacity and modifiers were fine, and §6.3 stocking wants a LOADED coach
out of the Division Yard, which held none while six sat in Classification. The
shortage stays — running out is part of the game, the same ruling Gitea#2 got —
but the blocked panel says so now instead of the action being silently absent.

Smaller: "working left" is "working eastward" in the make-up panel and the New
Train tip, because the map runs west to east and the table does not; the history
panel keeps 90 lines instead of 60 in the same 230px box.

`git diff v0.8.0.12..v0.8.0.13 -- src/engine/` is NOT empty this time:
`events.ts` declares `superintendentChanged` and `advance.ts` emits it. Both are
additive — `check()`, `legal.ts` and every predicate are untouched, and events are
derived by replaying a save rather than stored — so no once-legal move became
illegal and games in progress resume.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DmdqqCNoiqE7GBo6wthBnR
2026-09-17 04:43:59 -04:00
Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5 19a6a47ab6 v0.7.4 — Red Flags hold a train out of your Limits (Gitea#19)
"If played, asked FLAG EAST or FLAG WEST. That stops all trains from entering your
limits from that direction (i.e. Flag East holds westbound trains). You can do this
if you see a problem or wish to complete switching."

REPLACES the old rule outright, per Jesse's call. Red Flags used to be played on a
stopped train out on the Mainline and protected it from a rear-ender: offered 4,212
times and played 4 across 600 games, a mechanic nobody used, and ABS Signals already
does that job better. The flag is now planted on one side of your own district and
holds the next train arriving from that side.

SPENT ON THE TRAIN IT STOPS. One card, one train, so there is no lifting action to
build, nothing to forget, and a flag cannot quietly strangle the Division. The held
train loses one Mainline Phase and comes in on the next — it buys a Stage to clear
the lead, which is what "wish to complete switching" asks for.

PLAYABLE OUT OF PHASE, which is the other half of the issue: when an arrival would
certainly collide and the district's owner holds the card, the phase breaks in and
asks. Offered ONLY to somebody holding one — a prompt with a single button is not a
choice, and it would leak that a collision is coming. The danger is read from §8.3's
own two triggers rather than restated, so the prompt cannot offer a flag against a
collision that will not happen.

Built on the decision union Gitea#5 introduced: this adds a `redFlag` case and
nothing else structural.

THE BOT STILL NEVER PLAYS IT, AND I MEASURED RATHER THAN ASSUMED. It now takes the
out-of-phase prompt unconditionally — the engine has already established the danger,
so there is nothing left to judge — and over 200 solitaire games `redFlagsSet` fires
ZERO times. The prompt needs an arrival that would collide (0.14 per game, about one
game in seven) to coincide with holding the card from a three-card hand out of 121.
So the anomaly exemption in sim.test.ts stays, but its comment no longer claims the
bot is unwilling: it is measuring deck luck. What is left to fix is the half of the
card a human would use, planting a flag on purpose to buy switching time, and TODO.md
now says that instead of the old finding.

A BUG WORTH RECORDING, because the next interruption will meet it too: the flag was
originally taken down in a `reduce` case, which never fires for an event advance.ts
emits — the phase driver mutates state and then describes it. The flag stayed up and
held every train that came. test/events.test.ts's unreduced-event registry is what
makes that class of mistake visible, and `redFlagSpent` is on it deliberately now,
with the reasoning.

858 tests pass.

Closes #19

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EAgJSmeV8zrMh55Mj85ESb
2026-08-29 07:12:36 -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
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 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 a7221dcf20 v0.4.1 - bug fixes. initial d12 rolls determine what player in which seat. 2026-08-13 15:28:53 -04:00