12 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The 0.4.9 playtest line is no longer maintained (Jesse, 2026-09-29): the deploy rule that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 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 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 dc31555625 v0.8.0.16 — the guide a tester can reach, and a flag that named the card instead of the gate
v0.8.0.15 wrote a Quickstart for a tester who has never played and then left it
in docs/, where a tester does not look — reachable only by somebody who already
has the repository. Nobody handed the box had it. build-web.ts now copies it to
dist/quickstart.md and the splash page offers it under the three doors, as a
line rather than a fourth door: reading the guide is not a way to play, and
giving it equal weight in that grid would say it is.

COPIED, NEVER RE-WRITTEN. The Markdown document stays the one copy. A
hand-written HTML twin drifts from it on the first edit, which is the failure
#15a was raised about and precisely what the v0.8.0.15 pass spent itself
undoing. It is served as PLAIN TEXT, which is honest rather than good — tables
render as pipes and the links do not click. Rendering it into a styled page
wants a small Markdown converter and is filed as TODO #109; build-web.ts's
comment names that number rather than gesturing at "the next step", so the file
and the worklist cannot drift the way the references just did.

Two things had to be true and tsc checks neither, so both are tests. The href on
the splash page and the filename the build writes are two strings with nothing
connecting them: rename the document and the build quietly publishes nothing
while the page keeps offering a link that 404s. And a .md file must not arrive
as a download — the server's MIME fallback is application/octet-stream, which a
browser saves instead of displaying, so the link would have handed a tester a
file to save rather than a page to read. '.md' is in http.ts's table now, and
the test reads that table out of the source rather than asserting on a copy of
it, which would pass while the real one was wrong.

VERIFIED AGAINST A RUNNING SERVER, not only compiled: 200,
text/plain; charset=utf-8, the guide's own first lines, and the splash link
resolving.

THE sortsCars COMMENT. Asked after v0.8.0.15 whether everything now agreed, and
the audit turned up one place that did not — the field's own doc comment named
the card's printed text as though it were the flag's meaning. Nothing reads it
to permit a sort; its two readers, resolveExtraStart in apply.ts and the
enumeration in legal.ts, both ask whether this is the one Mainline card with a
Yard Limit and therefore the one an Extra may be made up and started on. Comment
only, and worth the bump because of where it is: it is what a developer reads
before using the flag, and it is the likeliest source of the sentence v0.8.0.15
had to correct off the board. The name is kept for its link to the card face and
the comment now says outright that the name is not the meaning.

The five references and docs/design.md read v0.8.0.16. They describe this build
because the audit re-checked them against it, not because the number was swept
forward — a stamp bumped without a reading is worth less than none.

1001 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 01:28:51 -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 d1314066bd v0.4.3 fixed load/unload bugs. empty cars must be staged prior to loading. rolling stock is now conserved. 2026-08-14 08:33:32 -04:00
Jesse 393a669418 v0.4.2 fixed passenger trains not stopping at office. changeed revenue for train completing run - 1 point to every player when train exits division 2026-08-13 21:29:52 -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
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 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