Jesse
9f3b92d08e
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.
72 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown
# Station Master — Mainline Deck
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**Rules implementation reference: v0.4.5**
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**Scope:** the tarot-sized Mainline cards placed between Offices. This is an implementation reference, not a transcription of earlier prototype rules.
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## How Mainline cards work
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At setup the game places one randomly selected Mainline card between each neighbouring pair of Offices and one beyond each end Office, between it and a Division Point. Thus, a game with *N* players has *N + 1* Mainline cards. The implementation selects types with replacement; it does not deal them from a shuffled finite deck.
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A train crossing a Mainline card spends Stages, rather than moving through its printed cells. A 60 mph card costs one Stage and a 30 mph card costs two. A Slow train adds one Stage to every crossing. On Hilly terrain, any train carrying at least one coach uses the passenger rate; a train carrying no coach uses the freight rate. No crossing can take less than one Stage.
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The card does not itself determine which player owns the adjacent Office. It is part of the shared Division.
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## Physical card inventory in `Mainline Cards.pdf`
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The supplied PDF has **ten** tarot-sized terrain cards. Plains appears twice; the other terrain types appear once each. It also includes two Division Point cards.
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| Physical card | Copies in the PDF |
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| --- | ---: |
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| Plains | 2 |
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| Curves | 1 |
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| Hilly | 1 |
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| Heavy Grade | 1 |
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| Double Track | 1 |
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| Uncontrolled Siding | 1 |
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| Tunnel | 1 |
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| Trestle | 1 |
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| Interchange | 1 |
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| East Division Point | 1 |
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| West Division Point | 1 |
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The PDF art labels this card “Yard”; this reference uses the implementation’s correct name, **Interchange**, to distinguish it from the Division Yard, Classification Yard, Yard Office, and Small Yard.
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## Implemented Mainline card reference
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| Card | Implemented crossing time and feature |
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| --- | --- |
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| Plains | 60 mph; one Stage for Fast, two for Slow. The implementation has one Plains *type* rather than the PDF’s two physical copies. |
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| Curves | 30 mph; two Stages for Fast, three for Slow. |
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| Hilly | Passenger train: 60 mph. Freight-only train: 30 mph. Add one Stage if Slow. |
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| Heavy Grade | Starts at 30 mph; two Stages for Fast, three for Slow. The card requires the player to select its uphill direction; v0.4.5 instead selects that direction from the game seed during setup. Grade modifiers can reduce the time, to a minimum of one Stage. |
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| Double Track | 60 mph. Printed capability: trains may pass. The traffic-resolution rule is in Rules §4.5. |
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| Uncontrolled Siding | 60 mph. Printed capability: trains may pass. The traffic-resolution rule is in Rules §4.5. |
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| Tunnel | 30 mph. |
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| Trestle | 60 mph. |
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| Interchange | 60 mph. A train may be reordered there only through the card’s printed “sort cars” concept; the current engine does **not** provide a Mainline sorting action for it. |
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### PDF/code mismatch requiring correction
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`src/engine/content.ts` defines nine `MAINLINE_PROFILES` types: one Plains entry plus the eight other terrain types above. `setup.ts` selects uniformly from that nine-type list. The second Plains card shown in `Mainline Cards.pdf` is therefore not represented as a duplicate card or as extra Plains weight in setup. If the PDF inventory is authoritative, the setup selection needs a second Plains entry (or an equivalent weighted selection).
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The executable state represents East and West Division Points as fixed end nodes, not as card records. They are functionally present at the ends of the Division, but are not represented as the two PDF cards in the deck/state model.
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## Heavy Grade modifiers
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These cards come from the Home Office deck and are played onto a Mainline card during a player’s Draw option.
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| Card | Copies | Placement and actual effect |
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| --- | ---: | --- |
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| Brakeman | 1 | Heavy Grade only. Reduces a downhill crossing by one Stage. |
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| Airbrakes | 1 | Heavy Grade only, and Brakeman must already be on that card. Reduces a downhill crossing by one additional Stage. |
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| Helpers | 1 | Heavy Grade only. Reduces an uphill crossing by one Stage. |
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| Realignment | 2 | May be played only onto an unoccupied Mainline card. Changes Plains → Double Track, Curves → Plains, Uncontrolled Siding → Double Track, or Trestle → Uncontrolled Siding. It cannot be played on any other card type. |
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For the grade cards, “uphill” should be the direction selected by the player when the card is placed. In v0.4.5 it is the seeded `gradeUp` direction because setup has no player-choice step.
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## What is not implemented
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- There is no finite draw pile, player choice, or physical placement interaction for Mainline cards; setup selects their types automatically from the seeded random stream.
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- Interchange is catalogued as a “sort cars” card, but v0.4.5 has no operation that reorders a train on the Interchange. The Small Yard in an Office Area is the implemented sorting mechanism.
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- Heavy Grade orientation is seeded automatically rather than chosen by a player. The implementation needs a player-selection step to match the card.
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