Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
3befc420da
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
212 lines
10 KiB
Markdown
212 lines
10 KiB
Markdown
# Station Master — Quickstart
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**Version 0.8.2** · 2026-09-23
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For a player who has never played.
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Read this once before you sit down. It is about twenty minutes of reading and will save you an hour
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of confusion. The deeper references are listed at the end.
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---
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## 1. What the game is
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You are a railroad **Office** — a town — on a shared east–west main line called the **Division**.
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Everyone's Office sits in a row along it, west to east, with **Mainline cards** between them.
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Two jobs run at once:
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**Your own job, in your district.** Build track. Build industries and a passenger platform. Shunt
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cars around with a switching crew to get the right car to the right place, so that freight can be
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loaded and unloaded and passengers can get on and off. Every one of those completed pieces of work
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pays **Revenue**, which is the score.
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**The shared job, out on the Division.** Scheduled trains run across everybody's territory on a
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timetable. They arrive at your Office, and you work them. When two trains want the same stretch of
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track, the player wearing the **Superintendent's Fedora** rules on whether the second may follow the
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first. Rule wrong and they collide, which costs 5 Revenue and counts against a limit that can end
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the game.
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The tension the game is built around: **the useful work is local and slow, and the trains are shared
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and do not wait.**
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---
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## 2. How you win
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A game runs for a set number of **Days**, chosen when the game is created. Each Day is **12
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Stages**, which you can think of as two-hour clock periods from midnight.
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At the end of the last Day, the table's **combined Revenue** is checked against a floor. **Miss it
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and everybody loses**, however well you personally did — this is the number to watch. The floor is
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worked out from the number of players and Days when the game is dealt, and whoever sets the game up
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can raise or lower it.
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Clear the floor, and how you win depends on the game type:
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- **Co-op** — clearing the floor is the win, together.
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- **Competitive** — clearing the floor puts the game on, and the **highest individual Revenue**
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wins. Everyone is still working towards the same floor first.
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- **Cutthroat** — competitive, with the opponent-directed cards in play, so players can act against
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each other directly. Those cards are not implemented yet, so this plays as Competitive today.
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- **Solitaire** — clear the floor by yourself.
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**Collisions can end it early and badly.** Breaching the collision limit stops play at once in a
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collective loss: the railroad has been declared unsafe. The limits are configurable, and can be
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switched off entirely.
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**Falling short offers another Day** rather than just ending, so a game that misses the floor can be
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played on. A game stopped by collisions cannot.
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### Where Revenue comes from
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| Work | Pays |
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| --- | --- |
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| A passenger boarding at your platform | 1 |
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| A passenger getting off at your platform | 1 |
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| Completing an outbound freight load | 1 |
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| Completing an inbound freight unload | 1 |
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| A train completing its run across the whole Division | paid to every player; usually set to 0 |
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Every rate is set when the game is dealt and can be changed. As they usually stand, **your score
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comes almost entirely from working cars in your own district** — trains passing through pay nothing
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by themselves.
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---
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## 3. The shape of a Stage
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Every Stage runs five phases in this order. Only two of them are your turn.
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| # | Phase | What happens |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| 1 | **Local Operations** | **Your turn.** Choose ONE of three things (below). Each player in turn, starting with the Superintendent and working eastward. |
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| 2 | **New Train** | Trains due this Stage are made up from the Division Yard. The table takes turns adding one car each. |
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| 3 | **Mainline** | Automatic. Trains move, lowest number first. This is where clearance rulings and collisions happen. |
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| 4 | **Cargo** | **Your turn.** Your Laborers and Porters do their work — the loading, unloading, boarding and detraining that actually pays. |
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| 5 | **Supervisor Shift** | Automatic. Laborers and Porters refresh; expedited trains depart. Every third Stage the Fedora passes. |
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### Local Operations: you get exactly one of these
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- **Switch** — take a crew and shunt. **Six Moves** (five at night under Reduced Visibility). This is
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how cars physically get from the yard to an industry and back. Cars you run over are coupled up
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automatically, so plan the route.
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- **Draw** — take a card, then play and/or discard. This is how your district gets built: track,
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industries, Office upgrades, modifiers, train cards.
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- **Freight Agent** — one clerical act: stock a green outbound box, clear a red inbound box, or
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unjam a facility.
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**You cannot do two of them in one Stage.** Choosing is most of the game. A Stage spent drawing is a
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Stage not spent switching.
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> Passengers are **not** the Freight Agent's job. They board and get off in the **Cargo** phase, with
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> a **Porter**. Reaching for the wrong role and finding nothing there is the single most common new
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> player mistake, so each role now says on screen what it is for.
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---
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## 4. The screen
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**Across the top:** your Revenue, the target, the Day and Stage, collisions, and the game code.
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**When other players are acting**, their turns are replayed on your board a step at a time rather
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than arriving already rearranged, with a `[N behind]` counter, **Pause** and **Skip**. Your own moves
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are not replayed at you — they are already on your screen.
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**The main display, on the left**, top to bottom:
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- **The Division — west to east.** The shared main line: every Office and the Mainline cards between
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them, with trains drawn where they are. **West is always on the left**, and a train's engine is
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drawn as an arrow (◀ or ▶) showing which way it points.
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- **Your Office Area.** Your own grid of track cards. This is where switching happens. It folds away
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outside the phases that change it, unless you pin it open.
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- **History.** What has happened, most recent first.
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**The right-hand column:**
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- **Your Move** — the buttons. If it is not your turn this is empty, and the board tells you who is
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acting.
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- **Cards in My Hand**, and the **Department decks** — three face-up discard piles anyone may draw
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the top of.
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- **The Yards.** The **Division Yard** is the live supply of cars. The **Classification Yard** is
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where used cars go, and it comes back **only when the Division Yard runs completely bare**.
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- **Timetable** — who is due out and when.
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- **Blocked — why nothing is moving.** *Read this panel.* When something will not work, this is
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where the game explains why, in rules terms.
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- **Facilities** — the load pipelines at each industry.
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- **This Game** — the seed or your seat, the game code, the rules this game was dealt under, and
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links to this guide and the other references.
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---
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## 5. Start with solitaire
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Play a **solitaire** game first. It needs no server and nobody else, and it is the same rules.
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1. Open the site, choose **Play solitaire**, accept the defaults, **Deal**.
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2. **Stage 1 — Draw.** You start on a **Depot** with almost nothing else. Play a track card or two to
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extend your Running Track. A Depot already works passengers and has two A/D tracks, so a second
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train can stand at your Office without wrecking; a **Station** upgrade, when one appears, buys a
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third track and another Porter.
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3. **Build one industry** on a stub off the main — not on the Running Track itself, which the game
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will not allow.
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4. **Play a train card** when you get one. It rolls onto the timetable and then runs at that Stage
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**every Day**.
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5. **When a train arrives at your Office**, switch cars to it or from it, and do the paying work in
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the **Cargo** phase.
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6. Watch the **Blocked** panel whenever you are stuck. It is usually one missing thing: no empty car
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spotted, no loaded car in the yard, a full box, a locked industry track.
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---
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## 6. Things that surprise new players
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- **A turnout cannot be stopped on.** You may run through it; you may not end a Move there.
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- **Coupling is mandatory.** Run over a standing car and you take it, whether or not you wanted it.
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- **An industry track locks while a load is on its MEN | AT | WORK boxes.** No train can enter,
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cross or work there until it clears.
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- **A modifier adds a BOX, never room for a car.** It raises how much work an industry can hold, not
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how much rail it has.
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- **Nothing may be built outside your Limits** — track, industries and modifiers alike. Your district
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ends at its sign, and the sign moves outward as your Running Track grows.
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- **A train must be made up to leave.** Engine at one end; if it has a caboose, the caboose at the
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far end. A train shunted out of shape sits at your Office until you fix it — a **Small Yard** will
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re-order a consist for one Move, and each option tells you whether the result can leave.
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- **Passengers may dry up completely.** Coaches move one way — boarding sends the emptied coach to
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the Classification Yard, and it only comes back when the Division Yard is bare, which may never
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happen. When it does, the yard panel warns you and passenger trains are made up empty. **This is
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the rules working as designed.**
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- **Expedited trains leave the same Stage they arrived**, after the Cargo phase. Ordinary ones wait.
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After playing some solitaire, play a day or two of multiplayer with bots or friends to get a feel
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for how players interact. Then you are ready to run a real division.
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---
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## 7. Issues / Suggestions
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Please do report anything that looks like a bug or an area to be improved.
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- **What you expected versus what happened**, with the Day and Stage. "Day 2 Stage 9, train 5 had
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no coaches" is worth more than "passengers seem broken".
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- **Save the game** (the **Save replay** button) and send the file. A save is the seed and the moves
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made, so it replays exactly and the problem can be looked at directly.
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- **Anything the screen did not explain.** If you had to guess a rule, that is worth saying even
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when the game was right.
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- **Anything you went looking for and could not find.**
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**A save replays under the rules of the build that opens it.** When a rule changes, a save made
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before it may stop part-way — the game says which move it stopped on and leaves your file untouched,
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so the build you played on will still finish it.
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---
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## 8. Documentation / References
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| For | Read |
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| --- | --- |
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| The rules in full, with the FAQ | [Rules](rules.md) |
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| How the Home Office deck is dealt and played | [Home deck](home-deck.md) |
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| The Mainline cards and what they do to a train | [Mainline deck](mainline-deck.md) |
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| Rolling stock, yards, trays, the Fedora | [Components](components.md) |
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