Jesse.MarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
517238a727
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
5.3 KiB
Station Master — Components and Markers
Describes the game as built at v0.8.1.0 (2026-09-22). These references are kept current with every release rather than versioned as editions, so there is no version in the filename: this file is always the latest, and the build it describes is stated here.
Scope: non-card physical components and supplies. Card-created facilities, workers, deck piles, hand state, timetable state and other markers are documented with their cards or in the rules book.
The figures below are checked against ROLLING_STOCK_SUPPLY and the supply constants in
src/engine/content.ts. They are physical inventory rather than deck tuning, which is why they are
printed here at all — per-category CARD counts are deliberately not published anywhere (TODO #15a).
Rolling stock
Rolling stock has a type and a load state. In the interface, coloured cars are loaded and white cars are empty. The Division Yard starts with the following supply.
| Type | Loaded | Empty | Total | Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coach | 8 | 8 | 16 | Passenger work. |
| Boxcar | 10 | 10 | 20 | Freight House outbound/inbound; Grocer’s Warehouse inbound. |
| Hopper | 8 | 8 | 16 | Mine Tipple outbound; Power Plant inbound. |
| Reefer | 5 | 5 | 10 | Packing Sheds outbound; Grocer’s Warehouse inbound. |
| Tank car | 6 | 6 | 12 | Refinery outbound; Power Plant inbound. |
| Caboose | 6 | 0 | 6 | Required or permitted at the rear of the applicable train cards. |
| Total | 43 | 35 | 78 |
The engine is not rolling stock and does not count against the four-car Crew Tray limit.
Other supplies
| Component | Count | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Crew Trays | players + 3 | Engine and tray are one combined resource; there is no "engine without a tray". |
| Whistle Post cards | 4 | Every player starts on one; it is not drawn from the deck. |
| Limits signs | 8 | "2N + spares", so relocating one is never a supply question. |
The two yards
Division Yard
The Division Yard is the active supply. It provides:
- loaded cars to a Freight Agent stocking a green outbound box;
- empty cars for building up trains;
- an empty coach when passengers detrain; and
- an empty matching freight car when a loaded freight car begins unloading.
When a train completes a run or is destroyed, its caboose returns to the Division Yard. When a car is taken from the Division Yard and that yard has become entirely empty, every car from the Classification Yard moves back into the Division Yard immediately.
Classification Yard
The Classification Yard collects used rolling stock: cars displaced by boarding passengers, cars cleared from inbound red boxes, cars removed by unjamming a facility, ordinary cars from completed or destroyed trains, and empty cars replaced by a completed outbound freight load. It is not a player-selectable source. It returns to service only when the Division Yard is empty.
This is a one-way ratchet for COACHES, and it decides games. Boarding sends an emptied coach here; detraining takes a fresh empty out of the Division Yard. Nothing returns a coach to the Division Yard except the bare-yard refill — and a yard kept topped up with freight cars returning from industries may never run bare. Measured over one three-Day game, every coach was here by the middle of Day 2 and stayed. See Rules §4.6.
Crew Trays and trains
Crew Trays represent an engine and its coupled consist. The game creates players + 3 free trays at setup. A tray is scarce: a due train without a free tray is held for that Stage, and Extras wait until one becomes free.
Within a tray, the engine can pull, push, or be between cars while switching. To depart an Office for the Mainline, it must be made up with the engine at an outer end; if it has a caboose, the caboose must be at the opposite outer end. A train may have at most four cars. A scheduled train can run under-strength but never with more than its card allows.
Fedora
The Fedora is the physical marker for the Superintendent. The player with it resolves following-train clearance decisions, takes the Yard Office and Red Flag questions, and is the player every round round the table starts with. A Mainline collision is their fault by §10, and costs 5 Revenue. The initial holder is the first player tied for the highest Superintendent setup D12 roll.
It passes at the end of Stages 3, 6, 9 and 12 — every third Stage, at the Supervisor Shift. Since v0.8.0.13 the handover is announced on screen and written into the history: it is the one thing in the game that changes hands on the clock rather than because somebody did something, so nobody is watching for it. Note that the Supervisor Shift refreshes every Laborer and Porter every Stage while the Fedora moves only every third.
D12 and seeded randomness
The D12 is used by the engine for:
- the initial seating roll in a multi-player engine game;
- the initial Superintendent roll;
- a timetabled train’s timetable slot; and
- all shuffled deck order and automatic setup selection through the same seeded random stream.
The rules engine uses a deterministic 32-bit seeded random generator. The same numeric seed, player configuration, house rules, and accepted intent sequence reconstruct the same game. A seed by itself is not enough when house rules differ.