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.
3.6 KiB
Station Master — Components and Markers
Rules implementation reference: v0.4.5
Scope: non-card physical components and supplies modeled by the v0.4.5 game. Card-created facilities, workers, deck piles, hand state, timetable state, and other markers are documented with their cards or in the rules book.
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.
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.
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 and takes the 5-Revenue penalty for a Mainline collision caused by an unsafe clearance. The initial holder is the first player tied for the highest Superintendent setup D12 roll. The Fedora passes to the next seat to the left at each third-stage shift change.
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.