Jesse.Markowitz
7804756f11
Three more from the v0.4.9e gameplay-testing round, filed as Gitea issues, plus two bugs found underneath them. Gitea#2 is diagnosed but NOT fixed: it needs a ruling, and the reasoning is in TODO.md under Play Balance. GITEA#4 — AN EXTRA STARTS WHERE THE PLAYER PUTS IT. Only one Division Point was ever offered, chosen by number parity. The number no longer decides an Extra's direction — the start does, which supersedes the recorded ruling that "the number decides, like everything else on the timetable". The two cannot both hold: an odd, westbound Extra placed at the WEST end would leave the Division on its first move having crossed nothing, and be paid for the run. Either end now runs the train away from itself; at an Interchange or a Control Point the player picks the direction. The Interchange start is a YARD, off the running line, which is what makes the Superintendent clause work: placing it can never force a collision, a guaranteed one holds it there for another Stage, and a potential one is the Superintendent's to rule on — exactly evaluateClearance's `blocked` and `ask`, so nothing new decides collisions. Where an Extra may start is now a house rule (divisionPointsOnly / ownOffice / anyOffice, defaulting to what the engine already did). The legacy `atSeat` intent field still replays as it always meant. FOUND UNDERNEATH IT: an Extra started away from a Division Point ran empty. isBeingMadeUp tested position alone, so the Control Point start has been shipping since it was added with a train that could never be given a consist. Found by playing it, not by the tests, which had only asserted where the tray landed. FOUND UNDERNEATH IT: collide left the wrecks on the card. Destroyed trains kept their Transit entries, and evaluateClearance counts every transit as an occupant, so one rear-end collision permanently poisoned that Mainline card for every later train. THE MAINLINE CARDS WERE ROLLED, NOT DEALT — drawn from the nine types with replacement, so a Division could hold two Interchanges and Plains carried the weight of a card printed once. "An Extra may start at the Interchange if one is on the board" only reads as a rule if the board holds at most one. Now dealt from the printed deck without replacement, verified over 1600 deals. This re-deals every seed: the published replays were re-recorded, and the saved games in docs/ are retired too — two of those were already dead before this release and nobody had noticed. GITEA#6 — A TRAIN CARD IS NEVER DISCARDED, Timetabled and Extra alike. The forced play needed no mechanism: nothing discardable plus a hand over the limit leaves exactly one legal way to end the turn, and playing a train is unconditionally legal, so the corner cannot trap anyone. The bot needed no rule either. 400/400 games finished, revenue unmoved, trains scheduled 1.2 -> 1.3. The player is told on the card and on the button. GITEA#7 — COACH COUNTS. 1/2 Crack Limited 3 -> 2, 5/6 The Sparrow 2 -> 3. A change to the cards, so Trains3.pdf and the transcription keep the original numbers with a footnote while content.ts and the Home Deck reference carry what the game plays. CONTENT.TS COMMENT PASS — no data changed, only comments. Four were factually wrong, including an office table naming counts doubled long ago and a pointer to a DEALT_DECK_SIZE that has never existed. Every Enhancement row cited its implementation by line number and every citation had rotted; they name functions now. Card counts came out of the comments, since they move with play balance; source-sheet figures and dated measurements stayed. TODO.md gains an item for a card reference generated from content.ts, in six sections, so the documentation cannot disagree with the game. 715 tests pass, tsc clean, site builds.
5.6 KiB
Station Master — Mainline Deck
Rules implementation reference: v0.4.5
Scope: the tarot-sized Mainline cards placed between Offices. This is an implementation reference, not a transcription of earlier prototype rules.
How Mainline cards work
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.
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.
The card does not itself determine which player owns the adjacent Office. It is part of the shared Division.
Physical card inventory in Mainline Cards.pdf
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.
| Physical card | Copies in the PDF |
|---|---|
| Plains | 2 |
| Curves | 1 |
| Hilly | 1 |
| Heavy Grade | 1 |
| Double Track | 1 |
| Uncontrolled Siding | 1 |
| Tunnel | 1 |
| Trestle | 1 |
| Interchange | 1 |
| East Division Point | 1 |
| West Division Point | 1 |
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.
Implemented Mainline card reference
| Card | Implemented crossing time and feature |
|---|---|
| Plains | 60 mph; one Stage for Fast, two for Slow. The implementation has one Plains type rather than the PDF’s two physical copies. |
| Curves | 30 mph; two Stages for Fast, three for Slow. |
| Hilly | Passenger train: 60 mph. Freight-only train: 30 mph. Add one Stage if Slow. |
| 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. |
| Double Track | 60 mph. Printed capability: trains may pass. The traffic-resolution rule is in Rules §4.5. |
| Uncontrolled Siding | 60 mph. Printed capability: trains may pass. The traffic-resolution rule is in Rules §4.5. |
| Tunnel | 30 mph. |
| Trestle | 60 mph. |
| 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. |
PDF/code mismatch — CORRECTED
Was: src/engine/content.ts defines nine MAINLINE_PROFILES types: one Plains entry plus the eight other terrain types above. setup.ts selected uniformly from that nine-type list, with replacement. The second Plains card shown in Mainline Cards.pdf was therefore not represented as a duplicate card or as extra Plains weight in setup — and, worse than a weighting error, a Division could be dealt two Interchanges, two Tunnels or two Trestles, none of which the deck contains.
Now: MAINLINE_DECK in content.ts is the inventory table above — ten drawable cards, Plains twice and the other eight once each — and buildDivision deals from it without replacement. The two Division Point cards are not in that deck: they are the fixed ends of the Division, laid by buildDivision itself rather than drawn.
The Interchange is what forced the correction. §7 lets an Extra be started at the Interchange "if one is on the board" (see docs/rules/implications.md, §7), which only reads as a rule if the board can hold at most one.
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.
Heavy Grade modifiers
These cards come from the Home Office deck and are played onto a Mainline card during a player’s Draw option.
| Card | Copies | Placement and actual effect |
|---|---|---|
| Brakeman | 1 | Heavy Grade only. Reduces a downhill crossing by one Stage. |
| Airbrakes | 1 | Heavy Grade only, and Brakeman must already be on that card. Reduces a downhill crossing by one additional Stage. |
| Helpers | 1 | Heavy Grade only. Reduces an uphill crossing by one Stage. |
| 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. |
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.
What is not implemented
- 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.
- 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.
- Heavy Grade orientation is seeded automatically rather than chosen by a player. The implementation needs a player-selection step to match the card.