station-master/docs/rules/card-reference.md

Station Master — Card Reference

⚠ SUPERSEDED. This described an invented 52-card placeholder. The real catalogue arrived on 2026-07-30 in docs/Deck cards2.xlsx, Trains3.pdf and Mainline Cards.pdf, and is transcribed in src/engine/content.ts. See implications.md for the full comparison.

Kept for the reasoning it records — the economy analysis in §7 was how we knew what questions to ask the design. Do not use its numbers.

The per-card catalogue: what is printed on every card. This is the specification the rules engine instantiates from and that any print-and-play layout renders. It says what each card says, not how it looks.

Derived from rules-v0.2.md §12 and the Gap 10 decisions in open-questions.md.

All values provisional — calibration targets to retune after play.

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1. The Home Office deck — 52 cards

Category	Cards	§12.1
Timetabled Trains	12	one each, 1–12
Extra Trains	4	X9–X12
Office upgrades	9	Depot ×4, Station ×3, Terminal ×2
Freight Facilities	10	5 types × 2
Modifier Facilities	5	one each
Plain track	12	turnout ×6, straight ×3, run-around ×3
Total	52

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2. Freight Facility cards

Ten cards, five types in identical pairs. Every freight facility card carries: a track with the Operational Rail wheel icon, an industry track of the stated length, Laborer icons, the MEN | AT | WORK three-box turn track, and its green Outbound and/or red Inbound boxes.

Facility	Car type	Direction	Laborers	Outbound	Inbound	Industry track	Copies
Mine Tipple	Hopper	Outbound only	3	3	—	4	2
Produce Shed	Reefer	Outbound only	2	2	—	3	2
Grocer's Warehouse	Boxcar	Inbound only	2	—	2	3	2
Oil Refinery	Tank car	Outbound only	3	2	—	4	2
Power Plant	Hopper	Inbound only	3	—	3	4	2

Directions follow the commodity: coal originates at a Mine Tipple and is consumed at a Power Plant; produce ships out; a warehouse receives. This gives §9 all three of its cases — outbound-only, inbound-only, and both — with the Freight House the one card that does both.

The Grocer's Warehouse and the Oil Refinery are ONE-WAY (corrected v0.4.9e, from gameplay testing): "Grocer's Warehouse should be receive only, does not ship anything out"; "Refinery: only ships out tanks, does not receive anything" (Jesse). The Direction column read "Both" for both, on the reading below that "Freight House" named exactly those two.

And that reading is wrong. §9.3/Appendix A's "Passenger Facilities and Freight Houses permit cars to move each direction" names a CARD: the engine deals a freightHouse industry, 6 copies, one Laborer and one slot each direction (content.ts), and has since before v0.4.9. This paragraph used to read "'Freight House' is not a card — it is the collective term for a freight facility that loads and unloads, the Grocer's Warehouse and the Oil Refinery", and that premise is what made those two two-way. StationMaster-Home-Deck-v0.4.5.md prints them one-way, and the modifier set agrees: all three Refinery modifiers (Pipelines, Oil Depot, Viscosity Breakers) grant +1 outbound, which would be an odd card set for a facility that receives half the time.

Throughput — why these Laborer counts

A complete freight load takes four Laborer-actions (§9.3): Green → MEN → AT → WORK → onto the car. Laborers are usable once each per Stage.

MEN | AT | WORK is a pipeline, not a queue. §9.1 allows one Load on each of its three boxes, so up to three loads are in flight at once and each Laborer advances one of them per Stage. This is the key to reading the numbers: Laborer count is throughput, not latency.

single load, 2 Laborers → completes in 2 Stages
single load, 3 Laborers → completes in 2 Stages   (no faster!)

pipeline full, 3 Laborers → one load completes EVERY Stage

The extra Laborer buys nothing on one load and triples output on a full pipeline.

And the pipeline can only be fed one load per Stage, because stocking the green box costs a whole Local Operations action (§6.3). So a 3-Laborer facility is exactly balanced against the feed rate — it completes loads as fast as a player can possibly supply them. The 2-Laborer facilities are the deliberately slower industries, unable to quite keep up with a dedicated player.

That is why Laborer counts track Outbound capacity: Mine Tipple 3/3, Power Plant 3/3, Produce Shed 2/2, Grocer's Warehouse 2/2. The numbers are derived from the action budget, not chosen freely.

Even so, Laborers are rarely what limits a player — spotting the empty car and hauling the loaded one away both cost switching actions from the same budget. See §7.

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3. Train cards

Sixteen cards. Each carries its number, a direction from the card image, the consist specification, and the required order: engine at the front, revenue cars, caboose last where required.

Odd numbers run westbound, even eastbound. Pairs are sister trains under the optional rule (Appendix B). Seniority runs passenger-first — low numbers are the varnish, high numbers the drags and locals.

Trains	Class	Consist	Direction
1 / 2	Limited	4 coaches, no caboose	W / E
3 / 4	Mail-Express	3 coaches, no caboose	W / E
5 / 6	Manifest Freight	3 boxcars or reefers + caboose	W / E
7 / 8	Coal Drag	3 hoppers + caboose	W / E
9 / 10	Oil Train	3 tank cars + caboose	W / E
11 / 12	Way Freight	3 cars of any type + caboose	W / E
X9, X10, X11, X12	Extra	Any 3 cars + caboose, player's choice	Head-on — player chooses

A Crew Tray holds at most four Rolling Stock and a caboose counts toward that four (§A.4), which is why no caboose train carries more than three revenue cars.

Only trains 1–4 carry coaches, so passenger work at any Office depends on those four trains' visits.

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4. Office cards

Nine upgrade cards in the deck (Depot ×4, Station ×3, Terminal ×2 — the pyramid Gap 3b requires). Whistle Posts are a fixed supply outside the deck (§12.2).

Office	Control Point	Passenger Facility	A/D tracks	Porters	Green slots	Red slots	In deck
Whistle Post	no	no	1	—	—	—	supply
Depot	yes	yes	2	1	2	2	4
Station	yes	yes	3	2	3	3	3
Terminal	yes	yes	4	3	4	4	2

Slot capacity deliberately exceeds Porter count. Only trains 1–4 carry coaches, so an Office needs somewhere to bank boarding passengers between visits and room to absorb a whole trainload of arrivals. Slot counts mirror the A/D track progression.

All four tiers carry identical track geometry (§11.3): a through track plus a plain junction stub above and below. Upgrades are drop-in and must never disturb a connection.

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5. Modifier cards

Five cards, one each. A Modifier is not track. It is placed adjacent to a Facility, on any of the nine nearby spots — diagonals included — and if adjacent to two Facilities its effect may be used on only one per Stage (§9).

Two placement rules follow from it not being track. It is not bounded by the Limits: a host standing at the edge of the district keeps all nine of its spots, or the card would be unplayable exactly where the district ends. And it may never stand in the Running Track's row, which inside the Limits is always full anyway — beyond the sign that row is the ground the main grows onto, and a Modifier parked there would block the Limits sign from moving outward (§2.1).

Card	Effect	Applies to
Team Track	+1 car on the industry track	Freight
Loading Dock	+1 green Outbound capacity	Freight
Storage Shed	+1 red Inbound capacity	Freight
Extra Platform	+1 green and +1 red slot	Passenger
Section Gang	+1 Laborer or +1 Porter	Either

Capacity modifiers matter more than they sound: banking room, not worker count, is what limits output. Section Gang is the only way to speed a facility up, and is deliberately the sole worker-adding card.

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6. Track cards

Twelve plain track cards. Every one carries the Operational Rail wheel icon except turnouts, which a train may pass through but not stop on (§A.1).

Geometry	Count	Notes
Turnout	6	Enter from A → B or C; enter from B or C → A only. Not Operational Rail.
Straight	3	Operational Rail
Run-around	3	Operational Rail. Required for the facing-point move of §A.5.

Turnout-heavy because turnouts are how Secondary Track branches onward once the Office card's own junction stubs are built out (§11.3).

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7. Economy summary

Local Operations actions are the main currency. One per Stage, twelve per Day, and each is exclusive — switch, or draw, or work the Freight Agent (§6).

Revenue source	Local Ops cost
Freight load out	1 to stock the green box, plus amortized switching
Freight unload	none up front — 1 later, only once the red box fills
Passenger boarding	1 to stock a loaded coach
Passenger de-training	none up front — 1 later to clear the slot

⚠ Corrected against simulation. An earlier version of this section claimed every Revenue point costs about one action, giving a ceiling of 12/Day. That is wrong, and the error is instructive: the two inbound operations need no Local Ops action at all at the moment they score. A loaded car arrives on a train, per-Stage Laborers walk it off, and the point is earned using only free per-Stage resources. The action is spent later, and only when a box actually fills.

That earlier correction was itself measured against a scoring bug — unloads were paying a full Revenue point after one Laborer action instead of four. With the pipeline corrected, simulation gives ~0.9 Revenue/player/Day and a 0% win rate against these targets.

Treat the 5–6/Day figure as unfounded. It was derived from the mistaken model above and has not been re-derived. The measured cost of one freight point is four Laborer actions plus a stocking action plus the switching to spot a car. See open-questions.md Gap 12.

The development ramp

Players open with a Whistle Post — not a Passenger Facility — and no freight facilities at all. The timetable also starts empty, so no trains run until someone draws and plays a train card.

Day 1    ~0    no facilities, no trains yet
Day 2    ~2    first facility placed, first train running
Day 3    ~5    developed
Day 4+   ~6    steady state

cumulative:   3 Days ≈ 7     5 Days ≈ 19     10 Days ≈ 49

The §3 victory targets (10 / 20 / 45) are set just under these cumulative figures, so a game is winnable by a player running well and missed by one who is not. The Competitive collective floor of 3 × players × Days is about half of expected output and is comfortably met by a functioning Division.

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8. Fixed supplies (outside the deck)

Component	Count
Mainline cards (tarot, 2 regions each)	N + 1 for N players
Division Point cards	2 (East, West)
Whistle Post cards	N + spares
Limits cards	2N + spares
Crew Trays and engines	player count + 3
Number Boards	12, numbered 1–12
Red Flag cards	1 per player (optional rule only; removed from game when played)
Fedora	1
Pocket Watch	1
D12	1

Rolling Stock — 62 pieces

Type	Loaded	Empty
Coaches (blue)	8	8
Boxcars (brown)	6	6
Hoppers (brown)	6	6
Reefers (brown)	4	4
Tank cars (brown)	4	4
Cabooses (red)	6	—
Total		62

Supply check against facility demand. Worst case is every copy of every facility in play at once with all boxes full:

Car	Facility demand	Supply	Headroom
Hopper	Mine Tipple 3×2 + Power Plant 3×2 = 12	12	exactly met
Tank	Oil Refinery 2×2 = 4	8	4 spare (was "exactly met" while the Refinery was two-way)
Boxcar	Grocer's 2×2 = 4	12	8 spare (same correction)
Reefer	Produce Shed 2×2 = 4	8	4 spare
Coach	Terminal 4+4, per Office	16	scales with Office count

Hoppers are exactly met in the theoretical worst case, which cannot occur in practice — only 10 freight facility cards exist across a 52-card deck shared by all players, and the §2.2 Classification Yard recycle returns stock to the Division Yard whenever it empties. Both are worth watching in playtesting.