station-master/docs/design.md

Station Master — design index

Station Master is a tabletop railroad-operations game set in the era of timetable-and-train-order railroading (1840–1950), being developed into a multiplayer digital game: players connect from a web browser and an authoritative server manages lobbies and game state.

Source of record

• StationMasterPrototypeRules.pdf — the original prototype rules
• StationMaster-PrototypeTurnChart.pdf — the 12-Stage turn chart
• Deck cards2.xlsx — the complete card list (115-card deck, 104 track pieces, 12 start cards)
• Mainline Cards.pdf — the ten Mainline card types with their speeds and entry points
• Trains3.pdf — all 22 train cards with names, speed class, consist and operating rules
• tracks.png — card art for track and industry cards

These stay as-is. Everything below is derived from them.

The last four arrived after the engine was built and expand the game roughly threefold. See rules/implications.md: much of what is recorded below as decided was a placeholder for exactly this material, and the balance measurements in Gap 12 were taken against a ruleset that does not match the design.

For players and testers

Written to be handed to somebody who is about to play, rather than to somebody building the game.

Document	What it is
quickstart.md	Start here if you have never played. The point of the game, how a Stage runs, what is on screen, how you win, a first twenty minutes, and what to report.
rules.md	The rules in full, as the engine actually runs them, with a FAQ.
home-deck.md	How the Home Office deck is dealt, drawn and played out.
mainline-deck.md	The Mainline cards, how the deck is dealt, and what a card does to a train crossing it.
components.md	Rolling stock, the two yards, Crew Trays, the Fedora, the D12.

None of these carry a version in the filename, and that is deliberate (Jesse, 2026-09-21): they are kept current with every release rather than published as editions, so the name is always the latest and each says at the top which build it describes. Four of them were stamped v0.4.5 until v0.8.0.17 — the prototype rules edition they were first written against, never the version they described — which read as though they documented a build five minor versions old.

Rules

Document	What it is
rules/rules-v0.1.md	Faithful markdown transcription of the PDFs. No corrections. The baseline everything diffs against.
rules/rules-v0.2.md	The working ruleset. v0.1 with all ten gaps resolved, each change marked with its gap number.
rules/card-reference.md	⚠ SUPERSEDED — an invented 52-card placeholder, kept for its economy summary and its history. For what is printed on every card, read the generated tables in home-deck.md and mainline-deck.md.
rules/glossary.md	Every defined term, alphabetized.
rules/open-questions.md	All thirteen gaps, each with the options considered, the decision, and the rationale.
rules/implications.md	Read this first. What the four recovered design files (Deck cards2.xlsx, Mainline Cards.pdf, Trains3.pdf, tracks.png) change — and which decisions they supersede.

Architecture

Target is small self-hosted scale: a handful of concurrent games, hosted on a website or as a StartOS service. Stack is deliberately undecided; these documents describe what any implementation must do.

Document	What it is
architecture/components.md	The project plan. All 20 buildable pieces — where each runs, when, MVP vs finished size — plus dependency graph and build order.
architecture/overview.md	Why the server is authoritative; state/intent/event split; transport; the rules-engine boundary.
architecture/game-state.md	The entity model, and the constraints that are easy to lose.
architecture/protocol.md	Intents, events, and per-player view redaction.
architecture/lobby-and-sessions.md	Create/join, seating, reconnection, persistence.
architecture/deployment.md	Plain web host vs StartOS service — and the one constraint that differs.
architecture/multiplayer.md	The multiplayer build plan. The authoritative server as a layer added on top, with solitaire unchanged and server-free — plus every decision taken, listed for review.

Current status

v0.8.2. Rules formalized, card faces specified, architecture documented, and the game playable solitaire and multiplayer in a browser against an authoritative server. See ../CHANGELOG.md for what each version changed and ../TODO.md for what is open; this section is the shape of the project, not a running tally, because a hand-maintained tally is what drifted last time.

What is built. The rules engine, the developer bot, the balance harness, the replay viewer, the playable page — and the server: lobby, game codes, seating, bots, per-seat reconnection, persistence by replaying the intent history, and an ordered replay of other players' turns on each player's own screen. It ships as a StartOS package. 999 fast tests and 35 simulation tests.

What is not. The 22 opponent-directed cards — the Action and Space-use categories — are held out of every dealt deck until they have an implementation, along with the two defensive cards whose only purpose is to answer them. Real audio: everything the game plays is synthesised from oscillators.

Balance is not where it should be, and no conclusion should be read from the revenue numbers yet. The rebalance pass is deliberately deferred until the rules stop moving — card counts, industry counts and the track mix all need moving together. TODO.md carries the standing distortions and the measurements behind them.

Three rules are genuinely open, and they are the reason the README does not claim the rules are finished: where the Local's coach stands while its engine works (a §A.4 question, not a train-card question); Poling, the one card in the deck with no defined behaviour; and whether a Heavy Grade's orientation is rolled or chosen at setup. Thirteen gaps in the prototype rules were found and closed; these three came after.

The event log narrates; the intents reconstruct. Settled in v0.4.0 after the documentation had claimed state = fold(events) for months. It is not true — the phase driver mutates state and then describes it — so the canonical record is { seed, history: Intent[] } and persistence will be built on that. architecture/protocol.md §3 has the reasoning; test/events.test.ts pins it.

The economy, in one line: Local Operations actions are the main currency — one per Stage, twelve per Day — but inbound work bypasses them, which is where the game's variance comes from.

Stack: TypeScript, chosen so the engine runs in both the server and the browser — one implementation of the movement rules, and instant affordances without a round-trip. Node 22 runs TypeScript natively, so there is no build step during development, which also means erasable syntax only: no enum, no parameter properties, no namespaces.

Running alongside, and independent of all of it: print-and-play components. The generated tables in home-deck.md and mainline-deck.md carry every card face as the game actually deals it, so layout and art are the only remaining work before a table playtest — which answers the one question simulation cannot, whether it is fun.

Run the harness with node src/sim/harness.ts [games] [length].

Watch a game: node src/sim/replay.ts --seed 1234 [--length standard] [--out replay.html] writes a self-contained HTML file — open it in any browser and step through the game. It shows the Division, the Office Area grid, every facility's boxes and MEN|AT|WORK track, plain-English narration of each event, and a Blocked panel explaining why nothing is moving.