station-master/docs/quickstart.md

# Station Master — Quickstart

**Version 0.8.6** · 2026-09-29

For a player who has never played.

Read this once before you sit down. It is about twenty minutes of reading and will save you an hour
of confusion. The deeper references are listed at the end.

---

## 1. What the game is

You are a railroad **Office** — a town — on a shared east–west main line called the **Division**.
Everyone's Office sits in a row along it, west to east, with **Mainline cards** between them.

Two jobs run at once:

**Your own job, in your district.** Build track. Build industries and a passenger platform. Shunt
cars around with a switching crew to get the right car to the right place, so that freight can be
loaded and unloaded and passengers can get on and off. Every one of those completed pieces of work
pays **Revenue**, which is the score.

**The shared job, out on the Division.** Scheduled trains run across everybody's territory on a
timetable. They arrive at your Office, and you work them. When two trains want the same stretch of
track, the player wearing the **Superintendent's Fedora** rules on whether the second may follow the
first. Rule wrong and they collide, which costs 5 Revenue and counts against a limit that can end
the game.

The tension the game is built around: **the useful work is local and slow, and the trains are shared
and do not wait.**

---

## 2. How you win

A game runs for a set number of **Days**, chosen when the game is created. Each Day is **12
Stages**, which you can think of as two-hour clock periods from midnight.

At the end of the last Day, the table's **combined Revenue** is checked against a floor. **Miss it
and everybody loses**, however well you personally did — this is the number to watch. The floor is
worked out from the number of players and Days when the game is dealt, and whoever sets the game up
can raise or lower it.

Clear the floor, and how you win depends on the game type:

- **Co-op** — clearing the floor is the win, together.
- **Competitive** — clearing the floor puts the game on, and the **highest individual Revenue**
  wins. Everyone is still working towards the same floor first.
- **Cutthroat** — competitive, with the opponent-directed cards in play, so players can act against
  each other directly. Those cards are not implemented yet, so this plays as Competitive today.
- **Solitaire** — clear the floor by yourself.

**Collisions can end it early and badly.** Breaching the collision limit stops play at once in a
collective loss: the railroad has been declared unsafe. The limits are configurable, and can be
switched off entirely.

**Falling short offers another Day** rather than just ending, so a game that misses the floor can be
played on. A game stopped by collisions cannot.

### Where Revenue comes from

| Work | Pays |
| --- | --- |
| A passenger boarding at your platform | 1 |
| A passenger getting off at your platform | 1 |
| Completing an outbound freight load | 1 |
| Completing an inbound freight unload | 1 |
| A train completing its run across the whole Division | paid to every player; usually set to 0 |

Every rate is set when the game is dealt and can be changed. As they usually stand, **your score
comes almost entirely from working cars in your own district** — trains passing through pay nothing
by themselves.

---

## 3. The shape of a Stage

Every Stage runs five phases in this order. Only two of them are your turn.

| # | Phase | What happens |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **Local Operations** | **Your turn.** Choose ONE of three things (below). Each player in turn, starting with the Superintendent and working eastward. |
| 2 | **New Train** | Trains due this Stage are made up from the Division Yard. The table takes turns adding one car each. |
| 3 | **Mainline** | Automatic. Trains move, lowest number first. This is where clearance rulings and collisions happen. |
| 4 | **Cargo** | **Your turn.** Your Laborers and Porters do their work — the loading, unloading, boarding and detraining that actually pays. |
| 5 | **Supervisor Shift** | Automatic. Laborers and Porters refresh; expedited trains depart. Every third Stage the Fedora passes. |

### Local Operations: you get exactly one of these

- **Switch** — take a crew and shunt. **Six Moves** (five at night under Reduced Visibility). This is
  how cars physically get from the yard to an industry and back. Cars you run over are coupled up
  automatically, so plan the route.
- **Draw** — take a card, then play and/or discard. This is how your district gets built: track,
  industries, Office upgrades, modifiers, train cards.
- **Freight Agent** — one clerical act: stock a green outbound box, clear a red inbound box, or
  unjam a facility.

**You cannot do two of them in one Stage.** Choosing is most of the game. A Stage spent drawing is a
Stage not spent switching.

> Passengers are **not** the Freight Agent's job. They board and get off in the **Cargo** phase, with
> a **Porter**. Reaching for the wrong role and finding nothing there is the single most common new
> player mistake, so each role now says on screen what it is for.

---

## 4. The screen

**Across the top:** your Revenue, the target, the Day and Stage, collisions, and the game code.

**When other players are acting**, their turns are replayed on your board a step at a time rather
than arriving already rearranged, with a `[N behind]` counter, **Pause** and **Skip**. Your own moves
are not replayed at you — they are already on your screen.

**The main display, on the left**, top to bottom:

- **The Division — west to east.** The shared main line: every Office and the Mainline cards between
  them, with trains drawn where they are. **West is always on the left**, and a train's engine is
  drawn as an arrow (◀ or ▶) showing which way it points.
- **Your Office Area.** Your own grid of track cards. This is where switching happens. It folds away
  outside the phases that change it, unless you pin it open.
- **History.** What has happened, most recent first.

**The right-hand column:**

- **Your Move** — the buttons. If it is not your turn this is empty, and the board tells you who is
  acting.
- **Cards in My Hand**, and the **Department decks** — three face-up discard piles anyone may draw
  the top of.
- **The Yards.** The **Division Yard** is the live supply of cars. The **Classification Yard** is
  where used cars go, and it comes back **only when the Division Yard runs completely bare**.
- **Timetable** — who is due out and when.
- **Blocked — why nothing is moving.** *Read this panel.* When something will not work, this is
  where the game explains why, in rules terms.
- **Facilities** — the load pipelines at each industry.
- **This Game** — the seed or your seat, the game code, the rules this game was dealt under, and
  links to this guide and the other references.

---

## 5. Start with solitaire

Play a **solitaire** game first. It needs no server and nobody else, and it is the same rules.

1. Open the site, choose **Play solitaire**, accept the defaults, **Deal**.
2. **Stage 1 — Draw.** You start on a **Depot** with almost nothing else. Play a track card or two to
   extend your Running Track. A Depot already works passengers and has two A/D tracks, so a second
   train can stand at your Office without wrecking; a **Station** upgrade, when one appears, buys a
   third track and another Porter.
3. **Build one industry** on a stub off the main — not on the Running Track itself, which the game
   will not allow.
4. **Play a train card** when you get one. It rolls onto the timetable and then runs at that Stage
   **every Day**.
5. **When a train arrives at your Office**, switch cars to it or from it, and do the paying work in
   the **Cargo** phase.
6. Watch the **Blocked** panel whenever you are stuck. It is usually one missing thing: no empty car
   spotted, no loaded car in the yard, a full box, a locked industry track.

---

## 6. Things that surprise new players

- **A turnout cannot be stopped on.** You may run through it; you may not end a Move there.
- **Coupling is mandatory.** Run over a standing car and you take it, whether or not you wanted it.
- **An industry track locks while a load is on its MEN | AT | WORK boxes.** No train can enter,
  cross or work there until it clears.
- **A modifier adds a BOX, never room for a car.** It raises how much work an industry can hold, not
  how much rail it has.
- **Nothing may be built outside your Limits** — track, industries and modifiers alike. Your district
  ends at its sign, and the sign moves outward as your Running Track grows.
- **A train must be made up to leave.** Engine at one end; if it has a caboose, the caboose at the
  far end. A train shunted out of shape sits at your Office until you fix it — a **Small Yard** will
  re-order a consist for one Move, and each option tells you whether the result can leave.
- **Passengers may dry up completely.** Coaches move one way — boarding sends the emptied coach to
  the Classification Yard, and it only comes back when the Division Yard is bare, which may never
  happen. When it does, the yard panel warns you and passenger trains are made up empty. **This is
  the rules working as designed.**
- **Expedited trains leave the same Stage they arrived**, after the Cargo phase. Ordinary ones wait.

After playing some solitaire, play a day or two of multiplayer with bots or friends to get a feel
for how players interact. Then you are ready to run a real division.

---

## 7. Issues / Suggestions

Please do report anything that looks like a bug or an area to be improved.

- **What you expected versus what happened**, with the Day and Stage. "Day 2 Stage 9, train 5 had
  no coaches" is worth more than "passengers seem broken".
- **Save the game** (the **Save replay** button) and send the file. A save is the seed and the moves
  made, so it replays exactly and the problem can be looked at directly. In a Competitive
  multiplayer game the button waits until the game is over, because the file carries the seed and
  the seed is every rival's hand; note the Day and Stage and save it at the end.
- **Anything the screen did not explain.** If you had to guess a rule, that is worth saying even
  when the game was right.
- **Anything you went looking for and could not find.**

**A save replays under the rules of the build that opens it.** When a rule changes, a save made
before it may stop part-way — the game says which move it stopped on and leaves your file untouched,
so the build you played on will still finish it.

---

## 8. Documentation / References

| For | Read |
| --- | --- |
| The rules in full, with the FAQ | [Rules](rules.md) |
| How the Home Office deck is dealt and played | [Home deck](home-deck.md) |
| The Mainline cards and what they do to a train | [Mainline deck](mainline-deck.md) |
| Rolling stock, yards, trays, the Fedora | [Components](components.md) |