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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
• 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.

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8. Documentation / References

For	Read
The rules in full, with the FAQ	Rules
How the Home Office deck is dealt and played	Home deck
The Mainline cards and what they do to a train	Mainline deck
Rolling stock, yards, trays, the Fedora	Components