Home Deck

Version 0.8.6 · 2026-09-29

On this page

1. The piles
2. Hand and turn
3. Track cards
4. Office cards
5. Freight facilities
6. Facility modifiers
7. Train cards
8. Timetabled
9. Extras
10. Enhancements, Mainline modifiers and Maneuvers
11. Opponent-directed cards — not dealt
12. Action cards — opponent-directed
13. Space-use cards — opponent-directed
14. Maneuver cards
15. The Second Section card
16. Trains that pay for stopping
17. The Office you start on
18. What a train may pick up

Scope: the Home Office deck — how it is dealt, drawn, discarded and reshuffled, and what the rules are for playing each kind of card out of it.

The card tables in this document are GENERATED from src/engine/content.ts and checked by a test, so they cannot disagree with the game. npm run build:cards rebuilds them; do not edit a table by hand. The prose around them is how the deck WORKS; the tables are what is in it.

Card counts are not published. Counts move with play balance, so a printed count answers a question that has a different answer after the next retune. Where a count matters it is rendered as a yes/no — whether the deck deals the card at all — which is a fact about the design.

The piles#

• Home Office deck — face down. The pile a Draw comes from.
• Three Departments — face-up discard piles. A discard goes onto one, which is precisely so a rival may take it; a Draw may take the top card of a Department instead of the deck. Taking the last card off a Department refills it immediately from the Home Office deck (§6.2), so there are always three piles to choose from; see the Rules.
• Salvage Yard — where a played-out card ends up. An Extra's card goes here after its run.

When the Home Office deck runs out it is rebuilt from the Salvage Yard and all three Departments in full, reshuffled from the seeded stream. A spent timetabled train is not collected — its number is on the timetable and it cannot run twice — but a discarded train was never played and is still runnable, so it comes back.

Hand and turn#

The hand limit is three, or four while you hold a Red Flag. You may not end a turn over the limit: play a card or discard one to a Department. Some cards cannot be discarded at all — an Extra never can, and a timetabled train cannot when the discardTimetabled house rule is off — so a hand of nothing but those has exactly one way forward, which is to play one.

The opening deal is a house-rule choice made when the game is dealt. The default (threeRandom) is three cards from one shuffled deck; threeTrackThreeOther deals three track and three others from two separately shuffled piles, over the hand limit, so the first turn is spent choosing which district you can afford to build.

Drawing is one of the three Local Operations options — see Rules §4.2. Taking the option lets you draw and play or discard within the same turn.

Track cards#

Track cards are ordinary Home Office cards, not a separate personal supply.

• A placed card must connect to existing rail: at least one neighbour must join it.
• The Running Track is the row from Limit to Limit. A card placed there must carry an east–west through route, or it breaks the main.
• Placing track on a Limit sign extends the Running Track and moves that sign outward. The sign is a physical card, so it moves rather than being left stranded mid-track.
• Nothing may be placed outside your Limits — track, industries and Modifiers alike. Your district ends at its sign.
• Curves and turnouts are printed left- or right-handed. A card may be turned 180° but never flipped over, so its 45° leg never changes diagonal.
• A turnout may upgrade an existing straight, or a curve whose arc is exactly the turnout's diverging arc. An industry may be built over a straight off the Running Track, on the same principle. Neither is allowed if the card holds standing cars or an Enhancement, and every other occupied square is unavailable.
• A turnout may be run through but not stopped on: it is not Operational Rail, so a Move may not end there.

A row marked "no" is a shape the engine understands but the deck does not currently print.

Office cards#

Every player begins at a Whistle Post, which is not drawn from the deck: one A/D track, no Porters, no passenger slots, and not a Control Point.

Office cards are upgrades in strict sequence — Whistle Post → Depot → Station → Terminal — and each upgrades the Office in place rather than replacing its card or its attached track. Modifiers already beside it are preserved. Each tier adds an A/D track, a Porter, and an outbound and inbound passenger slot; a Depot and above is a Control Point and a Passenger Facility.

An upgrade takes no placement: the Office is where it already is.

Upgrades are strictly sequential — no skipping a tier — so a Terminal needs all three cards in order. Green slots are outbound passengers, red are inbound, and the design gives slots equal to Porters rather than one more.

Whistle Posts are a fixed supply of 4 outside the deck, and Limits signs a supply of 8.

Freight facilities#

An industry is placed on a connected straight stub off the Running Track — never on the Running Track itself, and never outside the Limits. A Facility carries its own rails, so placing one places track.

It may also be built over a straight already laid, in the same way a turnout may upgrade one, so rail can go down before the industry that will serve it. Only a plain straight may be built over: a Facility carries east–west track, so replacing a straight cannot break a neighbour's connection, while a curve or a turnout carries rails the Facility does not. The square must be clear of standing cars and carry no Enhancement — the replaced card leaves play.

Each begins with one Laborer and a three-box MEN | AT | WORK pipeline. No Office Area may hold a duplicate industry, or both ends of a lockout pair — a producer and the consumer of the same commodity cannot be built in one district.

An industry track holds four cars, like any other card. It is not sized by the industry's box count. That distinction was a real bug: box count is how much WORK an industry can hold, not how much RAIL it has, and conflating the two invented a printed siding no industry card carries.

Each lists the car types it works, which way its traffic flows, and the industries it may not sit beside. Every lockout pair is a producer and the consumer of the same commodity — you may build one end of a chain or the other, never both, which is what forces traffic to run between districts rather than in circles inside one. No two of the same industry may share an Office Area, and that rule is enforced for every kind rather than repeated in each row.

Facility modifiers#

A Modifier sits on an empty square square against its host Facility — north, south, east or west. It may not go on a diagonal: touching at a corner is not touching. It must be inside your Limits, like everything else, and may not stand in the Running Track row. One of each kind per Office Area.

A Modifier adds a BOX, never room for a car. A Truck Dock beside a Grocer's Warehouse gives it a second red box — somewhere for one more arriving load to be cleared to — and changes nothing about how many cars may be spotted there.

A passenger Modifier needs a Passenger Facility. A Waiting Area, Restaurant or Hotel may not be played at an Office that is still a Whistle Post — a Whistle Post is not a Passenger Facility, so there is nothing for the card to add to. Upgrade the Office to a Depot or better first.

A grant the host cannot use does nothing, and the game says so rather than pretending. An outbound bonus beside an inbound-only facility, or the Truck Dock's inbound bonus beside the outbound-only Packing Sheds, is discarded — the latter leaving that card with no effect at all.

Each sits beside a host and raises one of its capacities. office as a host means any Passenger Facility — so a modifier that adds a green slot to an Office adds nothing to a Whistle Post, which is not one.

Train cards#

Playing a timetabled train rolls the seeded D12 and puts its number in the first open timetable slot at or after the result, wrapping around the 12-slot chart. It then runs at that Stage every Day.

Playing an Extra queues it; it is made up when a Crew Tray comes free, and the player who played the card chooses where it starts and loads it as they choose (§7). Where it may start is a house rule — divisionPointsOnly, ownOffice, or anyOffice (the default) — and the Interchange is also available, because it is the one Mainline card with a yard. An Extra runs once and its card goes to the Salvage Yard.

The listed consist is a maximum, not a minimum. A train may depart with fewer cars, but not with more, not of the wrong category, not with a car behind the caboose, and not with the engine buried among its own cars. A Crew Tray holds four pieces, and a caboose counts toward the four.

A train made up short of what its card calls for is reported as such, with what it wanted and why the yard could not supply it — see Rules §4.4.

Per-train consists and printed rules are in the table under § Train cards below. It carries the empties only, reefers only, drop only and pick up empties only restrictions, every one of which the engine enforces.

Timetabled#

Extras#

Enhancements, Mainline modifiers and Maneuvers#

• Enhancements are played into your district and change what a square does — the Small Yard (re-order a consist for one Move), Interlocking, Yard Office and the rest. The table below marks each one live, dormantSolo or unbuilt, which is the part only the implementation knows.
  • ABS Signals is the exception, and it matters. It is dealt as an Enhancement but is not played into your district: it goes onto a Mainline card — any one of them — and stops trains there rear-ending each other. It takes no square and is not part of anybody's Office Area. See Mainline deck.
• Mainline modifiers are played onto a Mainline card: the Heavy Grade helpers and Realignment. See Mainline deck.
• Maneuvers are held and spent: Red Flags and Flying Switch have their own actions. Poling is catalogued but its effect is recorded as "TBD in the source", so there is nothing to implement.

The column that only the implementation can fill in: whether the printed effect actually resolves yet. live is read during play; dormantSolo is implemented at the point of attack but the attack is an opponent-directed card held out of every deck, so nothing reaches it in a solitaire game; unbuilt means the effect is recorded and nothing reads it. A transcription cannot carry this column, which is the argument for generating the page rather than writing it.

Opponent-directed cards — not dealt#

The Action and Space-use categories are opponent-directed and are excluded from every dealt deck, because their play rules are not implemented. They are catalogued in the table below so the composition is on record, and check refuses to play one. This is deliberate: silently accepting them would make a card look playable while doing nothing.

None of these is dealt in any deck today. A card that can only be played at another player has no legal target in a solitaire game, and a defence with nothing to defend against is as dead a draw as the attack — so both halves are held out until the attacks are implemented. They are listed because they are the design, and because what a defence answers is the only record of why it exists.

Action cards — opponent-directed#

Space-use cards — opponent-directed#

Maneuver cards#

Mainline modifier cards, for completeness — these ARE dealt:

The Second Section card#

Ordering a Second Section costs the card. Played on a train that is due out this Stage, it sends a second, identical train out right behind the first. That second train needs a Crew Tray of its own, so there has to be one free.

It is the one card that deliberately creates the following-train situation §8.1 makes the Superintendent rule on — so playing it is choosing to put that question to them.

One copy in the deck, spent when it is played.

Trains that pay for stopping#

Two Extras pay for standing still rather than for running: the Circus Train (X18) and the Campaign Train (X17). Their card is worth nothing if it is run like an ordinary train.

Three conditions, all of them required:

• Stopped. The train spent a whole Mainline Phase without moving. Switching around inside a district does not break it — what breaks it is leaving before a Mainline Phase passes.
• In an Office Area. Any square in a player's district. Standing on the Mainline or at a Division Point pays nothing. A Whistle Post district counts — the rule is about the area, not the Office's tier.
• Fully loaded. Every car except the caboose is carrying something. A train made up short, or carrying an empty, earns nothing however long it stands.

One point per district, and the point goes to whoever sits in the district it stopped in. A Circus touring three districts is paid three times; one parked in the same district all game is paid once. Neither train may switch, so it cannot load itself — it must be made up loaded before it goes.

The Office you start on#

Every district opens on a Depot unless the table chooses otherwise. A Depot has two A/D tracks and is a Passenger Facility, so passengers earn from the first Stage and a second train can stand at an Office without wrecking.

"Players start with Whistle Posts, not Depots" is the harder game, set when the game is created. A Whistle Post has one A/D track and is not a Passenger Facility: no passenger earns anything until somebody draws and plays a Depot upgrade, and a second train arriving is a collision unless an Interlocking holds it at the Limits until the track frees.

The deck follows the choice. Starting on Depots, the Depot upgrade cards are left out — an upgrade must be to the next tier up, so a Depot card at a table that already has Depots is a dead draw. Station and Terminal are still upgrades and stay in.

What a train may pick up#

Coupling is mandatory, so a train forbidden to pick cars up may not make the move that would pick them up — there is no "move but leave them". A square the rails reach but the train's card forbids is shown as blocked, with the rule that forbids it.

A train may always recover its own caboose. A caboose at the far end is what makes a train ready to leave, so a card that says "may drop but not pick up anything" would otherwise let a train strand itself for good the moment it set its caboose down.