The rules pages now describe the game we actually ship
The rulebook, the guide and the how-to-play page had drifted away from the game. All three were rewritten, the guide gained six pictures, and five new reference pages joined them.
In plain words
The four pages that explain opolyx had quietly fallen behind the game they explain. Team mode did not appear once in the rulebook or the guide, although you can pick it in the lobby. Square 20 was called "Free parking", when it is the Jackpot and has been for months — and the rulebook never mentioned the Jackpot at all. Jail said you were released after three failed attempts, when in fact you are charged the bail. The rent rules left out the boost your collectible cards give you. The how-to-play page offered a get-out-of-jail card that does not exist in the game.
The worst line was in the guide: "win a real game past round 20 and you earn a property card plus 200 XP". The threshold is five rounds, not twenty, and since the progression update every seat earns XP — that sentence was wrong in ten languages at once. All four pages have been rewritten against the code: the rulebook went from 13 sections to 17 and now covers every mode, and the guide from 22 to 26.
The guide also has pictures where it mostly had not: ten figures instead of four, all captured from real games. Buying, auctions, building, paying a debt, the Speed die and the Jackpot each have a screenshot now, and three older ones were re-taken because they showed a board we no longer ship.
And there are five new reference pages for anyone who likes detail: statistics from roughly four thousand simulated games, a square-by-square board reference, a strategy guide whose advice is derived from those statistics rather than from opinion, an eighteen-term glossary, and an honest comparison with Monopoly One — the game opolyx was modelled on.
For the technically curious
Documentation drifts because it is a copy. The fix, where possible, was to stop copying: the guide’s mode comparison table used to be a hand-typed transcription of the mode settings, and is now generated from the settings themselves.
// components/GuideDoc.tsx — the comparison table reads the real configuration
const columns = MODE_COLUMNS.map((mode) => ({ mode, cfg: modeConfig(mode) }));
return [
row('cash', (c) => c.startingCash.toLocaleString('en-US')),
row('turn', (c) => `~${c.turnSeconds}s`),
row('cap', (c) => String(c.roundCap)),
row('die', (c) => (c.speedDie ? `✓ (${c.speedDieFromRound}+)` : '—')),
];
// modeConfig() is what the game server reads when a game starts, so the table
// cannot drift from the rules actually being applied.The missing pictures had a mechanical cause worth remembering. The guide renders a caption only when a screenshot is mapped to that section — so five captions that had been written, reviewed and translated into ten languages had never once been shown to anybody. Adding the screenshots put fifty translated strings back to work.
The statistics page is the one thing on the site that cannot be copied from anywhere else: it is produced by running the real engine — the same code that runs your games — several thousand times across all modes and player counts. It is also a check on itself. The measured rate of rolling doubles came out at 16.68% against a theoretical 16.67%, and a test asserts that agreement, because it is the cheapest possible proof that the simulation is not subtly broken.