The purpose behind HOPS is to allow two players to play Splotter's Horseless Carriage, a game designed for 3-5 players.
HOPS tries to provide a reasonable simulation of a third human player. As such it is intended that HOPS doesn't always play the same, best moves, sometimes he will choose different paths.
HOPS doesn't build his factory by aligning stations in the way it's done with physical components. Instead he builds a virtual factory which has the stations notionally attached to one or more vehicles. Similarly, marketing may be attached to one or more dealerships. Each dealerhsip will only be attached to one mainline though.
HOPS tries to make sensible decisions based on factors like the factory floor space still available, the progress made by all players along the research tracks and the demands of the buyers.
Lay out your physical components for three players, choosing any player colours you like.
You don't need the factory floor tiles for HOPS. When taking stations for HOPS just put the tiles off to one side.
Place your laptop where one of you can interact with it. The minimum recommended resolution is 1920x1080, however it displays just fine at 1366x768 by setting the browser to 80% zoom. It is best to make your display fullscreen and remove all the surrounding browser sidebars. On a PC you do this by pressing F11.
Click the start button to begin the program setup process in which you tell HOPS your physical setup.
All interaction with HOPS can be performed by one player, who tells HOPS what the players do and updates the physical components to reflect HOPS' moves.
Identify the player colours you've chosen, including the colour of HOPS, and the initial player order.
Tell the system which brand will be played by HOPS.
Choose the skill level for HOPS. This mostly dictates how efficient HOPS is with his factory space.
Tell the system how the research tracks have been initially laid out. Click first on the track you placed at the bottom of the market (and so will be obsolete first). Then click on the track beside the market and finally in top down order, the other three tracks.
After this point HOPS will update the positions of tracks himself and won't need to be told which come and go.
You must tell HOPS where the first four buyers were placed into the market. You can either click Autofill to get HOPS to place the buyers or draw the cards yourself. If you do, then for each buyer click on the appropriate niche and then use the [+] buttons in the panel to place the buyer. If you accidentally place a buyer in the wrong niche use the [-] button to remove it.
The market board display will be shown in selected phases during the game. Use it to remove buyers during the sell phase and to add sparks and buyers when growing demand. You can also make corrections at those times.
Tell the system which research markers each player chooses to advance based on the number of research departments in their factory. When HOPS displays his choices you need only click Continue.
From this point on you can bring up a summary panel showing factory and research track information by clicking the button at top right. You can click again on the button or anywhere in the summary panel to dismiss it.
For each player either click the turn order position they spent their Gantt points on, or pass. When HOPS displays his decision just click Continue to acknowledge you've updated your physical components.
The panel displays all the station stacks and the number of tiles remaining in them. For each human player decrement the stacks to reflect the tiles taken, then click Confirm followed by Continue.
When HOPS takes tiles the stack number changes to show how many tiles were taken rather than how many remain.When you have updated your physical stacks to reflect the tiles HOPS took click Confirm followed by Continue.
If you realize later you've changed a stack by the wrong number, try to make your correction during the affected player's turn. That is, if you accidentally recorded that the Green player took two radiator parts when it should have been one, return the extra radiator part during Green's turn. This is because HOPS keeps track of who has what parts in their factory.
HOPS has dispensed with the dealership names and instead simply refers to them by their size: small, medium and large.
This shows you the cubes put onto HOPS' dealerships, dictating which buyers they can target.
In sales order each player takes a turn to update the market board with their sales. If a player chose to pass, click Pass, otherwise update the board with the player's sales and click Next.
On HOPS's turn you only have to click the button showing (either Next or Pass) as HOPS will have updated the board if necessary. The niche to which HOPS made sales will be coloured to match the dealer window frame.
When HOPS makes his first sale for a dealer he will put the market window onto the board and remove the market window placed for his previous dealer, if any. This is because HOPS makes sales for one dealer at a time and the removal of superfluous market windows declutters the board.
When everyone has passed click Finished.
HOPS doesn't monitor the timecard marker, so if the game has ended because of it you can just check to see how may dollars HOPS earned and then turn the laptop off at this point.
For this phase you'll have made all the ncessary switching around of physical component research tracks and HOPS is aware of the changes required. Just to make sure you're on the same page HOPS displays a summary of which track was made obsolete and which track was placed beside the board. If his assessment differs from yours, check that you haven't made a mistake in selecting the track to be introduced.
Click Next for each player so that if HOPS is early in turn order you can see where he places his card (the quadrant is highlighted in orange). Once all players have revealed their card add ALL the sparks to the market board and click Next.
The market board is automatically updated with the vehicles generated by the sparks and the black Horseless Carriage deck is then displayed - add the three vehicles that your drawn cards dictated then click Finished and a new year will begin.