RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

Can I build a settlement on top of another player's road?

Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this counted as refused

The rulebook doesn't appear to cover this cleanly — but here are the closest passages retrieved, in case they help you rule.

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.12 · Round One
Each player rolls both dice. The player who rolls highest is the starting player and begins. The starting player places a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y of their choice, then places a road adjacent to this settlement. The other players then follow clockwise. Everyone places 1 settlement
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.11 · roads
The roads connect your settlements and cities. You build roads on paths Y . You cannot build new settlements without also building roads. Roads provide victory points only if you hold the Longest Road Y special card. Only 1 road may be built on each path. You can build roads along the coast. Example
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.12 · settlements
Example: See Illustration M. Olivia, the blue player, wants to build a new settlement. She may only do so at one of the intersections marked 'B'. She cannot build on 'A' because of the Distance Rule, nor on 'C' because no blue road leads to this intersection. Note: If you have built all 5 of your se
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.12 · Round Two
Once all players have built their first settlement, the player who went last in the first round begins round two. That player builds their second settlement and its adjacent road. Important: After the starting player builds, the other players follow counterclockwise , so the starting player in round
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.7 · distanCe rule
You may only build a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y and only if none of the 3 adjacent intersections contains a settlement or city. Example: See Illustration F. Coleman, the blue player, wants to build a settlement. The settlements marked 'A' are already in play. Coleman cannot build on

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
qwen3:4b-instruct-2507-q4_K_M@0edcdef34593
timings
search 148 ms · ask 3342 ms · total 3491 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued n/a ms · generation 3491 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 12, "score": 0.016393, "snippet": "Each player rolls both dice. The player who rolls highest is the starting player and begins. The starting player places a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y of their choice, then places a road adjacent to this settlement. The other players then follow clockwise. Everyone places 1 settlement ", "headingPath": "Round One", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.016129, "snippet": "The roads connect your settlements and cities. You build roads on paths Y . You cannot build new settlements without also building roads. Roads provide victory points only if you hold the Longest Road Y special card. Only 1 road may be built on each path. You can build roads along the coast. Example", "headingPath": "roads", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015873, "snippet": "Example: See Illustration M. Olivia, the blue player, wants to build a new settlement. She may only do so at one of the intersections marked 'B'. She cannot build on 'A' because of the Distance Rule, nor on 'C' because no blue road leads to this intersection. Note: If you have built all 5 of your se", "headingPath": "settlements", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.015625, "snippet": "Once all players have built their first settlement, the player who went last in the first round begins round two. That player builds their second settlement and its adjacent road. Important: After the starting player builds, the other players follow counterclockwise , so the starting player in round", "headingPath": "Round Two", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.015385, "snippet": "You may only build a settlement on an unoccupied intersection Y and only if none of the 3 adjacent intersections contains a settlement or city. Example: See Illustration F. Coleman, the blue player, wants to build a settlement. The settlements marked 'A' are already in play. Coleman cannot build on ", "headingPath": "distanCe rule", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.015152, "snippet": "Take special note of the 'Distance Rule' Y : you may only build a settlement at an intersection if all 3 of the adjacent intersections are vacant (i.e., none are occupied by any settlements or cities-even yours). Each of your settlements must connect to at least 1 of your own roads. Regardless of wh", "headingPath": "b) Settlement Y Requires: Brick, Lumber, Wool, & Grain", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.014925, "snippet": "A settlement is worth 1 victory point. Settlements are built on intersections Y (where 3 hexes meet or 1 or 2 hexes meet the frame). You share in all of the resource production of each terrain hex adjacent to your settlements. You must meet 2 conditions when building a settlement: Your settlement mu", "headingPath": "settlements", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.014706, "snippet": "Select a color and take your 5 settlements, 4 cities, and 15 roads (no more and no less!). Place your 2 roads and your 2 settlements on the game board. Place your remaining settlements, roads, and cities down in front of you. Note: If you are playing a 3-player game, nobody plays the red position in", "headingPath": "settinG up the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
gate not evaluated for this ruling (boost, supersedence, and wrench all off at ask time), and the base-rulebook arm went unrecorded for the same reason — the wrench that would have stored it was off; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=false, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=false
answered-before recall
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until
Oct 6, 2026 23:59

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. How many arms fused this ruling was NOT RECORDED (it predates the boost trail, ran on the path that stored none, or stored one that could not be read), and the ceiling depends on that count (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60): 2 arms top out at 0.03279; 3 arms top out at 0.04918. So a score above 0.03279 here is not an anomaly: it is arithmetic proof a boost arm voted, and the measured band 0.016–0.033 (taken on two-arm asks) is what does not apply. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rankdocumentheadingpage fused RRF scoresnippet chars
#1 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) Round One p.12 0.016393 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) roads p.11 0.016129 (inside the measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 (measured on two-arm asks; this ruling's arm count was never recorded)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) settlements p.12 0.015873 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) Round Two p.12 0.015625 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) distanCe rule p.7 0.015385 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) b) Settlement Y Requires: Brick, Lumber, Wool, & Grain p.5 0.015152 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) settlements p.11 0.014925 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) settinG up the Game p.3 0.014706 (below the measured healthy band (< 0.016) — a weak fuse on a two-arm ask, and this ruling's arm count was never recorded) 300

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

#documentheadingpagequote chars
timing split
retrieval 148 ms · first delta n/a · total 3491 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued n/a ms · retrieval 148 ms · ask 3342 ms · gateway work 3491 ms · total 3491 ms
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 28s ago)
stream path
not recorded — this ruling predates the stream-path column (V41)
watchdog
first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture
both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.
outcome
REFUSED_NO_RETRIEVAL — Refused — the rulebook doesn't cover this
abstain rationale
the answerer offered no rationale text with this refusal (or the ruling predates the abstain_rationale column, V41)
decision
NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 1), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.