RuleSage cited table rulings
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You asked

What does the big follower do that a normal follower does not?

Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstain

Asked with: Catanbg-13-en-1e · Catan: Cities & Knightsbg-926-en-1e · Catan: Seafarersbg-325-en-1e

I looked through Catan's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.

The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.

RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.8 · larGest army
If you are the first player to play 3 knight cards, you receive this special card, which is worth 2 victory points. You place the 'Largest Army' card face up in front of you. If another player plays more knight cards than you have, they immediately take the special card. The 2 victory points likewis
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.8 · KniGht Cards
When you play a 'Knight' development card during your turn, you must immediately move the robber Y . Place the knight card face up in front of you. You must move the robber away from its current spot and onto the number token of any other terrain hex or on the desert. You then steal 1 resource card
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.5 · Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y
If you play a knight card, you must immediately move the robber. See 'Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber' above and follow steps 1 and 2. Once played, knight cards remain face up in front of you. The first player to have 3 knight cards in front of themself receives the special card 'Largest Arm
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.11 · roBBer
The robber begins the game in the desert Y . It is moved only by rolling a '7' Y or playing a Knight Y card. If the robber is moved to any other terrain hex, it prevents that hex from producing resources. Players with settlements and/or cities adjacent to the target terrain hex receive no resources
RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook · p.9 · lonGest road
If you are the first player to build a continuous road of at least 5 individual road pieces, you take this special card and place it face up in front of you. This card is worth 2 victory points. Note: If your road network branches, you may only count the single longest branch for purposes of the lon

Strategy guides → — community tips, kept separate from rulings

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
outcome
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
warm abstain
  • this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
corpus profile
live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings
search 292 ms · ask 9579 ms · total 9879 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 9879 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 8, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "If you are the first player to play 3 knight cards, you receive this special card, which is worth 2 victory points. You place the 'Largest Army' card face up in front of you. If another player plays more knight cards than you have, they immediately take the special card. The 2 victory points likewis", "headingPath": "larGest army", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "When you play a 'Knight' development card during your turn, you must immediately move the robber Y . Place the knight card face up in front of you. You must move the robber away from its current spot and onto the number token of any other terrain hex or on the desert. You then steal 1 resource card ", "headingPath": "KniGht Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "If you play a knight card, you must immediately move the robber. See 'Rolling a '7' and Activating the Robber' above and follow steps 1 and 2. Once played, knight cards remain face up in front of you. The first player to have 3 knight cards in front of themself receives the special card 'Largest Arm", "headingPath": "Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.03101, "snippet": "The robber begins the game in the desert Y . It is moved only by rolling a '7' Y or playing a Knight Y card. If the robber is moved to any other terrain hex, it prevents that hex from producing resources. Players with settlements and/or cities adjacent to the target terrain hex receive no resources ", "headingPath": "roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.030536, "snippet": "If you are the first player to build a continuous road of at least 5 individual road pieces, you take this special card and place it face up in front of you. This card is worth 2 victory points. Note: If your road network branches, you may only count the single longest branch for purposes of the lon", "headingPath": "lonGest road", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.029857, "snippet": "If you roll a '7' for resource production, none of the players receive resources. Instead: Each player counts their resource cards. Any player with more than 7 resource cards (i.e., 8 or more) must choose and discard half of them. Return discards to the supply stacks. If you hold an odd number of ca", "headingPath": "rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029211, "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": 6, "score": 0.028039, "snippet": "This 'Catan Almanac' contains detailed, alphabetical entries and examples for Catan . These are not the 'Game Rules.' You do not have to read this material prior to your first game. Instead, use the Game Rules. Then read this to enjoy the complete experience. This almanac includes advanced rules and", "headingPath": "almanac", "sharpsignalDocId": 43}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 43 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 43 boosted
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
Nov 3, 2026 20:32

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. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. 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) larGest army p.8 0.032787 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#2 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) KniGht Cards p.8 0.032258 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#3 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) Knight Cards (Purple Frame) Y p.5 0.031746 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#4 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) roBBer p.11 0.03101 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#5 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) lonGest road p.9 0.030536 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#6 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) rollinG a '7' and aCtivatinG the roBBer p.11 0.029857 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#7 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) Round One p.12 0.029211 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 300
#8 RULEBOOK Catan — Rulebook (corpus doc 43) almanac p.6 0.028039 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one)) 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 292 ms · first delta 9766 ms · total 9879 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 0 ms · retrieval 292 ms · ask 9579 ms · gateway work 9879 ms · total 9879 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3596
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
9
tok/sec
136.4 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.066 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 55s ago)
stream path
streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
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
ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
abstain rationale
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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.