You asked
How do I set up the game?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Civolutionbg-400602-en-1e
I looked through Civolution'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.
10 In games with two or three civilizations, you must cover encampments in the territories of the continent with blocking tokens . To do this, take the territory tokens and flip them back side up. In a 2-player game , cover the 10 encampments that show the /gid01780 icon or the icon by placing onto
Set the game up as in a 2-player game , but carry out setup steps 12 to 16 only for yourself as a single civilization. Afterwards, set up V.I.C.I's play area next to your console as follows: Take the 22 cards for the solo mode . Place the 7 display cards (with a purple mark and a number in the top r
Place the 7 stackable discs of your color onto the game boards: one disc onto space 0 of the score track, a one disc onto the left space of the Favor of Agera track (at the bottom of the sequence board ), b and one disc onto space 0 of each of the 5 progress tracks on the progress board . The discs
Now, each civilization receives its starting cards. Depending on how well you know the game, you can do this in one of two ways: 13 For your first couple of plays, we recommend using pre-made starting hands. To do this, take the starting marker cards and find the 6 cards showing a number in the bott
Option A (newcomers): For your first couple of plays, we recommend using pre-made starting hands. To do this, take the starting marker cards and find the 6 cards showing a number in the bottom left (1 to 6). Shuffle these and give each civilization one at random. Return any excess starting marker ca
🔧 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 336 ms · ask 14950 ms · total 140130 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 124833 ms · generation 15297 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 8, "score": 0.047712, "snippet": "10 In games with two or three civilizations, you must cover encampments in the territories of the continent with blocking tokens . To do this, take the territory tokens and flip them back side up. In a 2-player game , cover the 10 encampments that show the /gid01780 icon or the icon by placing onto ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 39, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "Set the game up as in a 2-player game , but carry out setup steps 12 to 16 only for yourself as a single civilization. Afterwards, set up V.I.C.I's play area next to your console as follows: Take the 22 cards for the solo mode . Place the 7 display cards (with a purple mark and a number in the top r", "headingPath": "Solo mode: Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "Place the 7 stackable discs of your color onto the game boards: one disc onto space 0 of the score track, a one disc onto the left space of the Favor of Agera track (at the bottom of the sequence board ), b and one disc onto space 0 of each of the 5 progress tracks on the progress board . The discs ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046032, "snippet": "Now, each civilization receives its starting cards. Depending on how well you know the game, you can do this in one of two ways: 13 For your first couple of plays, we recommend using pre-made starting hands. To do this, take the starting marker cards and find the 6 cards showing a number in the bott", "headingPath": "Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display:", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.045921, "snippet": "Option A (newcomers): For your first couple of plays, we recommend using pre-made starting hands. To do this, take the starting marker cards and find the 6 cards showing a number in the bottom left (1 to 6). Shuffle these and give each civilization one at random. Return any excess starting marker ca", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.045541, "snippet": "Setup Note: Civolution requires a large playing area. Especially in 4-player games, we recommend having at least 130 cm x 90 cm (51'' x 35'') of table space available. The following describes the game setup for 2 to 4 civilizations. For the solo mode, see page 39. Shuffle the 20 event cards and plac", "headingPath": "1 weather indicator · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.045009, "snippet": "Components Setup How to play the game How do you gain success points?", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.04374, "snippet": "14 First, set up the research display as described on the previous page. Then, have each civilization draw 2 cards from each of the 5 face-down research stacks into its hand. Afterwards, shuffle the starting marker cards and give each civilization 3 of them. Return any excess starting marker cards f", "headingPath": "Setting up the research display: · Option B (advanced): · Option A (newcomers):", "sharpsignalDocId": 319}]
- 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 319 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 319 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 6, 2026 14:10
retrieval — what the passage search returned
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 rank | document | heading | page | fused RRF score | snippet chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | Setup | p.8 | 0.047712 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | Solo mode: Setup | p.39 | 0.047643 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | Setup | p.8 | 0.047123 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | Setup · Option A (newcomers): · Setting up the research display: | p.9 | 0.046032 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | p.9 | 0.045921 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | 1 weather indicator · Setup | p.6 | 0.045541 (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 Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | p.3 | 0.045009 (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)) | 69 | |
| #8 | RULEBOOK Civolution — Rulebook (corpus doc 319) | Setting up the research display: · Option B (advanced): · Option A (newcomers): | p.10 | 0.04374 (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 the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it
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.
chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 336 ms · first delta 15198 ms · total 140130 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 124833 ms · retrieval 336 ms · ask 14950 ms · gateway work 15297 ms · total 140130 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 3126
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 138.5 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.065 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 14s 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.
disposition
- 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
setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render
- decision
- NO_APPROVED_CHECKLIST — setup-shaped, but no approved setup checklist exists for this game
- pattern that matched
- SETUP — "setup" / "set up"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
set up
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 247), 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.