Ruling — Caverna: The Cave Farmers

← Caverna: The Cave Farmers

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Caverna: The Cave Farmersbg-102794-en-1e

### Personal Playing Areas

1. Each player chooses a color and takes the Home board, 5 Dwarfs, and 3 Stables of that color.[1][2]

2. Place 2 of the 5 Dwarfs side by side in the "Entry-level dwelling" on your Home board.[1][2]

3. Keep the remaining 3 Dwarfs and Stables next to your Home board as your personal supply.[1][2]

4. Take one of each of the 2 different Overview cards.[1]

5. Randomly determine the player who gets the Starting player token.[1]

6. The Starting player and the player to his left each get 1 Food; the third player gets 2 Food; each other player gets 3 Food.[1][2]

### Game Boards with Action Spaces

7. Place the two single-sided basic game boards (with Round spaces 1 to 3 and 4 to 12) next to each other.[1][2]

8. Shuffle the 7 Harvest markers and place them face-down (with the grey rune symbol facing up) on the Round spaces 6 to 12, one marker per space.[1][2]

9. Place the "Harvest events" card next to the game boards.[1]

10. In a 2-player game, remove one Harvest marker with a green leaf from the game, then distribute the remaining 6 markers among Round spaces 6 to 12, leaving space 9 empty.[1][2]

11. Place the third basic game board to the left of the first two and turn it to the appropriate side depending on the number of players (1 to 3, or 4 to 7 players).[1]

12. For games with 5 to 7 players, use the larger additional game board, turned to the appropriate side (5, or 6 to 7 players).[1]

13. Use the smaller additional game board for games with 3 or 7 players.[1]

14. Place the required additional game boards to the left of the basic ones.[1]

### Supply Boards and Tiles

15. Place the supply boards for the Furnishing tiles near the other game boards.[1][3][4]

16. Place the Furnishing tiles on the appropriate spaces on the supply boards.[3]

17. Place some ordinary "Dwelling" tiles on the appropriate space on the supply board and keep the rest next to it as a reserve.[3]

18. Sort landscape tiles by type into separate stacks (3 types of both single and twin tiles).[3][4]

### Action Space Cards

19. Shuffle the 12 Action space cards, keeping them face-down while shuffling.[3][4]

20. In a 2-player game, use only 11 Action space cards by removing the "Exploration" card with the "Level 4 expedition" (and cover unused Round space 9 with a Dwarf card).[3][4]

21. Rearrange the shuffled cards into a face-down stack without looking at them: put three stage 4 cards at the bottom, then three (or two) stage 3 cards, then two ordinary stage 2 cards, then the card for round 4, and finally the three stage 1 cards on top.[3][4]

### Other Components

22. Separate remaining components into separate piles next to the game boards, keeping all animals in one pile and all building materials in another.[5]

23. Keep Weapon strength markers in a pile (no need to sort by number).[5]

[1] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.2 · Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces

[2] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.2

[3] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.3 · The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles

[4] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.3

[5] RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook · p.3 · The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 209 ms · ask 15173 ms · total 554340 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 538948 ms · generation 15392 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.047938, "snippet": "We will explain the game for 2 to 7 players fi rst. The solo rules will be explained on the last page. Each player chooses a color and takes the Home board and the 5 Dwarfs and 3 Stables of that color. Place 2 of the 5 Dwarfs side by side in the 'Entrylevel dwelling' on your Home board. Keep the rem", "headingPath": "Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047875, "snippet": "This is the setup for a 3-player game. Especially in a 3-player game, players tend to forget about the additional game board. Place the supply boards near the other game boards as you see fi t. The supply boards are double-sided. One side is used in the Introductory game , the other side is used in ", "headingPath": "The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047643, "snippet": "This is the setup for a 3-player game. Especially in a 3-player game, players tend to forget about the additional game board. Place the supply boards near the other game boards as you see ﬁ t. There is a sufﬁ cient number of ordinary “Dwelling” tiles (costing 4 wood and 3 stone). You do not need to ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.047123, "snippet": "2 PLAYERS Place the supply boards for the Furnishing tiles near the other game boards. The supply boards and Furnishing tiles The supply boards are double-sided. One side is used in the Introductory game, the other side is used in the Full game. The Full game comes with a larger variety of Furnishin", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.045475, "snippet": "Your Home board consists of two parts . On the left side, there is a Forest that you will cut down during the course of the game. On the right side, there is a Mountain with an entrance to your cave system, which currently consists of two Caverns. One of these is the 'Entry-level dwelling' and has b", "headingPath": "Goal of the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045037, "snippet": "No harvest Pay 1 Food per Dwarf instead of harvest Skip the Field phase or the Breeding phase 2 PLAYERS Setup We will explain the game for 2 to 7 players ﬁ rst. The solo rules will be explained on the last page. Your personal playing areas Each player chooses a color and takes the Home board and the", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 22, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The Starting player token is not passed at the end of the round. In order to become Starting player, you have to use the 'Starting player' action. (If no one does this, the Starting player token stays where it is.) You do not only become Starting player on that Action space, but you also get all the", "headingPath": "6. Action space: Starting player · Details on the 'Imitation' action", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030092, "snippet": "Example: If you like the element of surprise, we recommend you reveal the Harvest marker only at the end of a round. The 'Wish for children' Action space card will always come into play in round 4. Initially, place it with the 'Wish for children' side facing up on the game board. Turn it to the othe", "headingPath": "1. Add a new Action space · Special cases when adding a new Action space · 2 PLAYERS · 2. Replenish accumulating spaces · Details on replenishing accumulating spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers", "sharpsignalDocId": 229}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 229 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 229 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
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 14:17

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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces	p.2	0.047938 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles	p.3	0.047875 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	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
#4	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	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
#5	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Goal of the game	p.4	0.045475 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.2	0.045037 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	6. Action space: Starting player · Details on the 'Imitation' action	p.22	0.030303 (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 Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	1. Add a new Action space · Special cases when adding a new Action space · 2 PLAYERS · 2. Replenish accumulating spaces · Details on replenishing accumulating spaces	p.8	0.030092 (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

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	Setup · Your personal playing areas · The game boards with Action spaces	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.2	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The game boards with Action spaces · The supply boards and Furnishing tiles · The Action space cards · The landscape tiles	p.3	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[5]	RULEBOOK Caverna: The Cave Farmers — Rulebook (corpus doc 229)	The building materials, animals and Weapon strength markers	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 209 ms · first delta 9969 ms · total 554340 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 538948 ms · retrieval 209 ms · ask 15173 ms · gateway work 15392 ms · total 554340 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4240
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 792
tok/sec: 148.1 tok/sec — 792 output tokens in 5.348 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 52s 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: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

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 155), 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.