Ruling — Clans of Caledonia

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Clans of Caledoniabg-216132-en-1e

To set up the game, follow these steps:

1. Construct the game map by randomly choosing a side for each of the four double-sided Map modules and arranging them so that the rocks showing the module letters are in alphabetical order clockwise and adjacent in the middle.[1]

2. Flip the Market board to the appropriate side for the number of players and place the transparent Price markers on the encircled starting prices.[1]

3. Place the six types of Goods tokens (Wool, Milk, Grain, Bread, Cheese, and Whisky) and their tiles below the Market in separate piles.[1]

4. Place the Export board beside the map with the side face-up showing the icon matching the number of players.[1]

5. Shuffle the Scoring tiles and choose five randomly, placing them face-up in a random order in the five slots on the edge of the Export board.[1]

6. Shuffle the Export contracts and create a face-down draw pile, then place one Export contract face-up on each box on the Export board (noting that in solo or 3-player games, one box remains empty).[1]

7. Place players' Glory tokens and Import tokens (Cotton, Tobacco, and Sugar cane) off the board.[1]

8. Shuffle all Port bonus tiles and randomly choose four, placing one tile adjacent to a factory at each corner of the map according to player number.[1]

9. Each player chooses a colour and takes one Player board and all game tokens of their colour.[2]

10. Each player places four of each of the following on corresponding locations on their Player board: Sheep, Cows, Cheese Dairies, Bakeries, Fields, and Distilleries.[2]

11. Each player places eight Workers on the four forest locations (Woodcutters) and four mountain locations (Miners).[2]

12. Each player takes four Port markers and one Settlement token in their colour.[2]

13. Each player fills the Merchant track with five cubes (Merchants), placing the remaining two cubes below their Player board as starting stock.[2]

14. Each player places the Shipping token on the first location on the left of the Shipping track.[2]

15. Each player places the two Technology tiles, flipped to the side with the arrow, on the respective locations below the Workers.[2]

16. Each player takes one Export box tile and places it next to their Player board with the side face-up showing the icon matching the number of players.[2]

17. Randomly draw one more Clan tile than the number of players.[2]

18. Randomly draw as many Starting tiles as there are Clan tiles and randomly allocate one next to each Clan tile.[2]

19. Starting with the last player and going in reverse turn order (counter-clockwise), each player chooses a Clan tile and its corresponding Starting tile and places both in front of themselves.[2]

20. Determine a starting player randomly.[2]

21. Put all players' Turn order tokens on the Turn order track on the Export board.[2]

22. Beginning with the starting player and continuing clockwise, each player places one Worker (Woodcutter or Miner) from the top of their Player board onto an empty hexagonal space on the game map, paying for both the land and the Worker.[2][3]

23. In reverse turn order (starting with the player who placed last and moving counter-clockwise), each player places a second Worker.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook · p.2 · Map Modules · Market Board · Export Board · Port Bonus Tiles

[2] RULEBOOK Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook · p.3 · Player Starting Items · Clans · Turn Order · Placing the first Workers

[3] RULEBOOK Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook · p.3 · Money Icons

🔧 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 286 ms · ask 11488 ms · total 841136 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 829351 ms · generation 11785 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each player chooses a colour and takes one Player board and all of the game tokens of their colour . Then each player performs the following actions: Place all of your tokens on the corresponding locations on your Player board, four of each of the following: Sheep, Cows, Cheese Dairies, Bakeries, Fi", "headingPath": "Player Starting Items · Clans · Turn Order · Placing the first Workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "The game map consists of four double-sided Map modules which are labelled both by module (A-D) and by side (1-2), offering 16 different map configurations. Randomly choose a side for each Map module and construct the game map by making sure the rocks showing the module letter are in alphabetical ord", "headingPath": "Map Modules · Market Board · Export Board · Port Bonus Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Place one unit (Sheep, Cow, Cheese dairy, Bakery, Field, Distillery, Woodcutter or Miner) from the top of the respective column of your Player board onto any empty space of the map that is neighbouring or within Shipping reach of any of your units. Pay for the costs of the unit (coin with red number", "headingPath": "3. Expand · Phase 1: Preparation · Phase 2: Action", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Then in reverse turn order (starting with the player who placed last and continuing in counter-clockwise order), each player places a second Worker. The second Worker does not need to be adjacent to the first placed Worker. Each space can only ever have one unit (Worker, Sheep, Cow, Cheese dairy, Ba", "headingPath": "Money Icons", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "There are three Direct export bonuses that players can take in any order to gain an immediate advantage: Money, taken immediately from the supply. Free space, which allows the player to immediately take an Expand action without paying the land cost of the space into which they expand. The player mus", "headingPath": "Direct Export Bonuses · 8. Pass · Free Action: Using a Port bonus tile", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "During the Production phase players receive Income and produce Goods from units that are deployed on the map. The amount of money and Goods produced in this phase is indicated by the empty slots on the Player board from which the units have been removed and that now show the Income icon . The Produc", "headingPath": "Phase 3: Production", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Use this bonus in a turn when you fulfil an Export contract requiring Meat. The fulfilled Export contract requires 1 fewer slaughtered animals. Discard one Basic good of your choice and gain any three Basic goods of your choice (including the type you discarded). Discard one Processed good of your c", "headingPath": "Scoring Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.029762, "snippet": "Fill all empty slots on the Export board with new Export contracts from the draw pile. Your last Price die roll shows which of the six Export contracts gets removed. Find the intersection of the algebraic symbol and the numeral on the Export board and remove that Export contract from the game. Each ", "headingPath": "Refill Export Contracts · Settlement Scoring: · Simplifications · Static Import Goods · Without Scoring and/or Port Tiles · Tighter Game Map · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Map Modules · Market Board · Export Board · Port Bonus Tiles", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Player Starting Items · Clans · Turn Order · Placing the first Workers", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Money Icons", "sharpsignalDocId": 276}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 276 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 276 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 14:22

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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Player Starting Items · Clans · Turn Order · Placing the first Workers	p.3	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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Map Modules · Market Board · Export Board · Port Bonus Tiles	p.2	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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	3. Expand · Phase 1: Preparation · Phase 2: Action	p.4	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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Money Icons	p.3	0.03125 (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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Direct Export Bonuses · 8. Pass · Free Action: Using a Port bonus tile	p.6	0.030769 (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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Phase 3: Production	p.7	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
#7	RULEBOOK Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Scoring Tiles	p.10	0.029851 (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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Refill Export Contracts · Settlement Scoring: · Simplifications · Static Import Goods · Without Scoring and/or Port Tiles · Tighter Game Map · …	p.9	0.029762 (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 Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Map Modules · Market Board · Export Board · Port Bonus Tiles	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Player Starting Items · Clans · Turn Order · Placing the first Workers	p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Clans of Caledonia — Rulebook (corpus doc 276)	Money Icons	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 286 ms · first delta 6278 ms · total 841136 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 829351 ms · retrieval 286 ms · ask 11488 ms · gateway work 11785 ms · total 841136 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3851
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 742
tok/sec: 136.0 tok/sec — 742 output tokens in 5.455 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 47s 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 204), 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.