Ruling — Québec

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Québecbg-91984-en-1e

To set up the game for 3 to 5 players, follow these steps:

1. Place the board in the middle of the table.[1]

2. Randomly place the 44 Building tiles, construction site face up, on the available spaces of the same colour (blue buildings on blue spaces, red buildings on red spaces, etc.).[1]

3. Ensure buildings from the same century are distributed as evenly as possible so that all buildings from one century are not next to each other.[1]

4. Align the roman number on the tile with the district.[1]

5. Put the 11 blue discs on the I of the 11 buildings of the first century.[1]

6. Each player chooses a colour and takes the following pieces of that colour: 1 Hand tile, 2 pawns (one used as a marker and placed on the 0 of the scoring track, the other used as the player's architect), the ★ tokens, and a number of workers (cubes).[1]

7. Distribute workers to players based on player count: 3 players receive 25 workers; 4 players receive 22 workers; 5 players receive 20 workers.[1]

8. Each player puts 3 workers of his colour on his Hand tile (these are active); the other workers in his supply are passive.[1]

9. Place the 5 Leader cards, face up, next to the board.[1]

10. For 3 players, do not use the Religious leader (purple) and use the 2/3-player side of the Cultural leader (blue).[1]

11. Sort the events by century and randomly draw 1 per century, then stack them face down in chronological order.[1]

12. Reveal and read the event from 1608.[1]

13. Randomly determine the first player.[1]

For a 2-player game, add these steps to the setup:

1. Players place all of their workers in their personal supply.[2]

2. The first player gets 3 active workers; the second player receives 4 active workers.[2]

3. Every leader is used except the Religious leader.[2]

4. Use the side with 2 pawns on the Political, Economic, and Cultural leaders.[2]

5. Place the neutral architect near the board.[2]

[1] RULEBOOK Québec — Rulebook · p.2 · Game setup · Zones of power and VPs · Number of workers per player:

[2] RULEBOOK Québec — Rulebook · p.6 · The 2-player game · Game setup · Playing the game

🔧 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 392 ms · ask 9832 ms · total 1200940 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1190701 ms · generation 10239 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 2, "score": 0.048916, "snippet": "Follow these steps and rules when playing with 3 to 5 players. The setup to your right is for 4 players. The adjustments required for 2 players are on pages 10 and 11. Place the board in the middle of the table. For your first game, use the setup illustrated on these pages. Randomly place the 44 Bui", "headingPath": "Game setup · Zones of power and VPs · Number of workers per player:", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.048652, "snippet": "Some adjustments are needed to play with 2 players. Although the rules are quite similar, the experience is different from the 3 to 5-player game. You can play with both the Family or the Complete rules. We recommend that you play your first couple of games with 3 to 5 players. Add the following ste", "headingPath": "The 2-player game · Game setup · Playing the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "This will often be the first action you take in the game. Buildings completed with your architect give you VPs at the end of the game (see Final scoring , page 7). This action is also the best way to activate workers. At first, your architect is not in play. To put it in play, you must do the follow", "headingPath": "1. Start a new building", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "On his turn, the active player must choose one of the four available actions. Players cannot pass on their turn. Start a new building Contribute to a building Put a worker in a zone of power Take a Leader card Important: If a player already has a leader and does not have any active workers, he will ", "headingPath": "Playing the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Remove the blue disc from the tile and place it with the others, next to the board. Activate 3 workers. During step 5, if no more sites are available for your architect this century, proceed immediately with the end of a century . Complete your turn (steps 5 and 6) after the scoring round. a. b. Ali", "headingPath": "1. Start a new building", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "Place 1 to 3 active workers on ONE space of the activated building (where there is an architect) of your choice. This is the primary action of the game. You must always place as many workers as the building requires (from 1 to 3, indicated in a gray circle in the district). Y ou may never put more o", "headingPath": "2. Contribute to a building · Additional actions · 3. Put a worker in a zone of power", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029958, "snippet": "You can move your architect at any time, no matter the number of contributions on the building it occupies. If you leave a building on which there aren't any workers, flip it but do not put a ★ token on it. Players may no longer place their architect there. When you start a new building with the neu", "headingPath": "Precisions · Strategic hints", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "A century immediately ends when one of these two conditions is met: A player does not have any workers in front of him (active or passive) at the beginning of his turn. When a player does the Start a new building action and there are no more available buildings for the current century . At the end o", "headingPath": "End of a century", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Game setup · Zones of power and VPs · Number of workers per player:", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}, {"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "The 2-player game · Game setup · Playing the game", "sharpsignalDocId": 208}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 208 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 208 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 14:29

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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	Game setup · Zones of power and VPs · Number of workers per player:	p.2	0.048916 (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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	The 2-player game · Game setup · Playing the game	p.6	0.048652 (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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	1. Start a new building	p.3	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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	Playing the game	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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	1. Start a new building	p.3	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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	2. Contribute to a building · Additional actions · 3. Put a worker in a zone of power	p.3	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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	Precisions · Strategic hints	p.6	0.029958 (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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	End of a century	p.3	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

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 Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	Game setup · Zones of power and VPs · Number of workers per player:	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Québec — Rulebook (corpus doc 208)	The 2-player game · Game setup · Playing the game	p.6	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 392 ms · first delta 6453 ms · total 1200940 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1190701 ms · retrieval 392 ms · ask 9832 ms · gateway work 10239 ms · total 1200940 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3503
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 515
tok/sec: 138.0 tok/sec — 515 output tokens in 3.732 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 1s 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 133), 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.