RuleSage cited table rulings
← El Grande

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: El Grandebg-93-en-1e

To set up the game for 4 players:
1. Place the Game board in the center of the table with the side for 4 and 5 players visible.[1]
2. Return the 10 Actions cards with and the 4 with symbols next to the title to the box.[1]
3. Sort the remaining Action cards into stacks according to their backs (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5).[1]
4. Shuffle each stack and place them face down in a row.[1]
5. Place both Scoring tiles next to the game board.[1]
6. Place the Round marker on the first spot of the round track.[1]
7. Place the Castillo on the designated space on the game board.[1]
8. Each player chooses a color.[1]
9. Place the corresponding Score markers on the 0 spot of the scoring track.[1]
10. Each player takes the 13 Power cards in their color to form their hand.[1]
11. Each player takes a Secret disc.[1]
12. Shuffle the 9 Region cards and make a face down stack.[2]
13. Reveal a card from the Region card stack and place the King in the region shown on that card.[2]
14. Starting with you, each player draws 1 Region card.[2]
15. Place your Grande and 2 Caballeros in the region shown on your drawn card.[2]
16. Return all Region cards to the box.[2]
17. Each player takes 7 Caballeros in their color and places them in their personal supply (their Court).[2]
18. Place all remaining Caballeros next to the game board in a general supply called the Province.[2]
19. Whoever visited Spain most recently takes the First Player marker.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK El Grande — Rulebook · p.2 · Assembling the Secret discs: · Setup
[2] RULEBOOK El Grande — Rulebook · p.3 · Setup
🔧 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 241 ms · ask 7358 ms · total 1247028 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 1239420 ms · generation 7608 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.04918, "snippet": "1 Game board 1 Castillo 9 Region cards 55 Action cards 5 Secret discs 81 Power cards in 6 colors 1 King 5 Score markers in 5 colors 1 Round marker 5 Grandes in 5 colors 1 First Player marker Assemble the marker before your first game 6 Tuck boxes 150 Caballeros in 5 colors (30 per color) 2 Scoring t", "headingPath": "Assembling the Secret discs: · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.048131, "snippet": "You can also play a shorter game that lasts only 6 rounds. During setup, start the Round marker on space 2. When advancing the Round marker, skip spaces 4 and 7. Set up the game as described on p. 2 and 3 with the following changes: Flip the game board. The 2- and 3-player side should now be visible", "headingPath": "Short game · 2-player game", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.046898, "snippet": "Shuffle the 9 Region cards and make a face down stack. 8 Reveal a card and place the King in the region shown on the card. The region occupied by the King is referred to as the King ' s region . Starting with you, each player draws 1 Region card. Place your Grande and 2 Caballeros in the region show", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.046635, "snippet": "Whoever played the lowest Power card in this round takes the First Player marker . Put your played Power card face down on your discard pile. Move the Round marker 1 space down . If the marker lands on a spot with the next digit, a new round begins as just described. If the Round marker lands on a s", "headingPath": "4. End of the round · 5. General scoring · a) Set your Secret disc · b) Score the Castio and move Cabaeros to a region", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.046432, "snippet": "At the beginning of each round, draw 2 Region cards. Place 2 Caballeros of the dummy in each of the drawn regions. If all 30 are on the game board, do not draw any more Region cards. If a card shows the King's region, do not place any Caballeros there. Then place the cards on a discard pile. After e", "headingPath": "Gameplay changes: · 3-player game · Mini expansion: 'New Regency'", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.045476, "snippet": "We recommend playing with the 4 Action cards only if you have already played a few games of El Grande. You can choose which cards to add, or even play with them all. Shuffle the Action cards as usual. Then, for each card you are adding, return 1 random card from the corresponding stack back to the b", "headingPath": "Alternative Action cards for 'Old Hands' · Setup: · Mini expansion 'Power Shift' · Gameplay changes: · Action card explanations", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.044337, "snippet": "All specified players must secretly set the arrow on their Secret disc to the region of their choice. Example ' Withdrawal': Each opponent must return 3 of their from the regions or their Court to the Province. Your left neighbor starts. ? Orange is to your left and returns 3 Caballeros from their C", "headingPath": "Secret disc", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "You try to gain majority in the regions of Spain by cleverly placing your Caballeros. During each scoring, you'll earn points depending on your majorities. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins. The game plays over 9 rounds. First, you play Power cards to determine turn order. ", "headingPath": "Goal of the Game · Gameplay · 1. Reveal Action cards · 2. Play Power cards · 3. Take a turn", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Assembling the Secret discs: · Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 162}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 162 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 162 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

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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Assembling the Secret discs: · Setup p.2 0.04918 (at the 3-arm ceiling (0.04918) — every arm ranked it #1) 300
#2 RULEBOOK El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Short game · 2-player game p.9 0.048131 (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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Setup p.3 0.046898 (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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) 4. End of the round · 5. General scoring · a) Set your Secret disc · b) Score the Castio and move Cabaeros to a region p.7 0.046635 (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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Gameplay changes: · 3-player game · Mini expansion: 'New Regency' p.9 0.046432 (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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Alternative Action cards for 'Old Hands' · Setup: · Mini expansion 'Power Shift' · Gameplay changes: · Action card explanations p.10 0.045476 (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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Secret disc p.11 0.044337 (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 El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Goal of the Game · Gameplay · 1. Reveal Action cards · 2. Play Power cards · 3. Take a turn p.4 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

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
[1] RULEBOOK El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Assembling the Secret discs: · Setup p.2 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK El Grande — Rulebook (corpus doc 162) Setup p.3 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 241 ms · first delta 4671 ms · total 1247028 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 1239420 ms · retrieval 241 ms · ask 7358 ms · gateway work 7608 ms · total 1247028 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3937
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
401
tok/sec
139.4 tok/sec — 401 output tokens in 2.877 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 0s 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
ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered)
answered — no abstain rationale applies
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

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 84), 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.