Ruling — Iberia

← Iberia

You asked

How do I set up the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Iberiabg-198928-en-1e

To set up the game, follow these steps:

1. Place the board within easy reach of all players.[1]

2. Put the 4 hospitals, 20 railroad tokens, and 14 purification tokens nearby.[1]

3. Separate the cubes by color into 4 supply piles.[1]

4. Place the outbreaks marker on the '0' space of the Outbreaks Track.[1]

5. Place the 4 research markers near the Researched Disease Indicators.[1]

6. Place the infection rate marker on the left-most '2' space of the Infection Rate Track.[1]

7. Shuffle the Infection cards.[1]

8. Reveal 3 cards and put 3 disease cubes of the matching color on each of these cities.[1]

9. Reveal 3 more cards and put 2 disease cubes on each of these cities.[1]

10. Reveal 3 more cards and put 1 disease cube on each of these cities.[1]

11. Place these 9 cards face up on the Infection Discard Pile; the remaining cards form the Infection Deck.[1]

12. Set the game’s difficulty level by using either 4, 5, or 6 Epidemic cards for an Introductory, Standard, or Heroic game, and remove any unused Epidemic cards.[2]

13. Divide the remaining Player cards into face down piles, as equal in size as possible, so that the number of piles matches the number of Epidemic cards being used.[2]

14. Shuffle 1 Epidemic card into each pile, face down.[2]

15. Stack these piles to form the Player Deck, placing smaller piles on the bottom.[2]

16. Take the Epidemic cards out of the Player Deck and set them aside until Step 6 (the infection/epidemic phase).[2]

17. Shuffle all Event cards and randomly set aside the number of Event cards shown in the table below.[2]

18. Add these Event cards to the City cards and return the remaining Event cards to the box without looking at them.[2]

19. Shuffle the Player cards (City and Event cards).[2]

20. Deal cards to the players to form their starting hands.[2]

21. Each player looks at the City cards in their hand and selects one of the cities pictured on their cards to place their pawn; if a player has no City card, they may start their pawn in any city on the board.[2]

22. Players keep their cards face up on the table.[2]

23. Shuffle the Role cards and deal 1 face up in front of each player along with the matching pawn.[1]

24. Remove the remaining Role cards and pawns from the game.[1]

25. (If playing the Influx of Patients Challenge) Add the Influx of Patients Challenge reference card over the Play section of the board.[3]

26. (If playing the Influx of Patients Challenge) Ensure only 6 purification tokens are available in the supply; divide the remaining 8 tokens into 4 stacks of 2, placing a hospital on each stack.[3]

27. (If playing as a Nurse) Place your prevention token into a region adjacent to your city during setup.[4]

[1] RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook · p.2 · CONTENTS · SET OUT THE BOARD AND PIECES · PLACE OUTBREAKS AND RESEARCH MARKERS · PLACE INFECTION RATE MARKER AND INFECT 9 CITIES · GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD

[2] RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook · p.3

[3] RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook · p.8 · INFLUX OF PATIENTS CHALLENGE · SETUP · BUILDING HOSPITALS CompoStelA

[4] RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook · p.12

🔧 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 292 ms · ask 13790 ms · total 1472746 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 1458653 ms · generation 14093 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 3, "score": 0.048139, "snippet": "3 A CoruñA SAntiAgo deCompoStelA Vigo ourenSe BrAgA porto CoimBrA liSBoA ÉVorA CáCereS BAdAjoz HuelV A SeVillA CórdoBA jAÉn Cádiz giBrAltAr grAnAdA AlmeríA CArtAgenA AliCAnte VAlenCiA AlBACete CiudAd reAl CuenCA teruel tArrAgonA BArCelonA pAlmA de mAllorCA gironA OUTBREAKS TRACK AndorrA lA VellA Hue", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.045956, "snippet": "7 Pawns 4 Hospitals Place the board within easy reach of all players. Put the 4 hospitals, 20 railroad tokens, and 14 purification tokens nearby. Separate the cubes by color into 4 supply piles. Place the outbreaks marker on the '0' space of the Outbreaks Track. Place the 4 research markers near the", "headingPath": "CONTENTS · SET OUT THE BOARD AND PIECES · PLACE OUTBREAKS AND RESEARCH MARKERS · PLACE INFECTION RATE MARKER AND INFECT 9 CITIES · GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.045541, "snippet": "This challenge simulates the rush of patients into the new, fledgling hospitals in the 19th Century Iberian Peninsula. In this period, hospitals were built for the treatment of specific diseases, and people tried to reach these cities in order to receive it. Use the setup rules for the base game wit", "headingPath": "INFLUX OF PATIENTS CHALLENGE · SETUP · BUILDING HOSPITALS CompoStelA", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "| # of players | Events in Deck | Starting Hand | | 2-player game | 4 | 4 | | 3-player game | 5 | 3 | | 4-player game | 6 | 2 | | 5-player game | 8 | 2 |", "headingPath": "GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Each player turn is divided into 3 steps: Do 4 actions. Draw 2 Player cards. Infect cities After a player is done infecting cities, the player on their left goes next. Players should freely give each other advice. However, the player whose turn it is decides what to do. Your hand can hold City and E", "headingPath": "PLAY · ACTIONS · MOVE BY CARRIAGE / BOAT · MOVE BY TRAIN · MOVE BY SHIP · BUILD RAILROAD · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Sailor • When you do the Move by Ship action, do not spend a card. • When you do the Move by Ship action, you may take one pawn in your city with you. SAILOR • When you Move by Ship, do not spend a card. • When you Move by Ship you may take one passenger (a pawn in your city) with you. CREDITS Game ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "You can do this action in two ways: give the City card that matches the city you are in to another player, or take the City card that matches the city you are in from another player. The other player must also be in the city with you. Both of you need to agree to do this. Example: If you have the Có", "headingPath": "SHARE KNOWLEDGE · RESEARCH A DISEASE", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "When you do the Purify W ater action, you may play any City card, regardless of color. Spend an action to pick up the next 3 Player cards. Rearrange them as you like, then place them back on top of the Player Deck. When you do the Treat Disease action, remove one cube from your city, and one additio", "headingPath": "ROYAL ACADEMY SCIENTIST · RURAL DOCTOR · SAILOR", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "CONTENTS · SET OUT THE BOARD AND PIECES · PLACE OUTBREAKS AND RESEARCH MARKERS · PLACE INFECTION RATE MARKER AND INFECT 9 CITIES · GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "INFLUX OF PATIENTS CHALLENGE · SETUP · BUILDING HOSPITALS CompoStelA", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}, {"page": 12, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 317}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 317 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 317 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 14:33

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 Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)		p.3	0.048139 (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 Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	CONTENTS · SET OUT THE BOARD AND PIECES · PLACE OUTBREAKS AND RESEARCH MARKERS · PLACE INFECTION RATE MARKER AND INFECT 9 CITIES · GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD	p.2	0.045956 (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 Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	INFLUX OF PATIENTS CHALLENGE · SETUP · BUILDING HOSPITALS CompoStelA	p.8	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
#4	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD	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))	153
#5	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	PLAY · ACTIONS · MOVE BY CARRIAGE / BOAT · MOVE BY TRAIN · MOVE BY SHIP · BUILD RAILROAD · …	p.4	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
#6	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)		p.12	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
#7	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	SHARE KNOWLEDGE · RESEARCH A DISEASE	p.4	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 Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	ROYAL ACADEMY SCIENTIST · RURAL DOCTOR · SAILOR	p.12	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 Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	CONTENTS · SET OUT THE BOARD AND PIECES · PLACE OUTBREAKS AND RESEARCH MARKERS · PLACE INFECTION RATE MARKER AND INFECT 9 CITIES · GIVE EACH PLAYER A ROLE CARD, A PAWN, AND A REFERENCE CARD	p.2	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)	INFLUX OF PATIENTS CHALLENGE · SETUP · BUILDING HOSPITALS CompoStelA	p.8	no quote on the wire
[4]	RULEBOOK Iberia — Rulebook (corpus doc 317)		p.12	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 292 ms · first delta 9278 ms · total 1472746 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 1458653 ms · retrieval 292 ms · ask 13790 ms · gateway work 14093 ms · total 1472746 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4094
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 708
tok/sec: 149.1 tok/sec — 708 output tokens in 4.750 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 16s 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 246), 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.