You asked
What must be prepared before the first player takes a turn?
Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below counted as honest abstainAsked with: Brass: Birminghambg-224517-en-1e
I looked through Brass: Birmingham's rulebook and couldn't find a solid answer to that one — and I'd rather tell you so than guess at your table. Try asking it another way, or ask me about setup, turns, or how the game ends: those I know cold.
The closest rulebook passages are below — check them before ruling.
On your turn, perform a total of 2 actions. Exception: During the first round of the Canal Era, each player performs only 1 action. For each action you perform, you must discard a card from your Hand and place it face up on top of your Discard Pile. Exception: Wild cards are placed back onto their C
Rearrange the Character tiles on the Turn Order Track. The player who spent the least money this round will go first next round B , and so on, while the player who spent the most will go last C . If multiple players have spent an equal amount, their relative turn order remains the same C . Afterward
Take a Player Mat. Take £ 17 from the Bank . Choose a coloured Character tile. Q Place the matching coloured Link tiles in your player area . their appropriate slots on your Player Mat. The side of the tiles face down. Place your Victory Point (VP) Marker on the '0' space of the Progress Track X . P
Place the board on either the day or night side. For a player count of less than 4, remove all cards and Merchant tiles that show a player count greater than your number of players, and return them to the box. The 2-player ( ), 3-player ( ), and 4-player ( ) counts are shown in the bottom right corn
Since Brass is such a deep game, some players may prefer to play a shorter introductory game for their first experience. The introductory game plays exactly like the full game, except you only play the Canal Era and there are additional scoring rules to make players' scores more closely reflect thei
🔧 debug — where this ruling came from
- outcome
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- warm abstain
-
- this ruling — W1 — generic warm abstain · receipt: none (generic)
- corpus profile
- live
- answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only)
- gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
- timings
- search 313 ms · ask 5974 ms · total 2104534 ms
- single-flight (PR-5)
- queued 2098237 ms · generation 6297 ms
- retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
- [{"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "On your turn, perform a total of 2 actions. Exception: During the first round of the Canal Era, each player performs only 1 action. For each action you perform, you must discard a card from your Hand and place it face up on top of your Discard Pile. Exception: Wild cards are placed back onto their C", "headingPath": "PLAYER TURNS", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Rearrange the Character tiles on the Turn Order Track. The player who spent the least money this round will go first next round B , and so on, while the player who spent the most will go last C . If multiple players have spent an equal amount, their relative turn order remains the same C . Afterward", "headingPath": "Determine turn order for the next round", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Take a Player Mat. Take £ 17 from the Bank . Choose a coloured Character tile. Q Place the matching coloured Link tiles in your player area . their appropriate slots on your Player Mat. The side of the tiles face down. Place your Victory Point (VP) Marker on the '0' space of the Progress Track X . P", "headingPath": "PLAYER AREA SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Place the board on either the day or night side. For a player count of less than 4, remove all cards and Merchant tiles that show a player count greater than your number of players, and return them to the box. The 2-player ( ), 3-player ( ), and 4-player ( ) counts are shown in the bottom right corn", "headingPath": "BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Since Brass is such a deep game, some players may prefer to play a shorter introductory game for their first experience. The introductory game plays exactly like the full game, except you only play the Canal Era and there are additional scoring rules to make players' scores more closely reflect thei", "headingPath": "INTRODUCTORY GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "For each action, you may choose to perform one of the following (you may perform the same action twice): Build - Place one of your Industry tiles onto the board, paying the appropriate cost and consuming any required coal / iron. Note: Only Build requires a specific card. Network - Expand your canal", "headingPath": "ACTIONS LIST", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 7, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Discard 1 card for every single action you perform, including passing. Only Build actions need a specific card. You can perform the same action twice in a turn. For instance, you may place 1 or 2 rail Links with the Network action, then use the Network action again to place 1 or 2 rail Links. During", "headingPath": "THINGS TO REMEMBER", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "Discard any card from your Hand, and place it face up onto your Discard Pile. Exception: Wild cards are placed back onto their Card Draw Area.", "headingPath": "To perform the Develop action:", "sharpsignalDocId": 86}]
- citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
- []
- boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
-
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 86 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 86 boosted
- answered-before recall
-
no past answered ruling for this game matched closely enough
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 14:49
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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | PLAYER TURNS | p.4 | 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | Determine turn order for the next round | 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 |
| #3 | RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | PLAYER AREA SETUP | 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | BOARD SETUP | 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | INTRODUCTORY GAME | p.7 | 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | ACTIONS LIST | 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 |
| #7 | RULEBOOK Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | THINGS TO REMEMBER | p.7 | 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 Brass: Birmingham — Rulebook (corpus doc 86) | To perform the Develop action: | p.6 | 0.029412 (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)) | 142 |
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
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.
| # | document | heading | page | quote chars |
|---|
generation — timing and the path taken
- timing split
- retrieval 313 ms · first delta 6180 ms · total 2104534 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
- full breakdown
- queued 2098237 ms · retrieval 313 ms · ask 5974 ms · gateway work 6297 ms · total 2104534 ms
- tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
- 1582
- tokens out (what the answerer generated)
- 9
- tok/sec
- 142.9 tok/sec — 9 output tokens in 0.063 s of generation
- live seat (read from the running child)
- answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 14s 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
- ABSTAINED — Abstained — no grounded answer; closest passages below
- abstain rationale
-
I don't have enough information.
the answerer's own words, verbatim — hostile corpus/LLM text, rendered escaped
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
- BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
- matched words (in the normalized question)
-
before the first player
errata registry — what the gate above had to match against
this game registers NO errata cards (edition 17), 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.