Ruling — Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game

You asked

How do I setup the game?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Battlestar Galactica: The Board Gamebg-37111-en-1e

To setup the game, follow these steps:

1. Before playing for the first time, attach the four resource dials to the game board by pushing one side of a plastic connector through the board and the other side through the dial, then pushing them together until they fit snugly.[1]

2. Place the game board at the center of the table.[2]

3. Set the food and fuel dials to '8,' the morale dial to '10,' and the population dial to '12'.[2]

4. Place the eight vipers and four raptors in the 'Viper and Raptor Reserves' space of the game board.[2]

5. Place the fleet token on the start space of the Jump Preparation track.[2]

6. Place all other tokens (facedown) and plastic ships adjacent to the game board.[2]

7. Place one basestar and three raiders in front of Galactica.[3]

8. Place two vipers below Galactica and two civilian ships behind Galactica.[3]

9. Randomly choose a player to be the first player, and give him the current player token.[2]

10. Starting with the first player and proceeding clockwise, each player chooses a character of the character type(s) that is most plentiful (political leader, military leader, or pilot); support characters may be chosen at any time.[2]

11. After choosing a character, the player receives the corresponding character sheet, stand-up character token, and a piloting token if applicable.[2]

12. The player places his character token on the location specified on his character sheet.[2]

13. Give the President title to the first available player in this list: Laura Roslin, Tom Zarek, and Gaius Baltar.[2]

14. Give the Admiral title to the first available player in this list: William Adama, Saul Tigh, and Helo Agathon.[2]

15. The Admiral is given the two nuke tokens.[2]

16. The President shuffles the Quorum deck and draws one Quorum Card.[2]

17. Set up the Loyalty deck according to the 'Creating the Loyalty Deck' sidebar on page 6.[2][3]

18. Shuffle the Quorum deck, Crisis deck, Super Crisis deck, and Destination deck and place them next to the game board.[2][3]

19. Separate the Skill Cards into five decks by type as shown on their faces.[2][3]

20. Shuffle each Skill deck separately and place them (facedown) below the matching colored regions at the bottom of the game board.[3]

21. Place the Kobol Objective Card faceup next to the Destination deck.[3]

22. Each player, except the starting player, draws a total of three Skill Cards from among any of the cards he can draw during his Receive Skills step.[3]

23. Deal two Skill Cards of each skill type facedown onto the 'Destiny deck' space on the game board and shuffle them thoroughly.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Plastic Ships

[2] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · Setup

[3] RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook · p.5 · 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 229 ms · ask 12796 ms · total 13037 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 13037 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.04866, "snippet": "Follow these steps to prepare to play Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game . Place Game Board: 1. Place the game board at the center of the table. Set the food and fuel dials to '8,' the morale dial to '10,' and the population dial to '12.' Set Up Tokens and Ships: 2. Place the eight vipers and four", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.048387, "snippet": "Set up the Loyalty deck according to the 'Creating the Loyalty Deck' sidebar on page 6. Set Up Other Cards: 7. Shuffle the Quorum deck, Crisis deck, Super Crisis deck, and Destination deck and then place them next to the game board. Then separate the Skill Cards into five decks by type, as shown on ", "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.045009, "snippet": "All characters who have piloting in their skill set have the ability to personally pilot a viper. A piloted viper functions slightly differently than an unmanned viper and may not be activated using the 'Command' location. A player who wants his character to pilot a viper simply moves his character ", "headingPath": "Piloting Vipers · Moving and Actions when Piloting · Viper Destruction · Moving from a Viper", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "Some play groups may find that it is too easy for the human or Cylon players to win the game. A group may decide before the start of the game to make the game easier for the humans or Cylons. To make the game easier for the human players, start the game with 2 more of each resource (10 food, 10 fuel", "headingPath": "Adjusting Diffi culty", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Before playing the game for the first time, attach the four resource dials to the game board. These dials are used to track the fleet's dwindling resources throughout each game. To attach a dial, simply push one side of a plastic connector through the board, and the other side through the dial. Then", "headingPath": "Plastic Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 15, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "At the start of the game, a deck of 10 Skill Cards (two of each type) is created and shuffled. Two random cards from this deck are placed into each skill check, and add an element of uncertainty. After the last card from the Destiny deck is played, the current player creates a new one by dealing out", "headingPath": "Destiny Deck", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.030092, "snippet": "Front of Galactica Back of Galactica Destiny Deck Location: 1. Two cards of each Skill Card type are placed here to form the Destiny Deck. Two cards from this deck are added to every skill check. Damaged Viper Box: 2. When a viper is damaged, it is placed here. Viper and Raptor Reserves: 3. All vipe", "headingPath": "Setup Diagram · Game Board Breakdown", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 32, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Receive Skills Step: 1. Draw Skill Cards according to the skill set on your character sheet. Revealed Cylon players draw two Skill Cards of any type(s). Movement Step: 2. Move to any location. If moving to another ship, you must discard one Skill Card. Action Step: 3. Activate your location, or use ", "headingPath": "Player Turn · Skill Checks · Jumping the Fleet · Activating a Viper · Activating Cylon Ships · Quick Lookup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Plastic Ships", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}, {"page": 5, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 354}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 354 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 354 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 7, 2026 04:53

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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	0.04866 (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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	0.048387 (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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Piloting Vipers · Moving and Actions when Piloting · Viper Destruction · Moving from a Viper	p.26	0.045009 (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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Adjusting Diffi culty	p.28	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
#5	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Plastic Ships	p.5	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
#6	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Destiny Deck	p.15	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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup Diagram · Game Board Breakdown	p.8	0.030092 (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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Player Turn · Skill Checks · Jumping the Fleet · Activating a Viper · Activating Cylon Ships · Quick Lookup	p.32	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 Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Plastic Ships	p.5	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game — Rulebook (corpus doc 354)	Setup	p.5	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 229 ms · first delta 8242 ms · total 13037 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 229 ms · ask 12796 ms · gateway work 13037 ms · total 13037 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3098
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 654
tok/sec: 138.2 tok/sec — 654 output tokens in 4.733 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 51s 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): setup

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 283), 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.