Ruling — Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon

← Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon

You asked

How should we prepare everything before the first turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moonbg-408180-en-1e

**For a standard game:**

1. Each player chooses a color, then takes the matching components and a player board (which is their base).[1]

2. Each player places their structures on the matching spaces of their base, their 3 Goal markers at the bottom of their base, their VP marker on space “0” of the VP track, and their Reputation marker on space “<0xC2><0xA0>0<0xC2><0xA0>” of the Reputation track.[1]

3. The last player who traveled into space becomes the 1st player for the 1st round (if no player has ever traveled into space, a 1st player is determined randomly).[1]

4. In clockwise order starting with the 1st player, each player places their turn order marker on the available space of lowest value on the turn order track.[1]

5. Place Agency leader tiles (on random side, A or B) near the main board equal to the number of players.[1]

6. In turn order, each player chooses an Agency leader tile, places the leftmost Dome from their base on one of the 6 central sectors on the main board, places a Solar Panel in this sector (starting at the top of the crater and proceeding clockwise), and activates a Corporation token from this sector.[1]

**For a 2-player game:**

1. Choose a player color for yourself and one for AstroBot.[2][3]

2. Follow the setup for a 2-player game, but draw only one Agency Leader tile for yourself and do not place the AstroBot's dome yet.[2][3]

3. Place your Turn Order marker on the 1st slot and AstroBot’s on the 2nd.[2][3]

4. Take a third player board and place it to the right of AstroBot’s board, showing its Solo side; this board has 3 Corporation slots (A, B, and C) with a track below and the AstroBot’s Development track at the bottom.[2][3]

5. Take the solo Corporation cards of the 3 corporations in play and place one on each of the 3 corporation slots (A, B, and C) of the Solo Board.[2][3]

6. For an easy game, place all corporation cards on their Easy side; for more challenging games, place one or more on their Hard side.[3]

7. Place the 3 AstroBot's goal markers on the 0 of the project tracks located under the Corporation cards.[3]

8. Place the Development marker on the 0 of the Development track of the Solo board.[3]

9. Shuffle the Solo Action cards into a deck and place it face down below the solo board.[3]

10. Draw one Solo Action card and use it to decide where AstroBot will place its first Dome; look at the letter with a red background in the top right corner of the card, then place the starting Dome in a sector from the inner circle next to the corresponding Corporation token (if both adjacent sectors are occupied by the neutral Dome and yours, use the letter without the red background).[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook · p.3

[2] RULEBOOK Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook · p.10

[3] RULEBOOK Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook · p.11 · 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 208 ms · ask 14641 ms · total 37949 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 23092 ms · generation 14857 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 4, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Example: At the beginning of the 2nd round, in reverse turn order, Fabio FKRRVHV KLV 6KXWWOH ƓUVW WKHQ Nestore and Matthieu choose theirs 1 . After having selected their Shuttle and gained the astronauts and resources from them, turn order is determined by ascending Shuttle number 2 . Astronauts fro", "headingPath": "3 Maintenance phase", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Then, Fabio reveals AstrBot’s Shuttle tile’s number: it is the Shuttle #1, so Fabio adjusts the new turn order accordingly 4 . Action Phase 2Q\u0003$VWUR%RWōV\u0003WXUQV\u000f\u0003GUDZ\u0003D\u0003FDUG\u0003IURP\u0003LWV\u00036ROR\u0003GHFN\u0003DQG\u0003SODFH\u0003LW\u0003WR\u0003WKH\u0003ULJKW\u0003RI\u0003WKH\u0003SUHYLRXV\u0003FDUG\u0011\u00032Q\u0003WKH\u0003ƓUVW\u0003WXUQ\u000f\u0003SODFH\u0003WKH\u0003FDUG\u0003RQ\u0003WKH\u0003OHIW\u000f\u0003WKHQ\u0003RQ\u0003 subse", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "3 Player setup 1 Each player chooses a color, then takes the matching components and a player board (now called their base). 2 Each player places: A. Their structures on the matching spaces of their base. B. Their 3 Goal markers at the bottom of their base. C. Their VP marker on space “0” of the VP ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The game then plays as follows: Follow these steps in order: 'XULQJ HDFK 6KXWWOH SKDVH VKXIŴH WKH 6KXWWOH WLOHV IURP WKH FXUUHQW URXQG IDFH GRZQ $VVLJQ RQH IDFH GRZQ WLOH WR $VWUR%RW WKHQ UHYHDO WZR PRUH face up. &KRRVH RQH RI WKH UHYHDOHG 6KXWWOH WLOHV IRU \\RXUVHOI WDNH DVWURQDXWV DQG UHVRXUFHV LQG", "headingPath": "Gameplay · Shuttle phase · Action Phase · 1 Check the letter", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 11, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "Each corporation card has two sides: one marked as Easy ( ), the other marked as Hard ( ): • For an easy game, place all cards on their Easy side. • For more challenging games, place one or more cards on their Hard side. 5 Place the 3 AstroBot's goal markers on the 0 of the project tracks located un", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "4 Take the solo Corporation cards of the 3 corporations in play, and place one on each of the 3 corporation slots (A, B and C) of the Solo Board. In the remainder of the rules, we will refer to corporations by their corresponding letter (i.e. corporation A will be the corporation which solo card was", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "1 A. Place the main board at the center of the table. B. If playing a 2 or 3-player game, cover the Command Action area with the Command Action overlay board, on the side that corresponds to the number of players. 2 A. Place the 18 Solar Panels on their corresponding spaces around the crater. B. Pla", "headingPath": "General setup · Corporation setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "10 End of the game After the Maintenance phase of the 3rd round is over, proceed to endgame scoring to determine the winner: 1 Score VP from the Projects you funded. 2 Score VP from Astronauts in your Laboratories : for each Laboratory you built, score 2/5/10 VP if there are 1/2/3 Astronauts of the ", "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 10, "quote": null, "headingPath": "", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}, {"page": 11, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Setup", "sharpsignalDocId": 431}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 431 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 431 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 05:10

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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)	3 Maintenance phase	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		p.12	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)	Gameplay · Shuttle phase · Action Phase · 1 Check the letter	p.12	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		p.11	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		p.10	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)	General setup · Corporation setup	p.2	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		p.10	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))	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 Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		p.3	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)		p.10	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon — Rulebook (corpus doc 431)	Setup	p.11	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 208 ms · first delta 7400 ms · total 37949 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 23092 ms · retrieval 208 ms · ask 14641 ms · gateway work 14857 ms · total 37949 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 4271
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 665
tok/sec: 89.8 tok/sec — 665 output tokens in 7.408 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 33s 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: BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question): before the first turn

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 360), 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.