RuleSage cited table rulings
← San Juan

You asked

Before anyone takes a turn, how is everything laid out on the table?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: San Juanbg-8217-en-1e

1. Select a starting player using any method desired.[1]
2. The starting player takes the governor placard.[1]
3. Place the 5 role placards next to each other in the middle of the table.[1]
4. Shuffle the 5 trading house tiles face down and place them in a stack face down next to the trader placard.[1]
5. Each player takes one Indigo plant card (sorted out from all the cards) and places it face up in his play area as his first building.[1]
6. Each player takes 4 face down cards from the card supply (after shuffling it) and takes them in his hand, keeping them secret from other players.[1]
7. Place the remaining cards as a face down card supply next to the role cards.[1]
8. Place the discard stack opposite the card supply.[1]
9. Place the scoring pad and pencil to the side.[1]
[1] RULEBOOK San Juan — Rulebook · p.2 · PREPARATION
🔧 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 225 ms · ask 5410 ms · total 5643 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 0 ms · generation 5643 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 2, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "The players select a starting player using any method they want. He takes the g overnor placard. Place the 5 role placards next to each other in the middle of the table. Shuffle the 5 trading house tiles face down and place them in a stack face down next to the trader placard. Each player takes one ", "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Producer (producer phase ❖☎ all produce goods) The player, who chose this role (i.e. the producer), begins the goods production. He takes one card from the card supply and places it face down, without looking at the face up side, on any one of his empty (i.e. where no card already lies) production b", "headingPath": "Each role · Note:", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "After each player has chosen a role and the players have taken the associated actions and privileges, the round ends. Players return the used role placards to the middle of the table. The governor's left neighbor takes the governor placard, becoming the new governor. The new governor reminds the own", "headingPath": "A new round · GAME END · The buildings", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "The game is played over several rounds (usually between 11 and 14 rounds). Each round runs as described below. The governor (the starting player) begins. He takes one of the role placards from the middle of the table, places it face up in his play area, and takes the action associated with this role", "headingPath": "PLAYING THE GAME", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "put role placards back in the middle of the table governor changes - and reminds owners of the chapel checks players' hands for the card limit (7 or 12) begin the new round * Important: the number of cards in a player's hand is always available to other players. The content, of course, is not. as so", "headingPath": "the following rounds:", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "offers each player one action (exception: prospector) gives a special privilege to the player who chose the role Builder phase: each player may build one building; the builder pays 1 card less During play, the players discard cards face down to the discard stack. Because both the card supply and the", "headingPath": "Each role", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Each role has an associated action (phase) for all players, taken in clockwise order, and a special privilege only for the player who selected the role (exception: prospector) . Basically: The player selecting the role is the first to take the associated action. The other players follow in clockwise", "headingPath": "The roles · Builder (builder phase ❖☎ all build a building) · Note:", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "The special functions of several buildings may allow a player to alter these selling rules if he has the building in his play area when he sells. These include the market stand, the trading post, the market hall, and the library. The players may choose to take their actions simultaneously as there i", "headingPath": "Note: · Prospector (prospector phase ❖☎ no action)", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 2, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PREPARATION", "sharpsignalDocId": 459}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 459 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 459 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 05:48

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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) PREPARATION p.2 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) Each role · Note: 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) A new round · GAME END · The buildings p.6 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) PLAYING THE GAME p.2 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) the following rounds: p.6 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) Each role p.3 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) The roles · Builder (builder phase ❖☎ all build a building) · Note: p.3 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) Note: · Prospector (prospector phase ❖☎ no action) p.5 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 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 San Juan — Rulebook (corpus doc 459) PREPARATION p.2 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 225 ms · first delta 4114 ms · total 5643 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 225 ms · ask 5410 ms · gateway work 5643 ms · total 5643 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
3954
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
197
tok/sec
135.5 tok/sec — 197 output tokens in 1.454 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 6s 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
BEFORE_FIRST_PLAY — "before the first turn" / "before we begin"
matched words (in the normalized question)
before anyone

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 389), 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.