Ruling — The Pillars of the Earth

You asked

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

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: The Pillars of the Earthbg-24480-en-1e

1. Place the game board in the center of the table.[1]

2. Each player chooses a color (blue, red, green or yellow) and receives 3 master builders, 1 large worker, and 7 small workers in that color.[1]

3. Players place their workers in front of them as a supply.[1]

4. Place the master builders in the cloth bag, which is placed next to the game board.[1]

5. Each player receives 3 starting craftsman cards (1 mortar mixer, 1 woodworker, and 1 stonecutter) and places them face-up in front of them.[1]

6. Each player receives 1 game overview card in his or her player color.[1]

7. Each player places one scoring marker (wooden disk) on the '2' space of the victory point track along the edges of the game board.[1]

8. The other scoring marker is placed on the gold track along the bottom of the game board as a wealth marker.[1]

9. The starting player places his or her wealth marker on the '20' space, while other players place theirs on 21, 22, and 23 in clockwise order.[1]

10. Sort the 24 craftsman cards by the round in which they appear (numbers 1-6 on the back), shuffle each of these 6 stacks of 4 cards, and place them in order next to the board.[1]

11. Shuffle the 9 building resource cards.[1]

[1] RULEBOOK The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook · p.3 · P R E P A R A T I O N F O R T H E G A M E

🔧 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 234 ms · ask 7011 ms · total 7254 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 7254 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 5, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Place the remaining 2 craftsmen face up at the bottom of the game board, on the 2 lighter colored fields. Draw the top 7 building resources cards. Sort them by type and place them face up next to the 2 craftsman cards. Set aside the 2 remaining building resource cards as they will not be used in thi", "headingPath": "S E Q U E N C E O F A G A M E R O U N D · Phase I: Select Building Resource Cards and Craftsman Cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Before the next round begins, players must: a Restock the resource market: It should start the next round with 4 stone, 4 wood, and 4 sand a Place a metal on the King's court (if one is not already there) a Return any gray workers that have already been used, placing them on Shiring Castle. a Return", "headingPath": "BEFORE THE NEXT ROUND · E N D O F T H E G A M E · THE CRAFTSMEN", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "In this phase, the players resolve the actions associated with each numbered location on the game board. The actions are resolved in numerical order, which corresponds to a clockwise direction around the board. The master builders are returned to the bag once the actions of a location have been comp", "headingPath": "Phase III: Game Board Actions (in Clockwise Order) · 1. Events: Reveal the top event card · 2. Archbishop's seat: Protection from events · 3. Wool mill: Collect income · 4. Kingsbridge: Take an advantage card", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 3, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Place the game board in the center of the table. Each player chooses a color (blue, red, green or yellow) and receives 3 master builders, 1 large worker, and 7 small workers in that color . The large worker is equal to 5 small workers, so each player starts with a total of 12 workers. Players place ", "headingPath": "P R E P A R A T I O N F O R T H E G A M E", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "The game is played over 6 rounds. Each round represents several years in the building process. At the end of the game, the cathedral is complete. Each round is divided into 3 phases. While that sounds complex and long, the game is actually played in Phases I and II. Phase III requires very little ti", "headingPath": "S U M M A R Y O F G A M E P L A Y · S E Q U E N C E O F A G A M E R O U N D", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "The player whose master builder was drawn first can now choose whether to place the master builder (for a cost of 7 gold) or to pass (and lose the first action!) If the player decides to place a master builder, he or she places the master builder on the chosen space and moves his or her wealth marke", "headingPath": "Phase II: Master Builder Assignment", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "Then, the master builder who was passed second is placed, and so on. Example: The red player passed first, then the blue player, and then the red player again. Now that all the other master builders have been placed, red may place his master builder for free onto a master builder space, then blue, a", "headingPath": "Phase II: Master Builder Assignment", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "After the building resource cards and craftsman cards have been distributed, the starting player takes the bag containing each player's 3 master builders. Without looking, the starting player draws the first master builder from the bag and places it on the black cost marker. The player whose master ", "headingPath": "Phase II: Master Builder Assignment", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 3, "quote": null, "headingPath": "P R E P A R A T I O N F O R T H E G A M E", "sharpsignalDocId": 463}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 463 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 463 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 05:49

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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	S E Q U E N C E O F A G A M E R O U N D · Phase I: Select Building Resource Cards and Craftsman Cards	p.5	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	BEFORE THE NEXT ROUND · E N D O F T H E G A M E · THE CRAFTSMEN	p.8	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	Phase III: Game Board Actions (in Clockwise Order) · 1. Events: Reveal the top event card · 2. Archbishop's seat: Protection from events · 3. Wool mill: Collect income · 4. Kingsbridge: Take an advantage card	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	P R E P A R A T I O N F O R T H E G A M E	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	S U M M A R Y O F G A M E P L A Y · S E Q U E N C E O F A G A M E R O U N D	p.4	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	Phase II: Master Builder Assignment	p.6	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	Phase II: Master Builder Assignment	p.6	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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	Phase II: Master Builder Assignment	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 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 The Pillars of the Earth — Rulebook (corpus doc 463)	P R E P A R A T I O N F O R T H E G A M E	p.3	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 234 ms · first delta 4785 ms · total 7254 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 234 ms · ask 7011 ms · gateway work 7254 ms · total 7254 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3440
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 327
tok/sec: 137.6 tok/sec — 327 output tokens in 2.376 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 36s 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 anyone

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 393), 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.