RuleSage cited table rulings
← Aquatica

You asked

What needs to be placed on the table before the first round begins?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Aquaticabg-283393-en-1e

1. Place the Game Board (1) in the centre of the table.[1]
2. Shuffle the Ocean Characters (6) deck and place it on the bottom row of the board.[1]
3. Take 6 cards from the top of the Ocean Characters deck and fill the Character's row.[1]
4. Shuffle the Locations deck (3) and place it in the middle row of the board.[1]
5. Take 6 cards from the top of the Locations deck and fill the row.[1]
6. Place all Wild Mantas miniatures (7) effect side up next to the board.[1]
7. Each player places one of the player boards (2) in front of them, face up.[2]
8. Each player takes a set of 6 starting Character cards and 4 Trained Mantas with their chosen symbol.[2]
[1] RULEBOOK Aquatica — Rulebook · p.6 · GAME BOARD SETUP
[2] RULEBOOK Aquatica — Rulebook · p.7 · PLAYER 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 245 ms · ask 6249 ms · total 103971 ms
single-flight (PR-5)
queued 97467 ms · generation 6504 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read
[{"page": 7, "score": 0.032787, "snippet": "Each player takes one of the player boards (2), and places it in front of them, face up. Each player chooses one of the available symbols and takes the set of 6 starting Character cards and 4 Trained Mantas with their chosen symbol. In further games you can start using the King cards (4). In basic m", "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 6, "score": 0.032258, "snippet": "Place the Game Board (1) in the centre of the table. Shuffle the Ocean Characters (6) deck and place it on the bottom row of the board. Take 6 cards from the top of the deck and fill the Character's row (as shown in the picture). Shuffle the Locations deck (3) and place it in the middle row of the b", "headingPath": "GAME BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 26, "score": 0.031746, "snippet": "When you feel ready for a more challenging experience, you can try playing the Advanced Mode! Advanced Mode adds two new rules to the game: Variable Goals: Instead of using the 4 basic Goals (that are printed on the Ocean board), shuffle the Goal tokens, take 4 at random, and place them on top of th", "headingPath": "ADVANCED MODE", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 12, "score": 0.03125, "snippet": "Starting from the first player, players take turns in clockwise order. During their turn players must do 1 Main action and may also perform an unlimited amount of additional actions . These actions may be performed in any order you choose. When you have finished all your actions for your turn, it pa", "headingPath": "Player turns · Main Action", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 28, "score": 0.030769, "snippet": "These Goals are only used for the Advanced mode and they replace the standard Goals printed on the Game Board. Have at least 11 locations on your player board and in your Scoring Pile Have 3 or more Wild Mantas Have 1 or more Location cards of 4 different types in your Scoring Pile Have 10 or more C", "headingPath": "GOAL TOKENS", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 5, "score": 0.030303, "snippet": "5 24 Starting Character cards 4 sets of 6 starting cards. Each set is marked by a unique symbol. 7 16 Trained Mantas miniatures Each player has a set of 4 Mantas, which are marked by a unique symbol, corresponding to their Starting Character cards (5). Players will need to fulfil these goals to get ", "headingPath": "GAME COMPONENTS · 9 5 double-sided Goal Tokens · 6 18 Ocean Character cards", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 4, "score": 0.029851, "snippet": "1 Game board Represents the Ocean, where players will discover unknown Locations and encounter new Characters. 3 56 Location cards Are representing the unknown Locations players will discover in the Ocean. 2 4 three-layered player boards Each player board has five slots that players use to hold Loca", "headingPath": "GAME COMPONENTS", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 2, "score": 0.029412, "snippet": "| Table of Contents | page | | About the Game | 2 | | Goal of the Game | 3 | | Game Components | 4 | | Game Board Setup | 6 | | Player Setup | 7 | | Setup | 8 | | Basic Concepts | 9 | | How to Play | 12 | | Effects | 14 | | Goals | 24 | | End of the Game | 25 | | Advanced Mode | 26 | | Solo Mode | 2", "headingPath": "SIMPLE DIVING, DEEP STRATEGIES RULEBOOK", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show
[{"page": 6, "quote": null, "headingPath": "GAME BOARD SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}, {"page": 7, "quote": null, "headingPath": "PLAYER SETUP", "sharpsignalDocId": 545}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3)
no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 545 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 545 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 08:04

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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) PLAYER SETUP p.7 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) GAME BOARD SETUP p.6 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) ADVANCED MODE p.26 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) Player turns · Main Action 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) GOAL TOKENS p.28 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) GAME COMPONENTS · 9 5 double-sided Goal Tokens · 6 18 Ocean Character cards p.5 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) GAME COMPONENTS p.4 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) SIMPLE DIVING, DEEP STRATEGIES RULEBOOK p.2 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 Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) GAME BOARD SETUP p.6 no quote on the wire
[2] RULEBOOK Aquatica — Rulebook (corpus doc 545) PLAYER SETUP p.7 no quote on the wire
timing split
retrieval 245 ms · first delta 5235 ms · total 103971 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown
queued 97467 ms · retrieval 245 ms · ask 6249 ms · gateway work 6504 ms · total 103971 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read)
1937
tokens out (what the answerer generated)
185
tok/sec
149.9 tok/sec — 185 output tokens in 1.234 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child)
answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 53s 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 the first round

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 477), 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.